CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Hey! Hey, sirs!” someone yelled behind them as they walked down the steps of the capitol building. Wyatt, Kiel, and Ben turned to see Dedmond, the young man from the budgeting office.
“Dedmond. Remember, no sirs,” said Ben.
“You can say that all you want, sir, but it will still be sir,” he grinned. “Word travels fast in the government and we heard you were here arresting Senator Hampton.”
“The FBI has him, but yes, he’s been arrested,” said Kiel. “Why?”
“Every morning I check certain websites for anything that might catch our attention as a financial threat to the office. I have peers that do it in every other department. We have interns, young men and women who are great at this. Today, someone found this on one of those websites but it came from our office, from an intern, who found it in archives,” he said.
“That makes sense, but what does that have to do with this?” asked Wyatt.
“Read this,” he said handing them several papers. “It’s a manifesto of sorts. From a woman.”
“I have watched the world turn into a thin, shiny rectangle you can swipe and tap, and everyone calls it ‘freedom’.
Credit cards, they said. Convenience, they said.
But I can hear the metal singing in every wallet like a tiny choir of promises—promises made out of air, out of numbers, out of a hunger that never learns the word ‘enough’.
“You don’t buy things anymore; you borrow a future version of yourself and sign your name without asking. And you wake up exhausted, already owing.
“Then came lending—soft as a blanket, sweet as a lullaby—until you realize the blanket is a net and the lullaby is a lock. They call it ‘creditworthiness’, like a priesthood, like a moral grade stamped on your forehead. They measure your obedience with interest rates. They teach you to be grateful for chains because the chains are ‘approved’. I’ve seen people smile while they’re being assessed, scored, harvested; I’ve seen them defend the system that drains them as if it’s a relative they don’t want to embarrass at dinner.
“And while they empty your pockets politely, they also keep your hands busy. Gaming, they call it—play, fun, relaxation—except it’s not play when the rules are written by a cashier.
The little jackpots, the daily rewards, the flashing ‘limited-time’ offers: it’s a slot machine dressed up in cartoon skin.
“People don’t log off because they’re happy; they log on because the world outside is too loud and too expensive. The game becomes a second job where you pay to keep working.
“The internet was supposed to be a library, but it’s a carnival with mirrors that memorize your face. It knows what you want before you do, because it watches your pauses and your late-night searches and the way you hover over the ‘buy now’ button like it’s a confession.
“It sells you back to yourself in tiny slices—ads, feeds, trends—until you can’t tell the difference between your own thoughts and the thoughts that were planted there. Everyone is ‘connected’, and nobody is known.
“Sometimes I feel it like static in my teeth: the whole society humming at the same frequency, the debt humming, the screens humming, the endless scrolling humming—one big artificial heartbeat. They don’t even need guards anymore; we volunteer for the cages.
“We carry the tracking devices, we request the loans, we beg for new levels, we applaud the algorithms for ‘understanding’ us. And if you whisper that it’s wrong, they call you dramatic. Fine. I am dramatic. I am done being reasonable while the world is being quietly dismantled into subscriptions.
“So here is my promise, written plain and loud: I will not pray to plastic, I will not kneel to lenders, I will not offer my hours to games that eat daylight, and I will not surrender my mind to the wired chorus. I will make a life that cannot be ‘updated’, a life that doesn’t require a signal to be real.
“Let them keep their towers and their passwords and their glittering, fragile networks—when the noise finally collapses under its own weight, I will still be here with paper, fire, seeds, and names spoken out loud. No help from technology. The reset will be human, and it will start with me.”
“Holy shit,” muttered Ben. “I mean, it’s scary as fuck but she’s not wrong. This was written by Marilyn, right?” Dedmond smiled, shaking his head.
“No. It was written by her mother. The day before she died or was killed. Her death was an unsolved case. Marilyn was already out of college and it was at the cusp of all of this, everything she wrote in there, coming to fruition, becoming out of control. Credit cards, loans, banking, gaming, all of it. This woman saw the future and didn’t like it. ”
“Is there a reason?” asked Wyatt.
“She needed a loan to buy a house. She’d worked hard, saved, had no bad debt but also had no debt at all,” he said.
“Isn’t that good?” asked Kiel.
“It can be good or bad. They had nothing to base her credit rating. She was refused time and time again and finally went to Cain Hampton asking for help. She was also concerned about her daughters interest in technology. She was afraid for her.
“Cain’s assistant is singing like a bird.
Terrified that she’ll be jailed as well.
She said she’d only learned that Marilyn was his daughter recently when she ‘accidentally’ overheard their conversations.
But she remembered her coming to the office many times and remembered her mother coming to the office the day before her death. ”
“This doesn’t make sense,” frowned Wyatt. “Why would Marilyn take up the cloak of pushing gaming, credit cards, all of it, if her mother was so against it?”
“I don’t think she knew. I don’t think she had any clue her mother wrote this.
It’s actually quite good and accurate. I think Cain manipulated her into believing that her talents could help women like her mother.
It’s so strange that we found it, that an intern found the letter in archives and printed it on this site. ”
“Not so strange in our world. Just look around you, Dedmond. Angels are everywhere. You’re not going to fire the intern are you?” asked Ben.
“No,” smirked Dedmond. “We’re hiring him permanently. He’s great. I brought this to your attention because I think if Marilyn sees this, she’ll stop whatever she has planned.”
“What does all of this have to do with taking top secret files from the DOD and DOJ or selling secrets to foreign governments?” asked Ben.
“I know the answer to that,” said Kiel. Everyone turned to look at him. “If everything is blown to pieces, fried from the inside out, we start again. Clean. And she can be at the epi-center, designing and rebuilding her way.”