Death Waits Another Day

Human nature is very much like a child, able to adapt to change at a moment’s notice, yet resists that change with the whole of their being. The history of the human race is rife with such sentiments, all to its own detriment and demise. Andy was never one to wax philosophical, but as he stared into his glass of synthohol, its greenish hue matching what he imagined was the color of his upset stomach, he shrugged to himself and thought that now was as good a time as any for it.

The LED lights of the bar made the world seem like an overdeveloped photograph, and the music fit with the low-brow clientele. Andy had sworn to himself to never spend a moment in such an establishment, but circumstances had gone way beyond his control, and he found himself having to hideout. He remembered his father’s stories of the old days, before the corporate empire that was now the United States had fallen completely into the hands of the oligarchs. Back in those days, there was still a drive for society to overcome the moneyed interests of the world and do good for itself. But another side of human showed itself with impressive force, that the more information available to the general public, the less that information would be learned from and used to advance society as a whole.

Indeed, the Pandemic Wars, a title that Andy had always hated, had changed the world so much more for the worse. Where once there was a stark line between the grassroots and the corporatists, the string of pandemics that spread across the world back in the 20’s led to corporate power mergers of unprecedented scope, information became heavily controlled, and much of the surviving population seemed to have no use for the truth anyway. The very thing they were afraid of, losing freedom to corporate power, is the very thing their resistance allowed. Andy had been lucky, he found himself in the good graces of the corporate power structure. Knowing that he could not resist the coming authoritarian storm, he did what most Americans had done, just accepted the new world order and adapted as best he could to survive. That’s how he found himself as the foreman for the crew set to demolish the White House.

In the aftermath of the corporate coup, Washington DC had become an unwanted symbol of the past, so the Corporate Board of America decided to disband the city and demolish it. The central government of the new empire now sat in Seattle, Washington, a more travel-friendly hub to China. And as the elites consolidated power worldwide, leading to the triumvirate of America, China, and the European Union as the only surviving “nations” of the world, the nine billion other people in the world survived off the scraps the elites threw from their table. The world was not a pretty place. Few lived beyond the age of forty, as there was so much pollution in the food and water that the human immune system was constantly in overdrive. Mind-controlling and mind-altering drugs were legal and commonplace throughout the world, and free-thinking humans had given way to docile, subservient automatons. As long as there was entertainment, such as dive bars like the one Andy found himself in, then people would simply go on doing what they were told to do without no resistance. It was the fall of a species, Andy thought.

Soon after the White House job, he had gotten involved with a woman that introduced him to a growing resistance movement. It seemed that the human race wasn’t dead after all. though nothing cam of their relationship, they continued to work together to further the cause of freeing the human race from bondage. But Andy could only keep up the double life for so long, and three years ago he found himself on the run. At first, the running was easy as he was a part of rather large group, capable of hiding in the open. The CBA, though, quickly worked to establish the Assimilation Guard, whose role was to hunt down and “reassimilate” the growing number of free thinkers in America. They were like the agents from The Matrix movies that his father had loved so much. Three years, however, was quite a long time, and Big Brother, the title once granted to the United States government, but now wholeheartedly a perfect fit for the Corporate Board of America, was always watching and tracking. His group was slowly whittled down, and with each loss Andy’s role in the overall resistance grew until he was a lynchpin in the entire operation.

He imagined that the final goal was within reach if he could only survive the next eighteen months. A wanted man, though, has a gigantic target painted on his back at all times, and the need to be off-grid was greater than ever. So, here he was sipping stomach-churning synthohol in a drug-ridden, overlit bar full of stinking addicts and half-naked waitresses and arguing with himself over human nature and asking why it was so important to save this lot from the horror of their own lives. Then he thought of his father, and the lessons of humanity he taught Andy. It was not easy to let him go, but he was one of the first, along with his stepmother, the CBA had taken as an “enemy of the state” seventeen years ago. He felt the tears welling up in his eyes and decided to take another sip of the green-tinged awfulness in his glass.

As he raised the glass to his lips, the red, silent proximity alarm turned on between the index finger and thumb of his left hand. At the same time, he heard the cock of the pistol in his right ear.

“What do we say to Death?” the raspy voice said, quoting a television show from his childhood that he adopted as code for identifying resistance fighter.

“Not today,” Andy replied. He put the glass down and stood up from his seat. He couldn’t immediately recognize his ally, as the man was wearing a helmet with the tinted visor pulled down, but the smile was certainly warm and genuine.

The barrel of the pistol, Andy noticed, had not moved from its original position. Instinct told him to study the reflection of the visor the man wore. And there it was, another gun barrel pointed at the pair of men from the window above and behind him. It was a setup.

Andy’s reflexes were like lightning, and as he grabbed the pistol’s barrel with his right hand, he pulled the other man in front of him as a shield. The Assimilation Guardsman fired, putting a bullet into the man’s neck. The reflex of his body pulled the trigger of the pistol, which Andy had aimed directly at the window, and the bullet shattered the visor of the Guardsman and penetrated right between her eyes.

Through the resulting screams of the bar’s patrons, Andy caught sight of three more Guardsmen piling through the door. He pulled the pistol from the man’s hand and pulled his own with his other hand. The escape route he had planned out when he first arrived was clear of people, it was time to run again… but at least it put a pause on his nausea.

“Not today,” he said with a smile, and took off behind a rain of bullets.