Page 34 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

It had all been too easy.

"Turn over the stolen property." The Shadowkeeper held out a hand, and Vivian dropped both tissue-wrapped chips into it. There was no point in fighting now, anything she did would only make it worse, and there was no way for her to escape three Keepers.

Auntie had no PIP. There was no official record of her as a Citizen or a Shade—she was outside the system, already dead.

"Run," Vivian whispered.

But Auntie Yang didn't move. She held her arms up to show that she was harmless. It almost looked as though she was going to embrace the approaching Keeper. Her face was calm and her voice was steady. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible—"

The Keeper shot her in the chest before she could finish. Five shots in rapid succession. Loud bursts of sound. Auntie's mouth was still moving, trying to repeat the words that John F. Kennedy had once spoken, but Vivian couldn't hear her over the gunshots and the ringing of her ears. Blood soaked through Auntie's purple tunic, like crimson stars. The pattern reminded Vivian of Cassiopeia, a lopsided W of blood. Auntie wavered on her feet for a moment before she collapsed.

"...will make violent revolution inevitable." Vivian whispered, finishing the quote that Auntie had begun.

* * *

"You will be injected with nanites. Animal testing has shown minimal side effects. This is the initial round of human testing. Sign here to indicate that you understand the study and consent to participate."

"Injected?" The metal plates she'd been making were not the right scale for injections, they looked like something that would be surgically installed. "What the hell were those things I was making on the line?"

The generic silver features of the Doc twisted into a smirk, something Vivian didn't even know was possible--a new feature, or an upgrade that came with status? The Doc's face returned to its passive default. "You stole two scales for an animatronic dragon in the latest Cardinal Guardians immersive movie—Seiryu: Guardian of the East. Quite the wonder of design—each scale can be individually programmed for color, brightness, and movement to simulate bristling or flattening down for flight."

The Doc held one out, and unfiltered—or with a different filter—it looked more like a dragon scale than a chip.

What do you do against someone who has all the power? They controlled the rumornet, the overlays, the points. They wrote all the rules, and Vivian had no way to even know what was happening. The forms in front of her could say anything, and if she agreed to this procedure ZimCorp would control her past, feeding her false memories to support their version of reality. How could she fight that?

"I'm out of points," she said. "I have no choice."

The Doc across the table shrugged.

It was more of a choice than Auntie had been given. Participation in the study would restore her points to 7500. She would be a Shade, but she would be pardoned for the crime of stealing the chips--dragon scales—from ZimCorp. She could take classes at the community college, maybe earn her way back to citizenship somehow. Sign the forms and be a guinea pig for a whole new level of hell, or refuse and be terminated.

She signed the forms.

The needle for the injection was small enough that it didn't trigger her medical overrides. Metal disappeared into shadow, and the cloudy liquid inside the syringe disappeared.

They held her for monitoring, tested the outputs on her PIP.

Eventually the Doc nodded and handed her a notebook with a red cover. It was blank inside. "You are free to go."

The last time someone had told her that, she'd been in a physical cell, locked up like an animal in a cage that smelled faintly of bleach. Rows upon row of cells, prisoners on the inside, guards on the outside, and an overwhelming feeling of guilt for her crimes. Anything was better than being locked up like that, even as a Shade at least she could—

Vivian shook her head. She was old enough to remember jails, but she'd never been a prisoner inside of one. She had to keep track of her past, had to remember which memories were real and reject the others. She hurried across the city, desperate to get home.

* * *

Vivian wrote her memories into a notebook she'd stolen from an old woman's apartment three weeks after she got out of jail. She ran her fingers over the bright red cover. Red like the start of a rainbow, stretching across the sky. She'd stolen it all those years ago and carried it with her as she moved from housing shelter to housing shelter, staying alive by the grace of social welfare programs. She'd been so ungrateful.

The memories felt so real. Like overlays for her past, and she couldn't see the truth. That was why she had to write it down. Nothing digital, only old-fashioned ink on paper.

One child: Cass. Studied painting, loved sunflowers.

She had this niggling sense that she had written this before. She flipped to the beginning of the notebook, and skimmed over several pages of memories, beginning with her troubled childhood and leading up to the more recent past, the time when she began to work with the system instead of against it. Everything was coherent, it all made sense.

Where was she? She read the last line she'd written. If I can earn enough points to become a Citizen, I could see my family again.

Yes. She had to do better, earn back her points.

A targeted ad appeared next to her, projected into the silvery form of a Generic. "ZimCorp is looking for volunteers to test our new memory enhancement technology. Earn points toward citizenship by referring suitable candidates."