Revolution Page 3

  The warm air in the train is a welcome relief. It must be 90 degrees, but still my hands shake. I'm not sure if that's nerves or whatever goddamn disease Sveta passed on to me. I get off the train at Broadway. My passport photo is on all the TV screens, along with the occasional snippet of footage from the freeway pile up. A shot of the diner appears. A news crew is interviewing the waitress, but I can't hear what's being said over the noise in the station. There's a couple of cops by the subway exit. They're standing to one side chatting casually, so I move with the herd, keeping to the far side of the tunnel.

  I've always hated being short, but now I'm glad. There are security cameras everywhere. I keep in step with a huge African American ahead of me. He must be easily 6’4" so I hide in his shadow as the press of the human tide behind me carries us both out of the station.

  The sun has risen. The air outside is cool, but there's no breeze. Sirens sound. There's always a siren sounding somewhere in New York city.

  I walk to the corner of Broadway and Fifth and then stand there looking lost. The lights change. Pedestrians cross. The lights change again and another horde crosses in the other direction. I'm loitering like a tourist, only I don’t have a camera to take any photos and I look like a bum.

  Instead of being a junction, the corner of Broadway and Fifth is more like a pair of scissors—the two roads cross at an acute angle. I’m not sure which corner I should be standing on, or how I’ll recognize the man I spoke to.

  “This is wrong,” I mumbled. “I should turn myself in.”

  I’m burning up. It’s freezing cold and I’m running a fever. I’m dying.

  The lights change again, and amidst the sea of business men and women heading to work and the odd intrepid tourist braving the cold, I see Sveta. My heart skips a beat. She’s in a hurry. Either she doesn’t see me or she’s trying not to draw attention to herself, but she strides past no more than ten feet away. I want to call out her name, but given all that’s happened, that’s probably not smart. There’s a cop seated on a horse on the other side of the adjacent park. I don’t want to draw his attention.

  I walk briskly behind Sveta. It’s her, I’m sure of it, but how? She’s wearing the same skin-tight black pants that are totally impractical in New York during winter. She has a jacket on. Her eyes are hidden by designer sunglasses, but she’s not wearing a hat, allowing me to get a good look at her face in side profile.

  Sveta walks into the lobby of a nearby building and into an elevator with several other people. I rush to catch it and stop the doors as they close. Sveta glances briefly at me from behind her dark shades. I stand quietly near the front of the elevator, waiting for the other occupants to leave as we stop at the various floors. Finally, it is just the two of us.

  “Sveta,” I whisper softly. “How?”

  Sveta reaches out with an elevator key card, swiping a security panel by the buttons for the different floors and the lift comes to an abrupt halt.

  I stutter, saying, “I—I saw you. I saw you die.”

  She removes her sunglasses and pushes me roughly against the side of the elevator.

  “Sveta,” I plead, but she ignores me. Sveta reaches around behind the back of my neck and pulls me close, kissing me passionately. She’s surprisingly strong, easily overwhelming me. I’m trying to pull away, but her arms are firm. She rolls her tongue around my lips. I’m trying to speak, but it’s impossible. Her lips as so soft and moist and warm. I can feel myself surrendering.

  “Stop,” I finally manage, prying myself away from her grasp. She steps back, looking deep into my eyes. Her beauty is captivating, her skin flawless.

  “I can’t do this,” I say. “Please, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. What happened at the airport?”

  She shrugs and waves her security card over the elevator control panel and we continue moving to the top floor.

  “Talk to me,” I cry out, almost yelling at her.

  Sveta ignores me. She looks at the crumpled scrap of paper with the phone number. She must have slipped it out of my pocket as we kissed.

  “I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in,” I say. “But I can help.”

  Even as the words leave my mouth, I know they’re foolish. I have no idea what I’ve been caught up in, let alone have any ability to help myself or her.

  She sighs.

  The elevator doors open and two men wearing balaclavas grab me by the arms and drag me out. They’re dressed in black and have automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, with the muzzles pointing at the floor.

  “Sveta,” I say, pleading with her.

  She’s crying. Tears run down her cheeks.

  “There’s no Sveta,” she replies. “Sveta is dead.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The two men push me down into a chair. We’re on a movie set. No, it’s a television set. There are several cameras in front of a backdrop used for the news. Another two thugs stand to one side of a newsreader, but she looks out of place. Our eyes meet and I can see she’s as scared as I am.

  “Set up the data extraction,” a voice says. I recognize the voice from the phone call. I turn and see an elderly man in his late eighties.

  “I have a backup,” Sveta says, only it’s not Sveta. This woman has to be her twin sister.

  “Good, good,” the aging man says, walking over to me as I’m strapped into a chair like a prisoner awaiting execution. One of the men takes a swab from inside my cheeks and inserts it into a machine hidden inside a briefcase.

  “Please,” I say, begging the old man for mercy. “You’ve got to give me the antidote.”

  “Antidote?” he replies. “There is no antidote. This is a virus.”

  “But… I need an antidote. You said I’ll die.”

  “I lied.”

  One of the masked thugs laughs as the old man continues.

  “It is a variant of the common cold, designed to store massive amounts of information in the nucleus of a cell. In a few days, you’ll be fine.”

  “But why? Why are you doing all this?”

  As the words leave my lips, a video starts playing on the backdrop behind the newsreader. I can see a cable running from the machine in the briefcase to a broadcast panel controlling the images being displayed. The newsreader starts speaking, reading from a teleprompter. Her voice wavers as she speaks, but she quickly settles into her regular routine.

  “These images are from the breakaway republic of Odessa, south of Moscow. Men, women and children are being slaughtered by the thousands. But what is most alarming about this ethnic cleansing is that it is not being carried out by loyalist forces alone. Footage shows US Special Forces on the ground providing direction to local troops under the containment doctrine revived by President Carver. Supporting the Odessa government in its stand against Russian rebels might seem smart on paper, but innocent people are dying.

  “Using facial recognition, we have documented forty seven US soldiers on the ground, and have evidence of over one hundred and fifty support staff using electronic surveillance and long range reconnaissance. This information will be provided in full to Time Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today for independent verification.

  “Setting one corrupt foreign power against another corrupt government is akin to choosing between poisons. The world cannot afford another Monroe Doctrine. Historically, the US has supported criminal organizations such as the Junta of El Salvador, Augusto Pinochet and the House of Saud for strategic reasons, but to back a dictator such as Vlad Grecori as he ruthlessly slaughters his own people is like arming the Mafia.

  “It is you, the US public, that must pass judgement on President Carver at the election. You must do what is right, not what is expedient. America must stand for freedom, not political interests and lobby groups. Rise up, America, and speak. Let your voice be heard in all corners of the Earth.”

  The lights on the cameras switch off, signaling the broadcast has ended. The old man loosens the straps holding me in place.

  “That’s a wrap,” he says, clearly pleased with himself. “The police are coming. We must go.”

  I’m in shock.

  “What about me?” I ask. “What happens to me now?”

  “You are free to go.”

  “Free?” I cry, thinking about all I have been through in the last few hours and knowing I would not make it through a single day on the street alone.

  Sveta’s sister says, “You Americans value your freedom. But there's no freedom without the courage to fight for what is right.”

  The old man offers me his hand, but it’s not merely to help me out of the seat. There’s something more symbolic in his gesture. He smiles as our hands lock, saying, “Welcome to the revolution.”

  The End

  Afterword

  We live in a time of transition. The world around us is changing at an extraordinary rate. The kind of privacy concerns that forced President Nixon from office in the 70s barely register in the public consciousness today. In the near future, the advent of quantum computing may compound this effect further, allowing the toughest of encryption algorithms to be easily cracked.

  REVOLUTION is a glimpse into this world, and the prospect that highly sensitive information may need to be covertly shared by storing knowledge in DNA. Researchers at Harvard university have demonstrated the ability to store 700 terabytes of information in a single gram of DNA, that's the equivalent of 14,000 of your favorite blu-ray movies on the head of a drawing pin. Given the longevity of DNA, stretching into tens of thousands of years, such storage devices may well prove more popular than our current magnetic disk drives, but the potential for contaminating natural cells would be serious. The consequences could range from flu-like symptoms to the destruction
of a cell.

  Author Peter Cawdron specializes in science fiction, exploring such topics as first contact with an alien species, dystopian futures and time travel in his highly popular novels. You can find Peter Cawdron's books in the Amazon bookstore.

  http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Cawdron/e/B00600L9FO/

  References:

  Quantum computing & encryption:

  http://www.computerworld.com/article/2550008/security0/the-clock-is-ticking-for-encryption.html

  Storing information in DNA:

  http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Revolution

  Afterword

  Other books by Peter Cawdron

 

 

  Peter Cawdron, Revolution

 

 

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