The Timeservers

Chapter 68

A few kilometers outside of Ottawa, Ontario

The Lius'

December 22, 227 P.F.E

1000 hours

Sophia does more digging into the whole censorship thing. Mining into the dark archives of the Guardians cultivates a lot of dirt. Some dirt is better left in the ground.
"They captured the Barkley brothers yesterday. They found them to be guilty of conspiring to corrupt citizens and of being Historian spies. It took them five hours to break Connor's brother, and seven to break Connor. Both admitted to being spies for the other side. They're giving them the ultimate punishment."
"What's that?" Via asks.
Sophia and Kelly go silent. Avril and Waylon walk into the living room and sit down, each putting an arm around one of their children.
"You guys don't hear about this down south. They're careful about it. We don't like talking about it either. You know that the death sentence isn't allowed here. They went with something else instead. Put your shoes on; everyone. Grab a jacket. We're going to show you something."

∞

The group wanders through the woods at the back of the house. They trek for almost an hour and then strange things start to appear, there's barbed wire and electrified fences. They have to start hiding from standards walking through the woods with x-calibre rifles at the ready. There's the sound of wailing in the distance.
Sophia and Leo walk close together, Sophia leading a little. She's scared of what he might think but can't handle being close to him. Earlier she'd just wanted to spend all the time she could with him. Now, after she did what she did; every moment together seems like torture. All she wants is to be done being Sophia and to stop hurting him. She'll have to hurt him a few more times though.
Sophia stays closer to Kelly; who stays closer to Via. Really close to Via.
"I liked your parents a lot more an hour ago when they were cute and insane and talking about love," Via whispers to Kelly. She'd gravitated to him once they jumped the first barbed wire fence. Sophia noticed that they were holding hands soon after. She's not sure who reached for whom, but she understands the response. Being out here makes you crave the reassuring touch of another human. Just to prove that you're not falling, or falling apart.
"Yeah, my family's like that. Cute and a little insane when you meet them; secrets like crazy as you get to know them."
Avril turns to walk backward from her spot at the front of the pack. Her face is deadly serious, almost the same as Sophia'sthe night of the circus. "Do exactly what we say. Stay as quiet as possible. Brace yourselves. I'm sorry; but this will hurt a lot, dears."
"That didn't help," Via whispers.
"Don't worry; if anything happens then May and my mom can take care of us. My mom's the Damsel of Distress. She knows how to earn her name."
The group falls silent and walks for five minutes more. It starts to snow; thick and fast and covering their tracks. When they finally stop it takes a minute to see the camp through that snow. There are a lot of dark low buildings and watch towers in every direction. There are high fences and standards patrolling the grounds, sometimes stopping to threaten or follow through with threats against the prisoners.
"What is this place?" Via squeaks out. Her eyes are wide and she tightens her grip on Kelly.
"This is an integration camp. They show you videos of people having fun and learning about technology and laws. That's just the ones for Historians who ran from their country and don't look back. This is where they take sympathizers and captured Historians so that they can break them and guarantee there'll be no uprising once they're let out. If they make it out." Avril pulls out her screen and zooms in on a section of the camp to show everyone.
There's a woman there, being pushed towards some strange platform with a chair in the middle. She's clinging to a child, only two years old. She gets to the platform, stumbling a little, and the standards leading her rip her child from her arms.
The woman is sat down on the chair as she helplessly fights the standards. They shackle her to it and one of them pulls back her hair. A head wound; recent and terrible, is revealed. The standard injects her neck with something and holds her eyes open, injecting something into them. The standards clear off from the platform.
She fights against her shackles, screaming. Her child wails and tries to go to her but a standard picks them up.
One of the standards presses a button and Sophia looks away as there's a flash of light. The light lasts for only a few minutes, during which a screen in front of the woman flickers with different images of the life of a Historian. Audio from the Pre-Forgotten Eraplays. When the light flashes again the shackles fall away the woman slips to the ground.
One of the standards rushes to the woman's side as the one that held her child sets him down. The child races over to their mother, crying. She looks at them vacantly for a minute then the standard sweep her away into the nicest of the buildings on the property. A different standard picks up the child again and takes them to a shuttle.
"What just happened?" Via demands.
"They generated a tear! That's impo-,"Tatiana starts to yell but Avril clamps a hand over her mouth.
"Not impossible. That woman was a brilliant inventor. One good idea and she could have been a governor. She'ssympathetic though. They put her in a tear by releasing a large amount of methane, carbon dioxide, or something. They calibrate it so that the tear feeds off of it for a very specific amount of time before dissipating. They give the victims concussions sometimes, to increase memory loss. That stuff they injected her with does it too. They show her images and play the audio and as her brain empties of her real life, those images take her real memories' place. By the time she got out, she knew things Historians would. They'll tell her she was Historian, reformed now. They injected the flecks into her eyes. They scrub her page and set her loose on the streets as a Historian so she'll never gain power again," Avril explains. "The defectors from the Guardians are taken to the Frozen Coast for wiping. It's easier to build a narrative there."
Everyone's face falls. Sophia feels sick. She reaches out for Leo as he reaches out to her. When she sees his eyes he's not looking at her. He's looking at the platform as another person gets led up to it. He's pale, shaky, his eyes wide. He looks like he's seen a ghost.