Animal Theater

Marionettes

"You fascist piece of shit," Michael said to me. "You assume you're so above us, like you have all the power, but lemme tell you, if we're down in the mud? You're even further down, you're down in the shit. You think no one's ever gonna find out what you're doing? Bullshit. It'll all come out and when it does all you motherfuckers who thought everything you were doing was so secret, you're going to be exposed for what you are, perverted little paranoid weirdos. You think the war shields you? Well the war can't last forever, but what you did to my friend's brain is gonna last him the rest of his life. You represent everything that's wrong and evil in the human race. You're cruel and uncaring and you're a coward." He sat back and smiled. "Now you do me." He said.

I leaned in close to his face. "How the hell do you sleep at night? Someday you'll have to pay for your crimes, in this world or the next. Who gave you the right to do what you do to a person? The Party? The government? Who gave them the right? I'm a person just like you. Michael's a person, just like you. We have dreams and feelings, just like you, and yet you sit in a room somewhere, giving yourself the authority to steal all our privacy. To take our perceptions and filter through them in search of anything that would further your cause. Have you even thought about what it is that you do all day? Have you examined it? Because it's fucked. Don't you have a mother?" I shook my head. "Listen, I'm not like Michael, he's given up on you. Me? I think there's still hope. Repent! Make what you've done right before it's too late!"

"That was a good one." Michael said. "Thanks."

"You guys been in solitary too long?" She was a big lady, sitting down on the other side of the table from us in the mess tent.

"You liberated?" I asked her.

"Nah, I'm training to join a guerrilla unit, I'm a communications specialist." She said. "I write code for axes. I'm Rebecca."

"I'm Sam and this is Michael." I said. "We were liberated two days ago from a prison camp down near the border. This is our last meal with you guys. They don't take former prisoners into the Asym units anymore, so we're on our own."

"Subcomandante Miller got you guys out?"

I nodded.

"I met some guys from your camp." She said. "From what I heard you had it pretty rough down there."

"Plenty had it worse." Michael said.

"What's with you two cursing each other out like that?"

Michael looked at me.

"We do it just in case." I said. "We were in a Xianco prison in west Texas together and they did all kinds of surgical experiments on the population there. They bugged people's brains somehow."

"Nah, they can't do that." She said. "And even if they could, how would you know about it?"

"Well back at Xianco word got around that one surgery was a ticket out. Anyone that wound up in recovery with a one inch scar on their neck and bandaged up eyes would get transferred, some said released. When Xianco prison shut down me and Michael were transferred to a Sony prison in New Mexico and some of those guys were in there. If those guys were involved in any shit that was going on it would get busted. Thing was, they weren't snitches. One day one of these guys stood up in the dining hall and told everyone that his brain was being monitored and that anything anyone said to him went straight to the hacks."

"That sounds like a paranoid delusion, my older brother was schizophrenic and he said stuff like that." Rebecca said.

"Yeah, but right after this guy said all that he dropped dead." I said. "Guy was bleeding from his eyeballs. Next day they announced that he died of some new type of super G. That's when everyone knew he'd been telling the truth."