The hallway outside his father’s apartment was empty, except for the Duelist standing in front of his door, pistol drawn.
“You’re late.”
The altar boy had been late showing up with temps, and wanted more than the week before as he’d almost been caught cutting the communion dose. David barely talked the kid into coming back the next week. Should he lose that source, well, he simply couldn’t lose that source. Either way, it made him late getting back into the Scars.
“I know, but there was a—“
“Don’t care. Extra twenty or I won’t be here next week.”
“Yeah, okay. Can I bring that next week?”
The duelist holstered his gun and looked David up and down. “Ten now, ten then.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Your pass.”
“What? No?”
“That or the ten. I’ll hold your pass to make sure you bring the twenty.”
David didn’t have a choice. He opened his mouth wide while the duelist swabbed the inside of his cheek.
“Good?”
“For now. He’s been calling out for you. I told him to shut up, but—“
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t speak to him. Don’t ever speak to him again.”
“Or?”
“You have me at a disadvantage because I need you. Don’t make me stop needing you. He dies, I don’t need you. Then I talk to my sevens. Next day, you’re found with my pass on you in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, huh.”
“We can leave it at that.”
“Yes. We can.”
The smell of shit overwhelmed David as soon as he opened the door. “Jesus, Dad.”
A voice from the bowels of the apartment: “David? That you?”
“Yeah. Hold on one. Your lock is broken again.”
“Huh. I’ll fix that tonight.”
No. He wouldn’t.
David made his way into the apartment and into the bedroom. A heavily wrinkled man rested in bed, covered beneath tucked-in, military green blankets.
“You couldn’t make it to the restroom, Dad?”
“Of course I could.”
“Then why?”
“Fuck you, that’s why.”
“Dad, we—“
“You need to let me go.”
“You always say that and then you always change your mind.”
“I don’t want to live.”
“Yes, you do.”
“How do you know what I—“
David pulled the bubble tube from his pocket and held it in the air between them.
“No. Don’t—“
David grabbed a fistful of his father’s hair and pulled, stretching the old man’s stubbled chin toward the ceiling. With his other hand, David bent the bubble tube in half until it popped, shoving the leaking tube into the old man’s right nostril.
“Not on my watch,” David mumbled while the old man fought for breath then, involuntarily, snorted deep, the temp sucking back into his sinuses.
The wrinkles faded. The old man’s glossy eyes cleared.
“Better?” David asked.
“This is hell, you know.”
“What’s hell?”
“This. This damned in-between. I don’t know if I’m alive or dead any more. I don’t know if I want to be either.”
“Give it five minutes. You’ll be happy as a clam, Dad. You always are.”
“That, my boy, is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
THE DIRECTIVES: CLASSIFIED ARCHIVE
In the world of The Optimised Future, the State demands perfection. The population is neatly divided into ten Categories. At the top, the elite are rewarded with the suffocating, biological permanence of the Sacrament. At the bottom, the working classes are quietly recycled, their memories wiped to keep the machinery of Central running.
You are entering the shadows of that machinery.
These Directives are weekly dispatches from the unseen corners of the State. They are not the grand political struggles of the Bureau. They are intercepted transmissions from the periphery; micro-tragedies, analog rebellions, and the quiet, devastating cost of surviving in a world that has weaponized human biology.
New dispatches are unsealed every Saturday. Read them carefully. Central is always watching.
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