Gods Under The Dome

16.2

《A New Day》

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After news of the explosion, Ellie, Nol and I make for the upstairs gathering room. Clearing off a seat, I settle into a chair, place the dot on my temple, and connect to the Aviary Network. Nol's fingers wrap around my hand as  a way of reminding me I wasn't alone in all of this. I appreciate this kindness, though I'd never give him the smug satisfaction of voicing my gratitude.

Almost as quick as the visor forms over my eyes, presenting me with the A-Net homescreen, I'm bombarded by images of Sector 4b's destruction. A crater the size of Homestead One appears in concrete, laying bare the metallic plate underneath. Flames dance around the absence where once a building once stood, where inside, Della and the Collective had been meeting with the El Accosta to negotiate an armistice. Smoke slithers into the air. There was no way anyone survived the blast at point-blank range.

My mouth goes dry as I flip through more images of the same: leveled buildings, scorched spans of astro-turf, survivors -- soot-stained and terrified -- sobbing as they recanted their tales to news drones.

After an hour or so, there'd only been one picture of the casualties released to the public. This image, allowed to go live by the Council, was a vivid, close-up shot of two bodies, the larger one cradling a much smaller one. I gulp.

A mother and her child.

Charred flesh hang off both their bodies like clothes set out to dry on a line, much like the way people had done in the oldest of our archival vids. Underneath the picture, a caption reads, "Fear not, for the Council, the fighters of Truth, will see to it this act of villainy does not go unpunished."

This is followed by an avalanche of comments praising the FUA, praising Dove, praising the god that brings justice to the world through his infallible Truth.

"It looks as though they've given the go-ahead for AIN units to enter the Sect and start cataloging the dead." Though Nol's beside me, his voice sounds miles away thanks to the dot's built-in audio dampener, which had activated the second I logged into the Network.

I give his hand a squeeze.

It would take the AIN retrieval units days, if not weeks, to collect the Aviary chips off all the bodies, and then, analysis would take even longer. A full list of all the casualties wouldn't be released to the public for at least a month, but still, knowing who was dead and who wasn't was a luxury that couldn't be discredited. It brought families and loved ones closure.

In the Facility, we never had that luxury. If I hadn't seen my mother killed in front of me, I wouldn't have known what happened to her. She could have been dead or alive for all I knew.

Once you'd been stripped of your name and saddled with a number, you were unburdened of your past -- according to Mistress Ramona -- so that you could be handed the reigns of an unimaginable future.

A still of Dove's face rendered in crystal clear HD from his speech earlier, pops up in my feed, eclipsing every other image of the tragedy. He's unshaven, his hair disheveled - proof he was too consumed by grief to be his usual composed self. He's the manufactured picture-perfect image of a sympathetic leader, agonizing over the FUA's first mass tragedy in over two decades.

Staring into those eyes welling with drug-induced tears, makes my stomach feel as though its curdling. I'd been groomed to be him, and what's worse, I'd wanted to be him. I couldn't wait to laud power and privilege over a society I thought couldn't think for itself without walking down a path toward destruction. My jaw tenses.

How pathetically delusional.

I minimize the picture, the feed, Dove's video and rip the dot from my temple. The opaque band of produced black falls away from my eyes. Mid-afternoon sun slips through the slatted windows highlighting dust motes as they glide through the stale air. Food trays wobble precariously on the ledges of tables and off arm rests, filled with that morning's rations of canned potatoes and beans.