Chapter 20: The Right to Light
Vijay’s heart was pounding in his ears, the crowd around him was reaching fever pitch and he was right there with them.
“We deserve better!” A man yelled. He was standing atop a piece of old playground equipment that made up the center of the old Sergeant John Macaulay Park.
The crowd echoed him as he finished and Vijay was no exception. The group had been there since early that morning, and the man had been working them up for the past hour. By now everyone was hungry, cold and above all else invigorated with anger and hatred.
“What a perfect system they’ve created with the Helix! We have to have those earrings if we want a job, or if we want to rent a space to sleep. We even need them if we want to buy something to eat, but we can’t get them! Oh no, if we want one we need to pay! But what am I supposed to pay with? What are any of us down here supposed to pay for one with? Did someone strike oil? Did the folks at that old church suddenly decide to do something more useful than sell flowers and read moldy old books? There is nothing in the Undercity, and with the damned Helix now being required for every damn thing there’s going to be even less!”
Vijay could tell what the man was building up too, everyone in the crowd did. They all knew what he was going to say, and they all knew they were more than happy to go along with it. The people down here in the Undercity were angry and this was the only thing left to them, the only way they could still remind the people above that they were still there.
“They’d like to forget about us, sweep us under the rug and pretend we’re not there, but we are! We’re not on their network! We’re on no one’s friends list! We’re not checking in, or linking up, or logging on, but we’re still here!”
The cheer that followed this statement was deafening and Vijay’s throat was raw when it ended.
“It’s time to remind them, it’s time to remind them of the people left behind, the people left in the dark! We’re going to remind them, today we come out of the dark, because we have as much right to the light as any of them!”
This last was nothing new. “Right to light” had become the slogan of their movement a long time ago, but as the crowd boiled out of the park and onto the streets, it sounded new to him. To Vijay it sounded like a realization, the sort you have, and after you’re never quite the same again...
Vijay made his way up one of the alleys that connected the Under City to the streets above. His face was masked with a hoodie pulled over a brown bandana. Rounding the corner, he met up with three other hooded teenagers. One of them opened his backpack and pulled out three crowbars and a brick.
“Is that all you could find? That’s it?” a teen in a red bandana asked.
“Yeah, that’s all I could find. But that’s all we’re gonna need.”
The teenager with the pack passed out the crowbars. Vijay was stuck with the brick.
“Better make it good. You’ve got one shot,” said the adolescent in the red bandana.
Vijay wasted no time hiding the brick in the front pouch of his hoodie. In the distance, there was a loud explosion. A roar of angry people followed. “Right to light!” they chanted as the riot began.
Vijay and his hooded pack ran down another alley and out into a large open area. It was packed with people from the Under City. They were screaming, holding signs, and throwing various objects. They were angry and were going to yell loud enough for the sky to hear them.
The “police” had come out in droves. Not just city officers in full riot gear, but rather Civic Defence units, specially trained officers with fully armored tanks and four-legged Automated Enforcement Drone or A.E.D.
with weapons anchored to their backs. They lined the streets in lockstep, slowly advancing on the Undercity civilians. The police were more than willing to match the rioters’ violence tenfold. They wanted to make the consequences of their actions unbearable. Nothing was open for debate. The “Right to Lighters” knew this.
These demonstrations had started off years ago peaceful enough, but every time they assembled, they were met with increasing violence from the police and at this point neither side tried to pretend the demonstrations were going to be tranquil acts of civil unrest. No one remembered which side had escalated it to this point. These days, all demonstrations ended violently.
The police started their usual blasting of tear gas as they fired directly at people. The idea being to deal out a little damage, break a few bones, even take a life or two in addition to the gas. The police would have opened fire with truly lethal munitions if they could get away with it, but they needed to cling to the pretence that they were just trying to keep order.
The police tracked people through the smoke on their infrared scanners. Anyone who got caught by them were beaten till they couldn’t fight anymore and then were dragged away, sometimes never to be heard from again. It was a witch hunt for “domestic terrorists,” with the same fatal results.
The rioters smashed the shops up here on this level of the Terraces. They saw the owners as sellouts; after all, the Right to Lighters weren’t trying to stop the Helix, they were fighting for it. They were fighting for what they couldn’t afford—access. It had been taxed and regulated out of their grasp. The people on top didn’t want anyone from the Under City crawling out and into a better life. They feared it would compromise their own.
Vijay’s group ran down the street, smashing every car and shop window they could. There was a sign outside a corner shop; “No Earring? No sale.” Vijay picked up the sign and threw it through the store’s frontage. The noise it made was deafening as a wall of glass came shattering down.
Vijay and his group continued down the street, breaking any image of the Helix, any reminder of it they could. Ads showing the latest earring upgrades: more memory, more RAM, bigger Wi-Fi range, greater entanglement ratio, they smashed them all.
They came to the end of the block. Up on a wall was a Helix node. Vijay knew these nodes worked like relay stations for the Helix signal. They broadcasted the Network’s data connection, to everyone in the vicinity. Vijay watched the three of his friends climb up a fence and onto a fire escape. They began beating on it, smashing it with their crowbars. The node began to hiss and pop with sparks. The Helix had these axons spiderwebbed across the city. Destroying one was a minor victory, but it was one of the only victories they had.
The group jumped down quickly. They could hear the soldiers’ shooting getting closer. The four of them went tearing down another street. At the end, there was a large building; a reflection of a walker fell against it. They could hear its heavy hydraulic footsteps heading their way.
“Shit! We’re cut off!” The kid in the red bandana panicked.
They spun around and began running the other way. Officers in full combat gear came around the corner, chasing people with their weapons. The block was crowded with people, only some of which were actually causing the trouble. The police were out to show force. They didn’t care who was involved.
Again, tear gas canisters came flying in and exploded on the ground. They filled the entire block with a haze of lung-scarring smoke. People screamed, scrambling for buildings and climbing up fire escapes.
Vijay and his group began coughing. Their bandanas weren’t protecting them from anything. They ran through the smoke, almost completely blinded, down an alleyway, and out onto another street. Every corner of every alley, street, and easement was filled with the terrible smoke. At the end of this block was a department store with floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a popular luxury furniture store. The patrons who locked themselves inside were well dressed in expensive, imported clothes and the newest Helix earrings. They had a front-row seat to the melee outside, and all they did was watch. They all stood there uploading video and sarcastic remarks to the Network. From Vijay’s point of view, these people thought they were elevated above the struggle. Vijay saw his opportunity. The opportunity he had been waiting for, the opportunity to use his weapon. He reached into his pouch and pulled out the brick. He heaved it through the air and into the department store window. It shattered, shaking the entire store with a deafening crash as if the bonds of the Helix itself had been smashed. The terrible white smoke poured in. Everyone inside began coughing, wheezing, and sneezing. Vijay wasn’t out to hurt anyone. He, like the other Lighters, were out to get a message across, a message these people in the store now felt loud and clear in their lungs.
He whipped around to make his exit. What was done was done and if that was all he could contribute for today he would be content. He hadn’t completely turned around win the big heavy booming steps of one of the four-legged autonomous machines came pounding up to him. It reached out an ice cold metallic hand and grasped him by the throat. It had him lifted off the ground in a manner of seconds and with its forward scanner it seemed to be looking him directly in the eye, as if trying to stare into his soul. The machine stood motionless while Vijay gasped for air. He could feel his heart trying to beat right out of his chest as everything around him seemed to slow down. Was this thing going to kill him? He wondered, his whole body shivering with the thought, or was this thing going to drag him off to wherever the civil defense team made people disappear too? His life began to flash before his eyes as little red dots began to fill his view.
Suddenly the stinging white smoke all around them lit up a bright orange as if the fires from hell had come to meet them. A fraction of a second later a burning bottle came flying out of the thick fog and exploded against the face of the machine. The flames erupted out from where the bottle hit the surface of the machine with a thousand burning fingers that licked at his thighs. The A.E.D. responded by dropping Vijay from its grasp.
He fell from the grip of the machine with enough force to drive what little breth he had left from his lungs.Vijay struggled to catch his breath as the drone looked for whoever had thrown the homemade bomb. Vijay wasn’t going to waste any time lying there just waiting for the machine to remember he was there. Vijay pulled himself to his feet with some effort, and not really bothering to check where he was going, startted running. The smoke was so thick he couldn’t see anything in front of him anyway. He never bothered to look over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. Right now his only thought was getting as far away from the A.E.D. as fast as he possibly could.
The adrenaline coursing through his veins carried his feet several hundred yards as he did his best to feel his way down a series of short alley ways. It was then that he realized he was all alone.
Vijay looked around. “Shit! Where did everyone go?” He had lost his gang. He could hear the popping of the civil defense unit’s guns getting closer and closer. Through the smoke, he could hear the walkers. Boom! Boom! Boom! Their heavy mechanical feet shook the ground under him. He started coughing and wheezing. He lost his balance and fell up against a car, sliding off onto the ground. He started to see spots, little twinkling lights.
“Vijay!” a girl’s voice shouted. Out of the smoke and fog, he saw an outline. The outline came closer, resolving itself into a person. He knew this girl. Her bright red hair gave her away even in the haze.
“Lithia!” he coughed.