The Ruby key.

My name is Tala and five years ago I was Instagram famous. Now I am an orphan and a detractor.

I suppose I am this way by birth, I was born into a family of wealthy but very secretive high level military programmers. They pioneered the Ruby health system, a system which would reduce untimely deaths by seventy percent.

Ruby was able to detect even the slightest changes in health status and report back in real time to the CRS towers, a centralised system that collected data from implants through an extensive networking system. There was only ever two towers designed by my parents, they worked to mirror each other so that if one ever fell victim to war or natural disaster the system would still work.

There were a couple of hundred relay towers designed to relay information back to CRS, but ultimately, they were phased out and only the main towers were used. This was to be the greatest achievement by man, unfortunately it was misused but we will get to that.

My parents were so unbelievably smart, they always had a plan and a back up plan if there was ever a threat to national security. They told me if I was at risk I would find a green ribbon on our letterbox and I would know to run. I didn’t always listen to my parents though, they were seemingly paranoid and overbearing with their rules a lot of the time.

I came home from class one day and I saw it, my heart sank but instead of running I walked the long walk up the driveway, terrified that this might be the last thing I ever did.

The house had been ransacked, you could tell there had been a struggle. There was so much blood that I felt I couldn’t breath and began violently vomiting.

Where are my parents? Where is my British bulldog Telma? Everything was out of control, I am unable to put into words how scared I was.

I grabbed the emergency go bag in my room which had food, clothes, money and medicine. As I was leaving I saw a picture of a heart shaped locket drawn next to a sentence that just said “make new things old again”. I was very confused as the locket drawn on the fridge had a keyhole, the one in my mums jewellery box looked similar to the drawings and even had rubies in it but it didn’t have a keyhole.

Maybe mum and dad were trying to tell me something? So I took the contents of mums jewellery box and left.

I went to walk out the front door but I don’t know what happened next. I and this unsettling feeling come over me and I woke up in what I felt like was a jail. My heads spinning I am still nauseated, in that very brief moment I had forgotten that I had lost my parents. When that memory came flooding back I burst into tears, just in time for this man to walk in.

“welcome Tala, we are the Ruby resistance and we think you can help us”.

I remember I yelled at him “ I am not welcome, you’ve abducted me and cable tied me to an office chair, LEAVE ME ALONE! Where are my parents? Who do you think you are?”.

The man that stood before me was named Arlo, He told me that he worked with my dad on Ruby and was instructed to help if my dad ever gave him the signal.

I couldn’t quite pick Arlos accent, he was tall, broad, in his early twenties and spoke eloquently. why did he need help? At this point I was fairly certain this guy was a terrorist of sorts, trying to stop people from benefiting from the Ruby health implants.

“I am sorry Arlo I am not telling you anything, I simply don’t trust you and I don’t know anything anyway” I said with my voice quivering and my eyes teary”

“Tala, Ruby is a mind control platform. Think about it, the system is designed to control your every move and every thought, why do you think you don’t have an implant yet. Your parents and I didn’t trust this technology in the hands of the wrong person after seeing what it could become. So we coded a program to backdoor it called Ruby.Key, I need to know where they kept it”.

Get lost, I thought. Time would make a fool of me.

Over the next few weeks we started seeing video streams of Ruby going live, we watched people turn from high spirited and happy to compliant worker ants. Parents no longer looked after their children who were placed into facilities whilst all adults worked eighteen hours a day. People didn’t feel and they didn’t see, gone were the days of romance and impulsivity, this seemed like a precursor to modern day apocalypse.

We also saw live streams of what happened to the people who refused the implant, there were entire families executed for simply saying no. The people who tried to run seemed to suffer the worst, ending up in mass graves never to be identified.

People only slept for a few hours a day and it wasn’t uncommon to drop dead in the street, they call it the ruby siren which plays once the dead bodies pile up over a certain amount. Everyone is connected with Ruby and I am almost certain the play the siren to scare the remaining people underground in the cities, the drones who removed the bodies were called draggers and this was almost always a public display.

I developed a trust for Arlo and after about eight weeks I asked him what Ruby.Key actually does. He told me to think of it like a time machine, this program invades any and all computers and networks on the planet and would restore all of it to the last back up before Ruby went life, it also would clear all the chips data, like memories would disable the kill-switch and deactivate the implant permanently.

Arlo looked into my eyes and said “can you see why this is so important?”

I just let go, “I think I might know something, but I don’t know its probably nothing”. I showed him the tarnished antique locket in my quarters and I told him about the message on the fridge.

Arlo inspected the locket, turned out the locket had a card embedded in it and within that card contained not only Ruby.Key but also instructions on all of Rubys adaptive security systems. There was also a video from my parents from a while ago, My dog Telma had died of old age, I felt the grief for him all over again and my parents too.

It took us five years to test the programs and have them effectively work during simulations. Five years we were under attack, during this time we moved from relay tower to relay tower. They were cozy and very secure, sometimes a little draughty but we got used to calling them home.

I worked so closely with Arlo that despite my best efforts, we fell so absolutely in love. He was handsome, smart and caring. He had this nature about him that was calming, the way he spoke and the way he looked at me made me feel like my home would always be by his side.

I was 23 when we were wed, I never imagined my life like this, there was so much beauty and so much pain in that moment, I hadn’t my father to walk me down the isle.

There was only one tower left now, the first one was bombed by another resistance faction in the months after Ruby went live, now we are going to breach the next tower, upload Ruby.Key and execute all of the occupants of that tower, the puppet masters.

We had a convoy, we were armed and we were angry, I no longer resembled a scared young lady. I simultaneously felt like the harbinger of death and the saviour of our people. A college student turned warlord all because I was born by my parents.

The day before we left Arlo was out on patrol and he was shot my enforcers, I heard the commotion going on outside Relay 17 where we were residing, we got them all but Arlo was badly wounded. I held him so tightly, begging for him to pull through and screaming for someone to please help. Everyone but me could tell he wouldn’t make it.

I squeezed his hand and tried to pull myself together, his grip was weakening. “Tala…I need you to fight for them, I love you” a man who was always so well for words went silent, he let go of my hand as he drew his last breath and in that moment I had totally lost hope.

“fight for them” Arlo’s words echoed through my head, seemingly on repeat.

We readied for war feeling the rage of a people that had lost a great leader and a widow for her husband. This was the kind of fury you wouldn’t think existed in real life, just like the movies I called on the people to give their lives for the fight. You could almost hear the drums of war humming amongst the crowds. This is it.

We left on the 20th of June 2020 and headed north, I wont be back to update this as I plan on staying off grid. Also 2020 seemed odd to you, don’t worry you are not crazy.

If you are reading this then the plan worked. If I do not make it know that I died on my feet, I never lived on my knees, we owe it to those who lost their lives to honour them by resisting tyranny when we see it and making the world a better place by always asking questions.