He smiles as the sound parts his lips. He makes it again, first as just a letter and then as the beginning of a word, testing its possibilities. “Be. Buh. Beh—”
“Shh,” someone says, and turns up the TV.
The tall man looks scared but determined. He wipes his eyes. He takes a deep breath.
“My name…is R,” he says, struggling with the words. “It’s…only name that…matters to me. Only name I have…in this life.”
He looks at the ground.
“But…had another life. Another name.”
He shakes his head.
“First name’s not important. Just a noise my parents liked. But last name…family name…”
He forces his eyes back to the camera, takes a shuddering breath, and firms his voice.
“I was an Atvist. My grandfather founded the Axiom Group.”
“At…vist,” B says, frowning, and someone shushes him again.
“What this group wants is to go back,” R continues, and his voice is solidifying, gaining speed and force. “Back to packs and pecking orders, predators and prey and the dominance of the strong. It wants a world driven by hunger and fear, where we kill our children to keep them safe.”
The video stutters between R and a menu screen, a scrawl of code, a quick scramble through a selection of clips—then a huge room filled with plush chairs. B grins—paradise! But then he notices the people strapped into those chairs and stuck full of tubes and wires. He sees a little girl with a blue eye patch bucking and kicking against her restraints. And he sees R and Julie and a few others storming into this room and releasing everyone.
“The Axiom I worked for was a dangerous thing, but it’s become something much worse.”
He speaks over a montage of security camera footage:
Axiom guards divide up a crowd, directing some into apartment towers and others into vans.
A corral full of people sway and stare with looks of utter emptiness, like they’re waiting to be told what they are.
Two men in lab coats carry a struggling woman up a ladder. They drop her into a tank of clear fluid, and the three skeletons drifting in the tank come to life. The woman disappears. The fluid turns pink.
“Axiom isn’t a government,” R says, and his face reappears on the screen, his eyes now dry and fierce. “It’s not a strong leader of a secure society. It’s this.”
He steps aside, letting the camera focus on what’s behind him: a shipping container filled with brownish-white debris. Concrete? Dirt?
Bones.
Rattling bones and buzzing skulls, like the ones in the airport where B used to live, the ones that hissed wordless sermons and meaningless rules and roared like battle horns whenever they were challenged.
“This is Axiom’s Executive branch. This is where your orders come from.”
A severed hand claws its way out of the pile and into the mouth of a leathery skull. The skull bites down and the hand writhes.
“It’s a single neuron in the lowest part of our brains, firing over and over, and it’s saying the same thing it’s been saying for billions of years. Take. Eat. Fight. Win. Fuck. Kill. Survive.”
He spits the words like the names of old friends who betrayed him.
“But there’s more to us than this, isn’t there? Haven’t we grown bigger brains? Bigger souls?”
“Brains,” B says. “Be. Buh. Beh.”
Someone elbows him but he keeps mumbling, sampling syllables on his thawing tongue.
“We have the vocabulary for bigger thoughts. Beautiful, intricate thoughts made of many words. Maybe some we’ve been thinking for a long time but have been too scared to say aloud.”
“Be…Beh…Ben.” His eyes widen. His chest swells with a deep breath. “Ben!” he shouts, and a few of his neighbors stare at him. “My name is Ben!”
Ben stands up so fast he knocks over his chair.
Gael ducks as the helicopters roar overhead. Gebre shields his face against the blast of dust and leaves. The wind obliterates the street market, scattering its food crates and clothes racks and invention demo tents, blowing away Portland’s experimental society like a puff of dandelion seeds. Gael wonders what wish they made, the children flying those helicopters and driving these trucks down Hawthorne Street.
“I knew it,” Gebre says, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it, but I knew it.”
“Sir,” says a soldier in a beige jacket, “I’m going to have to ask you to keep moving.” He jabs at them with his rifle. Gael and Gebre fall into the line of prisoners—though of course Axiom doesn’t use that term, preferring to avoid the uncomfortable association with the thing it actually is. Prisoners became “detainees” decades ago, and now they’ve graduated to “guests.”
Gael and Gebre shuffle into the community center to join the rest of the guests. Portland’s organizers gathered here at the first sign of attack, calling it an emergency strategy meeting, but there was no strategy to discuss. They’re not a militia; they’re farmers and builders and artists and scientists. Their only plan for a situation like this was for it to never happen. And so the strategy meeting transitioned into a prisoner camp without a shot fired. The invaders didn’t even speak. They just walked in with their guns and redefined the context.
“I wanted to be wrong,” Gebre mumbles as he and his husband take their place in the crowd. “I thought it could be different…”
“Stop it,” Gael says.
“…but it’s Catalonia and the Free Territories and Stalin all over again.”
“I’m serious, Geb. Don’t you dare say it.”
He shakes his head. “I won’t say it. But it rhymes with ‘blistery retreats.’”
“Why is the TV off?” shouts an officer with a gray tie hanging over his gray shirt. “You people don’t want Axiom’s exclusive offers and updates?”
He finds the remote and clicks on the big flatscreen that hangs above the help desk.
Something is different.
Instead of the montage of dissociative imagery that usually fills the screen, the TV shows what appears to be raw security footage. A tall, East African-looking woman is calling to the camera as she slowly backs away.
“…in about fourteen minutes, BABL’s gonna be gone. You’ll be able to change the channel.”
She is far away from the microphone and her voice is faint. The community center listens in total silence.
“But first we need to show you something. So, uh…stay tuned?”
She looks familiar, but before Gael can place her face, she turns and runs out of the frame. The scene cuts to a battle.
For a moment Gael thinks it’s a movie—it has all the wordless mayhem of an old-world blockbuster’s obligatory action climax—but there’s a distinct lack of drama in the spectacle. Just a long, steady shot of soldiers and trucks and a clattering swarm of human skeletons, all locked in a blur of combat so jumbled it’s not even clear who’s fighting whom.
The troops in the community center watch the footage in mute horror. Then it cuts from the battle to the roof of the stadium. It pans over to a bizarrely incongruous dome resting on the roof, then cuts to the interior of that dome, where a man is looking at the camera.
“My name…is R,” the man says, and as he continues to speak, the silence in the community center deepens. The soldiers begin to glance at each other. When the footage cuts to some kind of laboratory, the officer clicks the TV off.