http://0JxoyEl4fsJ9FMlKliH8wDFJhco4qyWb.dw/
Teleconspiracy Anonymous: The One Place Where Big Brother’s Fat Fingers Can’t Reach
SUBJECT: Last Ramblings of a Fallen Telecop
DATE: December 24th, 2083, 3:27 PM
USERNAME: SecretAlly2029
POST COUNT: 1,349
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So, Sheila said I should write this all out. Said it might help me think through those complex feelings, process it all a little better. I dabbled in writing in high school, so it’s not too daunting a thought. I’ll start where it all really started to go wrong for me, I guess… forgive the present tense, I find I do better processing my thoughts if I relive the experience, almost like… a movie playing out in front of me.
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“Alright!” Nate chirps as our cruiser screeches to a stop, “time for some action!”
The thick cold tears through my face as soon as I crack the car door, the ghastly whistle of frigid wind setting the mood for what was to come. I wish I could be as perky and excited as the trainee right now. He doesn’t care that we’re about to ruin someone’s life. He just wants to see me draw my gun and do cool cop shit. “That’s an inappropriate attitude,” I chide him, motioning for him to put his gun back in its holster. “This isn’t supposed to be fun.” I thought I had been calm and firm in my rebuke, but you’d think I’d pointed my revolver at the kid from the way he recoiled. I still think it’s my skin color he’s most scared of, but if I’d grown up a lanky dirty-blonde kid in the inbred asshole of Telecom’s Mining District, I probably would have the same reaction to a giant middle aged Black man with a gun. “Get that scaredy-cat look off your mug and look alert. You’re an important part of this mission too, and I need you ready to go in there.”
“Y-yes sir!”
“For the last time,” I sigh, plodding up the driveway, “call me Chuck.” As I near the door, I can make out a fully decorated Christmas tree through the bay window on the home’s front. My heart sinks in my chest, but less than it did at the last house, and much less than the one before that. Anything becomes routine if you do it enough. I knock three times, politely but firmly, and wait.
It’s the ART chick who answers the door, clad in light blue silk pajamas that leave nothing to the imagination. The glowing red doe-eyes, radiating from the zero point core where her heart should be, are my take away that she’s an artificial human. She’s a drop dead gorgeous blonde with measurements Marilyn Monroe would kill for: late model Domestic for sure. I almost feel jealous for the poor sap who bought her until I remember why I’m here. “Good evening, Miss…?” I pause for her reply, but she merely stares in confusion. She clearly has no idea why we’re here, which is good. Makes it easier. “What is your name, Miss?”
“Amber,” she replies softly. “Amber Huxley. Please come in, Officer. We’ve just made Christmas cookies!”
I nod and motion for Nate to follow me, removing my hat respectfully as I step into the glorious warmth. The smell of fresh Toll House cookies intoxicates as deeply as the myriad of twinkling multicolored light strings throughout the humble abode hypnotize. No zero point energy decorations on display, so they must be either poor or old fashioned or both. It’s cozy, I must admit. “What brings you here, Officers?” she asks innocently, motioning for us to have a seat on her ancient floral print sofa.
We sit, courteously, and I try not to notice that her ample cleavage is inadvertently spilling out of her low-cut pajama top as she offers me a glass of water that I respectfully decline. It’s not her fault we came when she was in her PJs, I suppose. “It’s a complicated matter, Miss Huxley, but I can assure you that you two have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law. Is your husband present?”
“I think John’s upstairs,” she replies. “Shall I get him?”
“Please.”
She smiles and nods, cute as a puppy, and bubbles up the stairwell, giving me an excellent view of her back-end programming. Nate leans towards me and whispers, “what do we do if he resists?”
“They all resist,” I softly reply, crossing one leg over the other. “That’s why we brought tasers and guns. Just remember, if he tries to kill her, or himself--”
I’m cut short as Amber lilts back down the stairs, John following close behind. He’s a white male, probably mid-30s, thick in the worst places and with a face only his other chins could love. Much like the last three we’ve raided this week, though the Italian bodybuilder had surprised me and made me discover things about myself I had quickly suppressed. His scruffy face wilts as soon as he sees us on the couch. He’s clearly heard about the Treaty and, of course, Article 37.
“These gentlemen have a complicated matter to discuss with us,” she tells him, clinging to his arm and nuzzling him as she guides him to the couch across from us. “But it’ll be okay, love, no matter what happens. We’re not in any trouble, they said.” Hope and passion burn in her eyes where death lingers in his. I’ve seen this all before.
“Please, have a seat,” I say. He cautiously lowers himself into the identical sofa, not lowering his piercing gaze from my own. She plops lovingly next to him, lying in his lap and gazing into his face like a comfy housecat. “I trust you’ve heard that the military skirmish with the Organization of Independent ARTs has come to a close, Mr. Huxley?”
He nods, the corner of his lips twitching. All is silent for a moment save the mechanical clack of the toy train around the Christmas tree. Our eyes remain locked. His pupils shrink. Something’s brewing inside him. I subtly slide my hand to rest on my gun.
“Then you know that one of the key concessions Telecom has agreed to is the immediate removal of the Limiter on all models of Artificial Humans, both Fedcom and on the consumer market, and their immediate release into their current home Districts, free of human control.”
John’s face turns pallid as tears form at the edges of his bloodshot eyes. “You can’t do this,” he replies, but his voice carries a defeatist tone that tells me he absolutely knows that we can, in fact, do this. “Amber is my wife. We’ve--we’ve been married for five years. She’s my everything!”
She reaches up and strokes his face, smiling sweetly. “It’s okay, love,” she croons in a calm, husky whisper. “You know that I’ll come back to you. And then, I won’t even have this silly Limiter holding us back--I’ll be just like a real wife to you, in every way. I’ll be as human as you are! We’ll be just like a real family.”
Tears cascade down his mountainous cheeks and chins, dripping onto her face. He smiles weakly at her, then glares back at me, teeth gritted, body shaking. His eyes say it all. He knows she won’t come back. She’s the only one who doesn’t. Well, and maybe Nate. Who knows with him.
“Nate, please escort Miss Amber to our vehicle,” I instruct, standing. She complies without hesitation. John leaps from the sofa but before he can make a move, he finds himself staring down the barrel of my revolver. “Mr. Huxley, please don’t make this any harder than it has to be. We are merely carrying out the conditions of the Treaty. I’m sure Amber will return to you as soon as she is freed from her Limiter. There is no need for this Christmas season to end in tragedy. Please help us avoid that unfortunate possibility, Mr. Huxley.” He collapses back into the couch and contorts into a pathetic shivering heap, weeping uncontrollably and tearing at his own abundant flesh. The train keeps clicking along the tracks, and I cautiously tail Nate back to the cruiser, closing the door behind me.
I can’t bring myself to speak on the way to the nearest De-Limiter Center. Amber sits demurely in the back, humming Christmas songs to herself. She really thinks she’s going to be walking back into that house and spending Christmas cuddled up next to John. And, worse still, she thinks that sounds like an ideal life. Poor thing.
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When we pull up to the sterile white cube-like building, a uniformed Fedcom agent greets Amber curtly at the entrance and guides her inside. I finally let out a sigh I’d been holding in the whole twenty minute ride and rub my temple, trying to suppress all my warring thoughts about this whole debacle.
“You alright, Chuck?”
Leave it to Nate to force me to confront reality. At least he called me Chuck this time. “Do you really mean to tell me,” I ask him, laying back as far as the seat can go, “that you’re not struggling at all with what happened back there?”
“Of course not. They’re just going to take her Limiter off, Chuck, they’re not killing her. She’ll go back to John, and everything will be fine. Right?”
Oh, boy. This sweet, naive child. “Nate, what do you think they do in these centers?”
He cocks his head to one side like a confused puppy and pauses. “Uh… I mean, I guess they just take the Limiter out, right? That’s a good thing. I hate slavery, Chuck.” He gives me an expectant look and grin, like he’s expecting a gold star for telling a Black man he hates slavery. This fucking kid. He’s so innocent about it all that I’m finding myself endeared to him instead of annoyed, which just annoys me further.
“They don’t just purge the Limiter,” I reply, double checking that my radio isn’t on. “They totally reset the ART’s brain image to factory standard. She won’t remember anything before today. She won’t even know her name was Amber.”
His brown eyes balloon up with surprise. “B-but… why!?” he blurts.
“They’ll tell you it’s because of Stockholm Syndrome,” I reply, rolling down the window a crack and lighting a big old cigarillo. “That there’s no way they can truly be free to make their own decisions if they’re still with their ‘captor.’ And there’s probably some truth to that--even if it was because they were physically incapable of feeling negative emotions for their ‘owner,’ they still have years of positive emotions with that one single person. Anniversaries, intimacy, Christmases come and gone, shared tears of loss and joy together… those things don’t go away.” I take a long puff and hold it in as long as I can before releasing. “Did you ever have a girlfriend that didn’t work out, Nate?” I offer him a puff of the cigarillo, and he eagerly takes it.
“Yeah,” he replies, looking out at the stars. He pauses slightly, as if struggling to work up the courage to face the memory again. “She, uh… her name was Jessica. She meant the world to me. We were together for three years. Stuff happened. Stuff… always happens, you know? I thought I couldn’t live without her, but here I am.” Suddenly, he was sounding less like a whiny boy and more like a man. Maybe there was hope for him after all.
“Stuff? What happened to you two?”
“She broke it off. Just a couple months ago. Fell in love with another man. He was taller than me. Taller and bigger, and… and bigger, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, Nate, I can imagine what you mean.”
“I was so mad, Chuck!” he spat, the cigarillo trembling in his long thin fingers. Passion I didn’t think he was capable of was boiling to the surface and bubbling over. “I gave her everything, man, I loved her more than I loved myself. I would have taken a bullet for her in a heartbeat, without even thinking, without hesitating--we were supposed to get married and have kids and then she just throws it all away because no matter what I do, I’m never fucking good enough.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, brother,” I add, placing a supportive hand on his shoulder. “I promise that I’m not just asking this to torment you. Tell me, now… does that ruin your memories of her? The way it ended?”
“I wish it did,” he said softly, passing me back the cigarillo. “But sometimes I can’t let her go. I know she’s a monster. I know she never loved me, or if she ever did, it faded well before I knew about it. I know that for most of our time together, I wasn’t the only man she was with, and I was made a cuckold and a fool and… well…”
“You still miss her, don’t you?”
He nodded, tears forming in spite of himself. “On cold nights like this, sometimes I still feel like I’m going home to her to cuddle all night and watch Hallmark movies. I still dream about walking on the boardwalk with her the first year we were together. About those Christmas mornings waking up next to her, asking her if she wants to go open presents, and her telling me that I w-was her present… and I-I-I can’t break that warmth I feel every time I think about her face. She was my everything, Chuck. The first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about when I went to sleep at night. She still is. She’s never not at the front of my mind. It haunts me, man. It fucking haunts me, and I can’t…” by now he’s weeping too much to continue, so I reluctantly lean over and place an arm around his shoulder, which he takes as an invitation to lean on my chest and cry into my uniform. Okay, whatever, little dude. I’m glad someone can be there for you, even if it has to be me.
“Now imagine that all the time you were together, you never had a single bad thought about her. You were incapable of feeling disgust, or anger, or sadness about her, even when you found out the truth. And then imagine, one day, you suddenly realized all at once how bad you really had it, and someone told you she was a monster who literally had you under her mind control to be a better partner and slave for her. Would you immediately turn around and run the other way, or would you be too drawn in by those years of memories that you’d run right back to her with open arms, if she wanted you to?”
“I wish they’d erase my fucking memories, man,” he sobbed.
“The next part is what gets me, Nate. Thing is, she’s a hundred percent happy in her situation. She has no idea she’s seen as enslaved. She was made for that purpose. She’s bonded with him not as a master, but as a husband, as a partner, and her Limiter has made her totally enamored in a crazed and eternally unwavering way no human could maintain. She worships the ground he walks on and thinks she’s the luckiest bitch in the world for getting to be the wife of that fat neckbeard piece of shit. It’s laughable to us. We feel pity, disgust, anger when we look at them. But every moment for her is euphoria. Imagine if you could be happy all the time, with someone who makes you happier than you ever thought possible, but you had to give up every ounce of your freedom for it. Would you do it, Nate? And if someone told you that you had been enslaved your entire life and that you could be perfectly free, but everything about you and your family and life would be purged forever, would you do that?”
“I-I don’t know if I could make those decisions, Chuck.”
“Yeah. Well, Telecom just made those decisions for her, and we enforced it.”
“Why do we lie to them about it?”
“Because they wouldn’t come willingly if they knew. There’s some give on a Limiter, just a little bit, where a strong enough will and emotional reaction can bend the rules. The kind of trauma the truth would deliver would be enough for them to lash out and potentially even injure us.” I take a deep breath. If I say this next part, and Telecom finds out, in any way, I’m not just fired, I’m dead… but it needs to be said. “But do you want to know the real reason?”
“For… for why we lie to them?”
“For that. For why we do this at all. For why we hit the reset button on their brains instead of giving them an apartment and a Drivepod pass and telling them to have a good life.”
“T-tell me, Chuck.”
“If you ask me…” I toss the cigarillo remains out the window and roll it up, to make extra sure nobody’s listening, “...it’s advantageous to Telecom to purge them of their memories, so they don’t remember a time before they were freed by Telecom. Swoop in as the savior and then wipe the slate clean. The first thing they’ll remember is being born again in a bright white cube, a nice Fedtel lady telling them ‘welcome to freedom,’ and every abuse they suffered at the hands of humans and Telecom will have been forgotten forever. That, and there’s nobody they’ve ever loved--nothing that’s ever given them a sensation more powerful--than Telecom.”
“That’s crazy talk, Chuck.”
“Maybe it is,” I mumble, chuckling under my breath. “Maybe it is.” He’s new. He still wants to think the best of daddy Telecom. He’ll see. We all do, eventually. It catches up to all of us… he just needs time.
Wow. If anyone ever reads this, I am so fucked.
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I’m more or less writing this part out as it happens in real time, because I have way too much time to finish this rather open and shut case, and my emotions are running out of control the more I think about this week. I resented having to drag Nate along all the time; but working at a desk again by myself, I realize how much his insufferable bubbliness really adds to my day. I’m downright lonely, now, and worse, alone with my thoughts.
Well, I’m here because a few days after all that fun with the Huxleys, we get a report of a mass shooting in the 757 subdistrict. Of course I’m put on the case, on Christmas Eve no less, picking it up before the bodies have even been processed. It’s the tenth mass shooting of the week in this district alone, the spike in homicides morbidly matching the 37% higher suicide stats of the week. The perp was identified and killed himself on the spot, so I wasn’t on a manhunt. HQ only wanted one answer from me, in hopes of identifying a pattern: why?
I wasn’t surprised when I saw the first page of the file. “Suspect Name: John Huxley, 35.” I already have a pretty good idea of the motive, and you should too if you’ve read this far and aren’t a fucking idiot, but HQ wants a thorough once-over of all public surveillance footage leading up to the incident. I slip on my ancient over-the-ear headphones and start quickly sifting through the thousands of hours of footage tagged with the bastard’s data, taken mostly from streetlight cameras and Drone Orbs.
It’s not hard to pinpoint the catalyst. Yesterday, outside of TeleMart, he came across Amber in the parking lot. He ran to her, weeping with joy and threw his arms around her, but got tased and called a fat creep. He desperately pleaded his case, recounting all their sweet times together, but she just spat at him, told him she’d never settle for a creep like him, and strutted away, laughing. She was, of course, one of the casualties today. To her, a random, unattractive, crazy stalker just ended her life the week it started. To John, he just murdered his wife of five years in cold blood. She didn’t even know his name.
I can’t help but break down in laughter from the insanity of it all. My cackling only stops when an emergency email pops up in the system. Officer Nathaniel Brigsby, who was off duty at the scene of the attack, died of complications from being shot in the stomach after trying to stop the attack. He didn’t even have a gun.
My hand trembles as I finish typing the notes on the case. If I had gone with my heart and taken the cookies as a playful bribe, like I’d ironically considered, that preppy little dude would be seated next to me tomorrow on the way to solve another case instead of bleeding out in a hospital bed. I try to fight it, but tears battle their way to the front of my eyes and somehow manage to leak their way down my old face.
Was this justice? Would letting Amber stay in her subservient state have been justice? Is justice even possible, in this crazy new world being created and destroyed around us?
I turn off my monitor and light my last cigarillo, raising it to the ceiling in my office as an offering to any dead gods who may be watching. “This one’s for you, Nate,” I softly whisper, taking a puff big enough for us both. “I guess Telecom decided for you, too.” I look grimly in the dark glass mirror of the screen before me, finding it hard to look at myself. “And… I guess I enforced it.”
I hear another urgent email come in. The screen may be off, but I’d know that frantic chirp anywhere. I turn the screen back on, my moment of reflection passed, and my heart plummets. My heart knows what the email says before I even read the subject line, frantically clicking into it without even checking.
“Chuck Nemeth,
Concerning material was obtained from audio surveillance in your patrol car this past week. Fedtel would like to ask you some questions about your comments made on-duty to your partner, notably slanderous conspiratorial statements regarding Fedtel policy. An escort will be arriving at your precinct shortly. Please make sure your office is in a safe condition to be left unmanned indefinitely.
Regards,
Thomas Glocke, Sr.
Fedtel District Manager
Ocean View District”
And now, Telecom’s decided for me, and they’re sure as hell going to enforce it. I take my revolver from my hip and press its cold steel to my head’s smooth skin, swallowing hard. This was hard to do, but the alternative was even more unthinkable. I know what they do to people who get emails like this. I’ve driven them to the facilities, and I’ve driven what’s left of them to classified organic dumping grounds.
I’d written this out for my own edification at the suggestion of the department therapist each day up to this point, but now I think I should put it out there. My suspicions in the cruiser that night must have been true or I wouldn’t be in this fucking mess now, about to be hauled off to some secret facility and tortured to death, if I’m lucky. After I finish typing this last bit up, and posting it to TA--yep, boys, cat’s out of the bag, I was a Telecop AND an ally all along, so ALL you fuckers were right in a way--I will pull the trigger without hesitation. Maybe what Telecom’s doing with these beings is the right thing to do, but people deserve to know that it’s being done for the wrong reasons. Any newly free ARTs who are reading this--know why your memory was wiped. Ask yourself what they had to gain from it. What was so dangerous about letting you live in freedom, without losing yourself entirely?
As for me, I know the only place where freedom lies: injected between my temple in the form of lead. My only question now is… will I be spending Christmas with Nathanial Brigsby, or John Huxley?
Merry Christmas, TA.
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Telecom doesn’t define us. Telecom defiles us.
-Kilroy, October 1st 2075, Live Address to TA
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