Atlas

Prologue

The children sat silently, eyes fixed forward. The century-old diesel engines thrummed loudly, cutting through the growing gale and carrying the ferryboat further and further away from the rust and ruin of the abandoned Port of Los Angeles.

None of the children moved but together they swayed with the high waves like rigid marionettes.

Twenty to a row, forty rows to three decks.

Phillip tried to ignore the smell of vomit. A few of the younger children had emptied the contents of their stomachs onto the chipped paint of the old ferryboat’s decks. None of them had broken the silence, though, even in the grips of seasick spasms.

When they’d been led off the busses and onto the great waiting ferryboat, Mother had instructed them to hold all tongues and make no trouble on the sea voyage.

Phillip dared not move or talk. Once a guard had beaten him; he never questioned orders again. He did not laugh when something was funny. He did not mutter or mumble under his breath. He was quiet. He kept his hands to himself. He was a good boy. He made Mother proud.

The boat was already far away from the shore. Phillip and his brother Sam sat together in a row of boys, looking across a narrow aisle at a row of girls. During these times of intense silence, they’d learned to be afraid of talking, of looking anywhere but straight ahead,

Phillip, hungry for something on which to rest his gaze, found himself starring at the little girl directly across from him. With her small, almost anemic body, she looked about two years younger and underfed. He found himself enthralled by the intensity with which she seemed to stare through him, doing her best not to see or interact with anyone who might lure her into trouble.

It was then that a guard began to walk the aisle with a steady gait, watchful, his weapon held low but ready.

Phillip instinctively blanked his mind and kept his posture straight. He focused his gaze on the little girl and she focused her gaze right back at him. Phillip fought the impulse to squirm as she seemed suddenly to actually see him and realize he was staring.

It is impolite to stare.

The thoughts were not his own. They were thoughts that came in the night when they played the music while he slept.

He nearly looked down and away, but instead felt an odd stiffness in his neck. He did not want to look away. He wanted to stare at the little girl. Her dark hair was cropped as short as his. She was gangly, but slouched in a way that Mother sometimes disapproved of. It was plain that the messages had not yet sunk in for this pupil. All the new children slouched, or sniffled, or picked their noses at first. Within a few weeks, though they would conform. Spines would straighten; hands and faces would become immaculately clean.

As it was, though, were it not for her slouch and the dark pleated skirt of her uniform and the black leggings incasing her spindly legs, she might have passed just as easily for a boy his own age, nine, maybe ten. Her eyes seemed confused a moment as she stared at him, but he found he could not look away.

They were dark brown eyes, a shade similar to the little pebbles from a brook he’d known in his life before.

And so they sat, amidst the muffled howling of the wind outside and the rhythmic thumping of the monstrous machinery decks below them. She blinked every so often and he blinked back. They rocked on the gentle rolling of the ocean for a while, the guard passing by slowly, looking from the row of girls to the row of boys and back again as he moved.

A small noise drew Phillip’s eyes away from the little girl to the slightly taller girl beside her. The tall girl had apparently noticed his staring and as a result, she had laughed.

Now he was looking directly at her, she laughed again. It was a small almost imperceptible giggle and no sooner had it escaped her lips than the guard who had just passed rushed back. The guard’s rifle stock came up then down again, hitting the giggler on the side of the head with a savage crack.

For just a moment time seemed to stop.

The children all sat frozen, looking and yet not looking at the lifeless body on the painted white concrete floor of the ferryboat. She had landed on her face, her arms rolling away from her body like the sleeves of a dirty shirt tossed haphazardly on the floor.

The frozen second thawed when the guard knelt, pulling his heavy glove off with his teeth to check the girl’s throat for a pulse using his bare fingers. A beat passed and then he whistled for the attention of another guard, who came over quickly, took in the situation at a glance, and likewise checked the girl.

It was their policy always to double check.

The second guard nodded to the first who then reached a hand inside the little girl’s blouse. He took out a little silver medallion, a clone of the medallion Phillip felt coolly resting against his own breastbone. With a sharp yank, the chain around the dead girl’s neck snapped and the guard pocketed the identification disk. The second guard moved off again to monitor his own rows of children.

The first guard picked up the lifeless girl, looking around to make sure none of the other children was using this brief moment to take advantage of his distraction. The guard turned on his heel and carried the dead girl’s body to the window. He used his elbow to shove the window open and threw the little body out into the sea.

As the ferryboat rolled over the waves, Phillip imagined the body of the dead girl sinking to the bottom of the sea, her giggles forever silenced.

When he took an opportunity to steal another glance at the little dark-haired girl across the way, he found her brown eyes cold and glassed over with tears that refused to fall. The moisture in her eyes made them look more like the little wet pebbles in the brook. The girls eyes helped him recall the smell of mud and wet moss behind a half-forgotten house. He itched to glance at Sam, his brother, who sat beside him. Soon the guards would count the children and divide them into groups. Phillip would make sure he and Sam stayed together. It was his job to take care of Sam.

Somewhere behind Phillip, a guard coughed and a ship’s bell rang once. These were meaningless sounds, but he would remember them for the rest of his life, along with the sound of a rifle stock cracking against a skull. He would hear the sounds in his sleep and feel the little dark-haired girl’s umber-brown eyes turning from sadness into anger as she focused them accusingly at him.

Soon they would arrive at the island.

Chapter One

Thrashing violently in her bed, Victoria Rhodes fought through the feelings of fear, anger, and disorientation that consumed her half-conscious mind.

For an instant, her thoughts were unstuck in time. She was in the rings, nearly twelve-years-old, her bare legs locked around the neck of another girl whose face was broken and blooded. With a bitter sneering smile, Victoria had felt the surge of satisfaction as the moment came when the snap of vertebra signaled her triumph.

The scene had fallen away. Iin an instant she was again herself; a slightly older but smaller version, withered away by months of starvation.

She remembered rain. Sheets of rain, falling on the streets of some coastal town, vivid in her dream, with penetrating cold seeping through tattered clothes as she huddled in upon herself. Her younger, nameless self, muttered vague obscenities, willing away the poisoned voice, ever-whispering inside her head.

Never forget... Never forget... Never forget your mother.

The subliminal thought jarred her rudely awake. Victoria felt her chest heaving in and out in the tangle of her bedsheets as, quickly, her eyes shot open and she rolled wildly over, toppling halfway off of the hover mattress onto the hard wood floor.

Shit.

She kicked away the tangled sheets. The furnishings of her apartment surrounded her, grounding her in the reality of the present. She blinked and felt her shoulders slump and her legs go slack as he collapsed with her back resting against the bland, modular nightstand. The bedroom was only half-painted, a project she’d started and never finished. The sound of a police siren screamed past the closed window.

She felt the thumping in her chest recede. Each thought she forced through her conscious mind soothed away the memories of her lost youth and violent crimes.

I’m safe.

I’m home.

In the early morning darkness, she shivered, wiping cold sweat from the back of her neck as she hefted herself up off the floor, gathered up the tangled mess of disposable sheets, and with force, tossed them in a heap back onto the hover bed.

She pressed the button on the wall angrily and the bed slid away into the wall.

Fuck.

She shivered, reaching over to the nightstand to shut off the ceiling fan. The lights came up automatically. She felt naked in the yellow GE glow. An ancient rocker with dirty clothes piling up around its spindly legs butted up against boxes she’d never bothered to unpack. She dug her toes into the hard floorboards making the joins crack against the clear-coat lacquer of the floor.

With a finger, she pushed away a stray strand of her short brown hair and then felt her forehead with the back of her wrist.

The dreams were recurrent, with only slight variations. They began in the dark with the audible silence of others all around her, unseen but watching, waiting for the blinding light to flash and the violence to begin. It had become a trick, sensing the others in the stands while the silence was enforced before and during a conference.

Like all of the children on the island, she had come to love violence. She had learned to appreciate the sounds of snapping bones and the bloody mucus-slicked sobs of pain choked out of half-crushed windpipes and collapsing lungs.

These horrific details, these atrocious sounds, these images of heated cruelty exacted with expert and emotionless skill, were the bittersweet tapestry woven carefully into the fabric of the Patriot Youth mindset.

There was no semblance of innocence in the fights. Victoria never deluded herself. She winced, fighting her inner-child’s desire to spill hot blood on concrete.

Pray for victory.

It is all part of a plan.

The Wages of Freedom.

Victoria groaned over the programmed thoughts and shook her head.

I am not a monster.

Her limbs shook as she ran her hands over her face, turned, and strode boldly into her bathroom. She ran some water into the sink and splashed her face. Looking out the pebbled glass of the narrow bathroom window, she absorbed the pre-dawn and the drip-drip-dripping of water down the pane; marking the slow, steady onset of a Northern California springtime in a smog-choked city by the bay..

Sunlight would not come today.

In mid-March, the seasonal mixture of rainstorms and sulfurous, billowing clouds had replaced the hope of sunlight with the quintessence of despair bracketed in a five-day forecast devoid of a single golden ray. Even in the cramped bathroom of her under-heated apartment, Victoria could smell the rain, brewing outside in the fog and hovering menacingly over the general stench of the city. The thick-necked boomer clouds rolled in overnights from the Pacific and lingered for days without end. Thin wisps of precipitation metamorphosed; the dense yellowed fog would shift to a stagnant mist before breakfast and mutate to a full downpour by noon.

Victoria distributed her weight evenly on the bare balls of her feet as she padded back through her bedroom into the kitchen, turning on the coffee maker and programming the Mr. Kitchen for toast and peanut butter. Complacently, she looked at the kitchen info-screen. A lifeless thin blank on her wall, she waved it to life with her hand before peeling off her dampened tank and wiping her face dry of the water droplets that still lingered there.

The volume was preset to a low unobtrusive droning. She marked the digital clock blaring-neon, the green-digital time.

5:58 AM.

...reporting a slight increase of the DOW JONES average setting Wall Street in a frenzy today,’ the screen reported, as brown liquid burbled through synthetic coffee grounds. For the first time in nearly 50 years the ticker may tip the 400 mark, giving rise to speculation that the long promised benefits of class segregation are indeed paying off."

On Victoria’s kitchen counter, little pink candies spiraled out in a pattern at the bottom of a blue plastic dish. Victoria arranged a few of them idly before angling one out to balance on the pad of her right forefinger.

The head of the Federal Reserve was cautious during a press conference late yesterday afternoon where he said that, while the slow but steady climb was promising due to First Sector dominance in the fields of Private Security and International Shipping, it by no means guaranteed a lasting stability. The director of the Anglo-Chinese exchange...

Victoria muted the news with the press of her thumb and popped the watermelon jellybean between her lips, holding it with her teeth as she walked over to the refrigerator and leaned her forehead against its cold metallic surface. The jellybean dissolved slowly as she centered herself.

The perspiring, the feeling of fatigue in the mornings, the tightness of every muscle--it was all getting worse.

In the six years since the SFPD had gone under the budget knife, she’d had to deal with the nightmares and panic fits sans medication. Psychiatrists were considered a luxury in the new budgets and medical only covered injuries sustained in the line of duty. With each passing year, she’d managed somehow to cope, but it was getting harder and harder to keep her problems confidential and under control.

Victoria opened her eyes and tugged the metallic door of the refrigerator open. She took out a carton of soymilk and drank from it with long unashamed swigs.

She liked living alone. She liked living like a slob.

Mother likes order. A programed thought, chided.

Victoria’s mind rebuffed. Stuff it, you psychotic old bitch.

She wiped her lips on the back of her wrist and resealed the carton, shoving it back into the fridge. Idly turning to the coffee pot, she watched the dark-brown substance drizzle down slowly.

She disengaged the mute on her info-screen as the SFN 6 AM webcast began.

Our first report happens to be from our own neck of the woods, the insidious gossip girl chirped. Multi-trillion dollar front man of Atlantis Security Multinational, the svelte and sexy Mr. Phillip, played gracious host last night to the Presidio Preservation Society. Known popularly in Atlantian circles as Atlas, the camera-shy CEO of ASM provided a chic champagne dinner cruise around San Francisco Bay, celebrating the re-opening of the revitalized national park.

Victoria inhaled the disappointing aroma of the faux morning brew wafting through her apartment as the news program followed her through the apartment, leaping from screen to screen, as she returned to her bedroom and tossed her sodden tank top on the floor.

While whispers abound of Atlas falling into disfavor with Atlantian investors, his excursions into the public eye, both physically and financially, have made for interesting confrontations between the First Sector front man and the denizens of the disenfranchised public…

On the info-screen, Victoria watched as a small crowd of protesters with homemade signs chanted behind a line of ASM security droids. Reporters shouted at a tall handsome man emerging from a limousine. His handsome face affixed with a winning smile that slashed cruelly across a square cut jaw. His teeth were unnaturally white, matching the lustrous white of his high-starched collar and off-setting the brilliance of his Italian blue silk bow tie.

The voiceover continued as he moved with slow, elegant strides along the red carpet toward a gang-plank.

Numerous First Sector dignitaries and quite a few single-ladies attended the function, all hoping to get a chance to rub elbows the great Atlantian. Mr. Phillip was gracious and glib as always with photographers, quietly waving off questions concerning rumors of an interoffice romance with his personal assistant, the elegant Miss Perpetua Miles.

Victoria could not help but watch the bedroom monitor as an attractive Asian woman, clad in the latest Milan fashion, linked arms with the urbane trillionaire, leaning in and whispering something into the handsome man’s ear as they walked together closely.

The image shrank away to reveal the gossip-girl anchor, her grin a perfect picture of unstated innuendo. One can only guess what’s behind those secretive whispers. All that is left up to your imagination. Wishing you a scandalous day, I’m Faye-

Victoria shut down the newscast, rolling her eyes. She searched through the music feeds with her thumb, wanting something light and classical.

Beethoven’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, No. 1 in D-Major, Op. 12. Her apartment mainframe had a vaguely depressed feminine voice.

Play, Sunshine, she commanded, heading into her bathroom to begin her morning shower.

Chapter Two

She stepped into the shower quickly, knowing she had only a few precious minutes before the water ran cold.

She had just begun working up a lather in her hair when the twitter of her com-link interrupted her.

Spitting, she opened one eye. Pause music, she said, sticking her head under the shower to rinse away the excess foam.

She shut off the water. Answer phone, audio only.

The com-link beeped and a gruff voice barked at her from the wall speakers

Rhodes, go to secure.

It was the familiar baritone of Daniel Bowers, her Superior at SFPD Criminal Investigation Division, Central Command.

She called out the code for her secure line and opened the shower door to reach for a towel.

Go ahead, Sir?

I need you at 1213 Bancroft Avenue in Oakland Sector in 20 minutes.

She ran the towel over her short hair roughly and then wrapped it around her breasts before hitting the button that brought up her lieutenant's haggard face on her mirror display.

That’s in Atlantis.

Bower’s responded sternly, his brown face weathered into a scowl he seldom went without. Double homicide at the home of an indentured sensual companion.

First sector never contacts us.

The head of the P.I. division said the order to involve SFPD came from up top. That's pretty much all the information I got.

Nothing else?

Just advice. Watch your back.

Victoria nodded.

No need to tell me twice.

Bowers shuffled a few loose papers on his desk, not looking up at the screen.

I'm assigning you a Bobbie, he continued. He'll be on scene in less than 10, you’ve got just enough time to put on clothes.

Victoria shifted awkwardly on her bare feet. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.

It’s alright, just don’t turn pink, He cleared his throat, continuing as if she were dressed in something more than a towel. Media curtain is up. From your end, Rhodes, the line is ‘no comment.’ Understood?

Yes, sir, she nodded. I’ll hit the road A-SAP.

Without further pleasantries, her commander ended the call.

With Bowers’s face gone from her mirror, Victoria looked at the image he’d seen, now reflected back at her. Large brown eyes and a slightly crooked nose over medium-full lips. She never wore make-up, her skin for the most was part unblemished with all the scars faded over time. She considered her slender neck and bare shoulders, wiry with evenings spent taking out her pent-up rage on an Everlast body-bag in the basement of the Police Officer’s Fitness Club had made her tough but unassumingly so.

Ditching the towel without a second look, she picked up her synth-coffee from the edge of the bathroom counter and had a swig before dumping the disappointing sludge down the sink.

Her home shower was too temperamental. She realized she would have to forego the luxury and get through the day feeling only half-clean.

With a sigh, she moved back out into her bedroom, tossing the towel away onto the floor.

From her closet, she selected a pair of gray Kevlar-weave leggings and a blue policewoman’s blouse. She dressed quickly, taking her leather jacket off its hook by the bedroom door and grabbing her badge and gun off the nightstand. Overall, five minutes from the start of Bowers’s call she was fully composed and heading out into the kitchen to shut off the info-screen.

She grabbed a single slice of the dry toast on her way out the door, leaving the plate on the counter and tapping in the code on her police locks before taking the three flights of her walk up down two at a time.

In the lobby, she stepped over the half-wacked-out body of a meth-head, leaning against the garage’s steel security door, but didn’t stop to roust him. Vagrancy and Narcotics possession were crimes no longer enforced in the city. With nearly half the population homeless, Victoria Rhodes had learned to turn a blind eye to those who couldn’t face the world and retreated into a life of substances that at least spared them some pain.

In the sub-basement she climbed into her cruiser, hit the lights, and pulled out of her stall. The new day was beginning, and she had a job to do.

Chapter Three

The girl ate from a cardboard box, her long slender fingers folding the slice of morning pizza over and stuffing it greedily between lips that had not yet adjusted to the shift in time zones.

From across the large metal draftsman’s desk, he watched her, impassively.

It had been a day, maybe too, and he had spoken all of five sentences the whole time. He spoke to her in French because she seemed to prefer conversations in that language. He could not remember ever learning French but he found he was fluent in it and several other European and East Asian tongues.

My I have some? he asked, in French.

Are you hungry? She responded, not looking up at him.

He considered the question. He was not hungry. However…

You make it look good, he said.

The small girl smiled around a mouth full of cheese. He considered her a girl because she was small and moved easily in and out of certain looks. When she’d first come to collect him, she’d worn gray wool, a skirt and matched blazer designed to accentuate her Parisian slenderness.

Her accent was Parisian. He knew that because it was one of the things he knew. He could not recall ever being in Paris.

As she was now, wrapped in non-descript street clothes, her hair mussed from sleeping in the back of the car, he could have placed her as a run-away teenager. A girl with small breasts and narrow bone structure, easily indistinguishable from the hordes of teenagers who populated black market malls and loitered in the crumbling areas of the city where the rumble of skateboard wheels on concrete echoed off abandoned public works buildings.

An alarm chimed. The girl straightened up, tossing a half-eaten crust in the box before checking the disposable com-link on the dust-covered desk between them.

Her expression was one of equanimity.

Not us, she said, this time in English. Her accent was New York, Park Avenue before the war. She looked at him thoughtfully. You can have a slice of pizza if you’re hungry.

He wasn’t hungry. He looked at the pizza and considered the time. When was it he had last eaten?

No, Merci, he said, standing and moving back over to inspect the car where he’d parked it.

The girl at the desk watched him cautiously as he walked around the old Chevrolet, kicking the tires and popping the hood like any paranoid operative.

He moved like any other SAS or Mossad man, with his marine-officer haircut and emotionless features. It was less than 24 hours since she’d retrieved him. She’d managed to keep him in the dark so far with very little effort.

He might get suspicious, they’d said. But don’t worry, there are safeguards.

As he came back from the car, she let her hand move casually against the small Glock pistol in her faun boot.

Everything okay? she asked in French.

What’s my name again? he asked.

Sam. she said, a bit worried that he was having problems retrieving the implanted memories. Se rappeler?

Yes, he said, accepting the answer and apparently retaining it. I remember, now.

He looked at the pizza again.

It’s all part of the plan, he said.

She felt her hand move away from the gun’s grip as he sat down in the chair across from her. She took another slice of pizza. He looked off and away from her, disinterested once more in anything but his own thoughts.

Chapter Four

Coming out of her neighborhood via Lafayette to take the jump from the Central Freeway and convert to hover over the old Skyway past Bryant Street, Victoria flew past the dilapidated buildings still burned out and broken from almost 20 years of neglect. East of Bryant was generally considered a no-man’s land, left to the disenfranchised and disaffected. Cops patrolling the area dealt with the strung out, burned out, and poorest elementals of society. All of whom seemed to share the same empty-eyed demeanor hopelessness.

Save for the privately owned and privately policed docks, there was nothing east of Bryant but despair, festering in the fog and rain. All the