I walked the path utterly alone, my fists clenched while drones buzzed overhead like mechanical vultures. In this system where you aren't even alone when you go to take a sh*t, I was now a soul for sale.
They couldn't buy dreams, could they?
They couldn't station a guard inside the private Alcatraz of a boy's mind. They used to say there was once a great prison called Alcatraz; they said no one ever escaped. You went in alive, but you only came out dead.
In my own Alcatraz, I was the warden. In this hell I couldn't escape, my own prison—every corner of my mind—was my secret sanctuary.
They can't buy dreams, I told myself, but dreams turned into nightmares all too quickly. Just as the world's endless beauties were sacrificed by a handful of sh*tty politicians, everything beautiful was destined to perish. Even dreams were pelted with nuclear mushroom clouds, even dreams were dismantled into their atoms...
I sat up on my mattress, bruised from dampness and reeking of rot, where acid rain had seeped through. The old blanket fabric scraped against my skin like sandpaper. My gaze shifted to my little brother, Elyrian, lying silently beside me. Our parents had long since left their bodies to the earth during the harsh years of the nuclear winter.
Elyrian was still just a baby, and there was only one way for him to survive in this inferno Absolute Silence.
While raising him, I had pinned needles to his collars.
Every time he attempted to cry, every time he raised his voice with childish joy, that cold metal would prick his skin, teaching him the first rule of Vivaricus Crying equals pain. If you make a sound, the sinkholes come. If you make a sound, the earth splits and swallows you. I had kept him alive with this horrific conditioning, pruning his soul with needle tips. Just as my father had done to me.
The drone sent by Master Dante hovered buzzing in front of the shack, dropping off the medicines and that "real," non-synthetic food like spoils of war. Elyrian was sucking his own palm from hunger; his eyes were dull and wide.
I thought of that failed escape attempt. To save him from this digital cage, I had tried to send him to those legendary, farming "free tribes" beyond the river. We had set his twin and the other family adrift on the river's current. But the eyes of Vivaricus were everywhere. The drones had detected the betrayal in seconds, raining bullets down on those tiny bodies and the family that welcomed them. Elyrian was the only miracle to survive that bloody ambush, but his soul had drowned in that river that day.
Here, anyone who raised their head or stepped outside the system was crushed. This "Premium" life Dante offered me was, in truth, the price I paid so that Elyrian would not die.
Just then, a new analysis appeared on my lens. Dante wasn't just measuring what I ate, but what I felt.
[ANALYSIS: STATUS DETECTED BY MASTER DANTE: MELANCHOLIC MOOD.]
[INSTRUCTION: YOUR MASTER HAS UPLOADED A MUSIC FILE TO THE SYSTEM TO LIFT YOUR MOOD. ENJOYMENT IS EXPECTED.]
A thin, crystallized melody began to play inside my ear. It was so perfect, so fake... I looked at my brother's lips, bruised purple from hunger, and cursed Dante—my invisible God—once more in my heart. He could rent me, he could make me Premium, but he would never be able to drown out the pain of this needle-tipped life with any music.
"Be quiet, Elyrian," I whispered, adjusting the needle on his collar. "Be quiet, so that one day, we can turn this silence into a scream."
While the world was gasping its last breath beneath the clouds, I was struggling to keep a baby's soul alive with the tips of needles. But tonight, those needles will not shine just for silence; they will shine to be driven into the very heart of the palaces.
Tonight, my rebel friends and I would either make history or become history.