*****As I have stated before, any stories I attempt to have publish, but do not succeeded in doing, will end up here. This is a two part series where I was to tell the same story from two different perspectives--making them, in the end, two different but intertwined stories.
The first is titled - "It All Ended With A Bang"
It all ended with a bang.
But it had started with a boom.
When his tiny apartment had rattled so hard he could hear it—as well as feel it—over the music blaring in his headphones, he had wheeled back from the multiple monitors at his desktop and had shuffled curiously to the large window in his studio apartment.
There, squaring off like combatants in an arena, was a patrol officer and some shaggy haired guy on the street below. The lights from the officer’s motorcycle flickered off of his building and the neighboring one across the street in a shutter effect, making the two men move as if they were in slow motion—each punch, kick and shove illuminated in reds and blues.
Perfect, he thought, scrambling back across the room to grab his digital camera.
In seconds he was at the window again, his camera in hand, and its lense pointing down to the altercation below. He was going to share it across the web, because the rest of the world needed to know, needed to see how it is in Old Sojo.
The pigs in blue were constantly picking up his kind and putting them down, sometimes with a fist, or in the back of an unmarked armored truck.
Ever since that satellite fell, and the world collapsed with it, the police had turned into a militia of intolerance.
Especially towards his people.
But no one cared.
The protests, the riots in the broken streets littered with the old world didn’t change a damn thing. Not as long as the one percent still ruled.
Growing up he had watched exactly the same thing going on down below time and time again from his barred bedroom window. They always showed up randomly, asking questions like they were there to check on your welfare. But it was a ruse, always a ruse, just to get a foot in the door. And once they were inside, it ended the same. Always the same, with one of his people on the ground, and a group of them stomping and beating like they were just kicking the crap out of a piece of trash.
He was sick of it.
Maybe the government here wasn’t going to stand up for them, but the rest of the still living world would.
They had to.
Another boom startled him from where he stood filming and he jerked up, looking across the skyline to see smoke billowing up from somewhere in the walled city a half dozen blocks away.
Sirens followed just seconds later and he knew more police would be dispatched, probably in droves this time, to prevent whatever disaster they could make up and excuse. It would soon litter the news like gospel, encouraging faith and idolism in the blind sheep of the populous.
The idea of it all made him ill.
Zooming down on the still fighting pair, bare fists and a baton striking where they could, he tried to find the bodycam the cop was wearing.
Or should be wearing.
Figures.
Shaking his head, he frowned in disgust as he watched the protectively geared officer land strike after strike with his baton against the shaggy guy’s upper torso.
Each hit shook him a little as he was jolted with electric shocks.
Not only was the fight unfair—one unarmed man against another in full military gear—but his camera was going to be the only one telling the truth of the story.
No doubt the motorcycle officer’s bodycam was sitting in a saddle bag on his bike, which he could easily say he conveniently forgot to put it on quickly when he came across the supposed assailant.
The same bull used by Officer Carp—the useless piece of crap for a human being.
How many times did his heart have to break each time his mother looked at a picture of his father and tried not to break down into tears in front of him?
Officer Carp’s bodycam had been missing too and justice had been denied to him and his mother.
Well he wasn’t going to let it happen again.
He was tired of hiding behind doors with multiple locks, covering his face in public, sneaking through abandoned neighborhoods and eating leftovers tossed into bins by strangers who had the extra food to throw away.
He was a human being for Pete’s sake!
The color of his skin, the shape of his eyes, none of that made him different than anyone else. Just like the guy below who was struggling now, practically body hugging the cop to keep him from landing anymore blows.
The poor fella obviously didn’t have it in him to keep fighting anymore. But there was no way he could just back down and walk away. It was never going to happen. The odds were just too stacked against him. And at this point, there was no way that cop was going to take him alive.
Just no way.
A third explosion surprised them all.
This one closer than the last one and he had turned his eyes away to see the flames rise up now just a couple blocks away. His heart started pounding, watching orange and white streaks lick and climb their way up into the sky like a consuming spirit.
He was quickly starting to wonder.
Maybe it wasn’t his people setting off the bombs, but the police themselves.
Were they trying to flush them out?
He could already see his distant neighbors racing out into the street like insects in a colony scattering and the police were quickly racing their way.
Far more quickly than they had ever responded to any call before now.
Oh God.
He was starting to sweat, panic rising in his chest, clenching at his lungs.
What was he going to do?
Eyes bouncing around his apartment wildly, he took in all the computer parts and disassembled machines he had scattered from wall to wall, some stacked up towards the ceiling, and he knew there was no way he would escape in time with all the things he needed.
A bang, softer than all the other approaching chaos, drew him back to the window.
And to the body now lying motionless on the street below.
In the haunting wail of closing sirens, smoke rose from a discharged police issued magnum, and the officer finally stood victorious over the shaggy haired man.
His body seized in terror.
There was no going back for the deadman.
Or him.
Taking in a shaky breath, more red and blue lights rapidly lighting up around him from below, he turned his camera towards himself. He licked his lips twice and cleared his throat before his voice rasped out.
“My name is Alejandro, and what you have just seen is real. My people, our world, is tormented by those who call themselves the police. They come after us, just like you can hear right now, and they beat us down like dogs, even killing us in the street without remorse! We are human beings! We are no lesser than anybody else! And we need you, all of you, to stand with us, to help us fight back! Or you will be next!”
His last words were overshadowed by the sound of breaking glass just outside his apartment door and he prayed, as he wrapped his hands around his camera and huddled up in the corner by his window, that the live broadcast would finally reached enough eyes and ears to change things.
***** This is the second story in the series, titled - "It All Started With A Boom"
It all started with a boom.
But it ended with a bang.
When the tall window panes in the living room of her town home— just on the outskirts of Old Sojo—had rattled, she knew they were at it again. Locking the doors and killing the lights in each room as she went, she made her way upstairs to her study and secured the door behind her before walking in the dark towards the large barred window that illuminated the room in shades of streetlight. There, just a handful of blocks away, white smoke misted up between two buildings.
A pinging sound drew her back and she turned towards her work station, pressing the single power key to turn her monitoring system on. Taking a seat, she saw a new video feed was streaming live from the general vicinity of the chemical bomb that had just went off. Making sure her connection was solid and she had a tracker in place, she accessed the live feed and cringed as loud music blared to life from her desktop speakers. Quickly turning them down, she studied the scene before her.
It was a personal feed instead of the typical security footage she was use to getting. Whoever was filming was in a desolate apartment building facing down into an alleyway. Though the colors kept changing as the camera kept trying to compensate for the lights hitting it, she could make out a police officer and a shaggy looking guy squaring off.
Thankfully the officer appeared to be fully geared, including the now required full helmet that protected them from direct exposure.
Goosebumps broke across her skin and she shivered at the notion of what he was facing.
No one could have predicted this.
No one.
When they had released the satellite, they thought they were taking another large step forward for humanity. The intelligent life waiting just beyond Earth’s atmosphere had been so eager to accept a meeting of the minds, a sharing of information to assure a peaceful first contact. But the artificial intelligence of the satellite that was going to be their liaison malfunctioned.
She still wasn’t sure what exactly had gone wrong, but it had been horribly catastrophic. In seconds debri was rapidly hurtling back towards earth, alien and human alike. Most had hit desolate areas or bodies of water. Some had thankfully burned up into dust before ever reaching planet surface.
But one piece, the largest most complex part of the satellite, had crashed right back down into Sojo, obliterating everything within a mile radius.
The unnecessary loss of life had been devastating.
And then they had started showing up.
Men, women, children alike all with silvery skin and eyes that....
She shuddered.
How could they do it? How could they dig at their skin and...rebuild their looks with bionics? She knew it wasn’t their fault. Well, at least the first series of them. They had been the ones closest to the crash site and had been exposed to the melting pot of biological and technical material that had littered the area.
The artificial life, they had learned after attempting to retrieve it, had remained active but was badly damaged. Instead of going off line, as it had been programmed to, it had uplinked itself to the alien technology that had come down with it and had fixed itself.
Except it had been horrendously faulty.
The self preservation mode had shifted into a paranoid single cell thought process—survive, at any cost, because they were out to get you.
The they being the governing bodies of the world.
Soon Sojo was old Sojo, and the streets were being overrun by transhumanists controlled and consumed by the artificial intelligence. Eyes were always the first to go. She didn’t know why, she assumed so the satellite could see through its cyborg drones. But soon everything from limbs to organs were being replaced or merged with any technology they could get their hands on.
In fact, the first signs of someone being controlled by the satellite was the hoarding of computer parts, on top of the paranoia and conspiracy theories polluting their minds.
The knowledge scope of the artificial intelligence was thankfully limited, but it certainly knew how to twist and manipulate the facts that it had. And the alien biological that had fallen with it? Well...she couldn’t even speculate on what that was doing to them, it wasn’t her field of study, but it was obviously easily manipulated and could be turned into anything.
Including a biological weapon to spread the satellite’s ability to control.
The mist bombs were the infecteds most favored tool.
The electromagnetic pulse attached to the bio weapons they used created a loud but non destructive boom that always drew the attention of someone. Once the infected had victims within reach, the bomb itself was released and in hours there were more infected, behaving just like their progenitors.
She could tell now, as the officer and the infector struggled, that a bomb had been detonated and the person filming them both was also an infected. In the brief lights of reflection that streamed in, she could make out stacks and stacks of computer parts somewhere behind the cameraman. She also kept catching glimpses of his face and she had to resist the urge to cringe and turn away.
Every person they tagged was one more they could track down and remove from the streets.
Most were deactivating themselves upon capture—desperate and insane—but some they were able to contain and study while trying to help them. None had been successfully freed from the satellite. Not yet, anyways but she had hope.
Another explosion, then another, this one much closer, startled her and she raced towards the window as soon as she saw dark smoke and fire billowing up into the sky. An apartment building just a few blocks away was engulfed by flames.
Her heart squeezed at the sirens racing in from multiple directions.
If they didn’t get a break or an advantage soon, old Sojo and the surrounding city was going to sink into the sea by its own hands.
An echoing bang drew her attention away from the window and she returned to her desktop to see that the officer had been forced to finally use his service weapon on the infected. She was now, more than ever, thankful that police were carrying stunners that did not kill anyone they had to pull their guns on. She didn’t doubt it hurt like hell, knocking the struck individuals out after a strong electric burst, but they wanted their fellow humans taken in alive.
The camera spun on her and suddenly she was face to face with the camera owner—a young man who was sorrowfully marred by the self crafted bionics. His voice, distorted by some mangled new voice box, spoke up over the music in the background and she found herself sitting down and turning the volume up on her speakers to hear what he was saying.
“My name is Alejandro, and what you have just seen is real. My people, our world, is tormented by those who call themselves the police. They come after us, just like you can hear right now, and they beat us down like dogs, even killing us in the street without remorse! We are human beings! We are no lesser than anybody else! And we need you, all of you, to stand with us, to help us fight back! Or you will be next!”
His last words were overshadowed by the sound of breaking glass outside the camera's point of view and she prayed, as he wrapped his hands around his camera and huddled up in the corner by his window, that the unit sent in to retrieve him could one day truly change things.
Comments
Post a Comment