Heart Shaped Secrets

My name is Winnie. I am 16 years old. My birthday was last week and Mom had found some moldy cheese in a gutter. This rarity was presented to me on a leaf, like one of the Old Way, five course meals on a silver platter that my mom had shown me in some banned movies from an era, long dead and gone.

The androids came last night, these half human, half hellish looking machines, and entered our "house" in the early morning hours. The government has banned all of the "Old Ways" and wants us to get our chips "for our own safety", but my Mom was a hacker and a genius and evaded them for a decade now, until I came along.

She taught me all that she knew about computers and the Old Ways before they Traced her when they injected into the food she ate, nanobots, with genetic microchips in them at a black market she had been buying food from, all because I had complained that I was hungry and cramping. The only way she had known the precious commodity known as food was Traced was when she started bleeding from her nose and ears. She hadn't eaten in four days 'cause she claimed she "wasn't hungry".

From what my mom said, the nanobots attach to our genetic structures, like our chromosomes, DNA, but they usually target the brain and implant chips to "monitor" us and our vital signs. For our "own safety" in the words of our precious government leaders. We are like tagged animals. Our bodies are our prisons, the nanobots are our guards, and the government is our Warden.

I hid in the secret room my mom had rigged "just in case" when they came for her. She had just enough time to hand me her precious heart shaped locket, the one she always wore. The precious locket that had a small shallow groove from how often her thumb had lovingly traced that path, that my long dead dad had gotten her on their wedding. Before they took her away, before she was on the floor drooling and twitching; she had looked into my eyes, tears beginning to form in those beautiful brown eyes, those kind of eyes that turn into liquid pools of gold in the sun, before the nanobots sent an electrical burst to her brain stem knocking her unconscious. She had closed my hand tight and whispered, "This Locket has a secr..." before she passed out.

After holding my breath so they couldn't register me as a life form, they eventually left. I could see through the slits in the boards in our Underground Palace's secret room; my mother's worn out, patched shoes that I had gotten for her birthday when I was a kid, held together with some scraps from another Traced deceased victim, that she and I had meticulously worked on and sewn on for a week. I hate sewing, its mind numbing and boring, but was so worth it to see her smile. I had waited to see her smile for my entire life. It was like the sun peeking out in the midst of an eternal darkness. Her smile made me feel free, even if it was for a brief, fleeting moment.

Her feet dragging across the rough planks across the dirt in our tunnel, reminded me of the sound of short nails of some psychotic lady we had seen, reaching out blindly mhmmm when I was a kid -before the regulations had stolen what little freedom we had- or rather we had heard her in the "Rehabilitation Cages". Great iron beasts, whose stomachs were always full but never satisfied until they had sucked out every drop of the victim's soul and will to live. The psychotic lady, I had realized with growing dread at seven, I had recognized her voice. She had been out neighbor and was sweet, bubbly, and a new mother. With brown hair and hazel eyes, she had been quite striking. Now she was deranged from grief and pain screaming about how the nanobots had been in her baby's formula and her precious baby hadn't survived the "Integration Process".

I shivered and bit my tongue so hard I could taste the iron of my own blood, to keep that particular memory away and to keep from screaming when those taloned metal feet came within two inches from my hiding spot. The milky, rotting human eye that no longer saw anything but what the government wanted them to see, amongst the dangerous, unnerving red eye amongst unfeeling machinery that accompanied them. As I held that precious locket with clenched teeth, bleeding tongue, and sweating palms, I noticed that the back felt loose with a tiny snap that had come undone while i was biting my tongue and holding her locket in a clenched, sweating fist. There was a tiny, translucent map with the only words written on there in my mom's beautiful handwriting: "Your Father is alive. The Resistance is out there. Find them. Be Strong, Be Brave. I love you and goodbye.