**CURRENTLY A FEATURED STORY**
highest ranking: #11 in Science fiction
❝true happiness is only achieved without freedom.
There is a girl who wakes to a world that she was supposed to protect. Instead, she fights it.
There is a man who is cursed wit...
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It takes me no time at all to work out how the chip works. I run my thumb over it in a certain configuration that mirrors the pattern etched out onto its sides and it turns into a screen the size of a large tablet. Here it is. My mind greedily forces my fingers to fly across the screen, searching for answers, searching for something— but after a moment I stop, slow down, take a moment to think. Vance gave this to me. He gave it to me, probably knowing I'd want to look through it before it gets to Bernard. He was right, but perhaps he wanted me to find something, see something for myself before it gets either hidden from me or warped so its meaning and importance are skewed.
I turn the chip off and head for my room - or, rather, my dorm, with the hopes that it'll be empty at this hour. It is. I throw myself into my lower bunk, beneath Julian's bed, and open the chip up. This will take me time but I've been warned to take my time, lest the device should fall into the wrong hands too early, and have its secrets exposed too soon.
It's dark. My hands are trembling in anxious anticipation; the blue light from the screen illuminates my face, lining its highlights with turquoise, casting the rest into black shadow. The chip's screen opens to a series of folders. I scan their names quickly, urgently, hoping to find something that'll help me.
Adamík. #009_8_4 Projects
And, in a subfolder, Project Chrysalis. Then: inception. Both pique my interest. I choose Chrysalis first, and spend several minutes seething at the screen, at the lies that were told, the lies that unfolded. The drones come first. How Vance and Adamík (who I assume is a colleague of his) were given the task of positioning the drones, program them to their assigned locations, coordinates which were, to them, areas on the world map, but which were, in veritable fact, sectors of the city. Then, the serum. An injection designed and made possible with the power of nanorobotics and smart technology, a serum to wipe out some- weed out the bad numbers from the good ones, purify the population. Genocide, made possible on a microbiological level. The drones in their next stage, bringing back fabricated images of death from their 'global' tour, images of hunger, disease, wasteland, and multi coloured sunsets above floating chunks of ice across great oceans.
Photographs of the sun bleeding into the sky like ink bleeds into paper, in an explosion of colour, that to the human eye would be considered beautiful. But the president says they're ugly, they embody the bad, they're freedom and liberty, encapsulated in natural beauty. None of that, however, truly interests me.
I drag my finger over the holographic display, trying to find something important, something that perhaps pertains specifically to myself. I go back to the main Projects folder, and select inception to look at. It's a folder constructed of a multitude of files over thirty years a old that detail the beginnings of Tetrahmon; a great city, an empire, a fortress— the new world. And then, a locked file.
