CHAPTER SEVEN

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

That’s basically how it started.

The Eastern Security District used Direct Action Groups, or Rapid Response Teams, that paved the way for them to mold society. They initiated events via undercover specialists, agitators and provocateurs—like Ryan. Or Blake Robinson. Or was it Robinson Blake? It didn’t matter. Ryan can’t even remember much of it now. They’ve done so much to him over the years. It began innocently enough. He even had pride, once, at being an agent for them. Then The DOC came in and changed everything. The DOC, The Department of Control. From out of the chaos, came...control on Earth—and a hellish future.

Now Ryan was locked away in a metal can of a cell who-the-hell-knew-where. Naked. Nothing in the cell but four empty gray steel walls, a high gray ceiling, a cold gray steel floor. No bed, no commode, no sink, no window, no slit in the door. No ventilation system he could see. It seemed like he was breathing the same old stale air but it couldn’t be.

They’d thrown him in here some time ago. He didn’t remember when. Or why. He didn’t remember much at all. He just woke up in “here.” Nude and cold. Confused and scared. Alone except for an old paperback book he found on the floor beside him. He didn’t know why it was there. He didn’t know anything about it. It looked like some kind of old-time science fiction novel. A paperback with no cover. The title page said, Mars Needs Books, and it was by some obscure one-shot writer from LastCen named Philip K. Dickson.

Sometimes memory does come back. There were other agents doing other things. All kinds of things. Most were bad things. A lot worse than what he did. Ryan just killed killers and politicals. He knew the others killed innocents. He couldn’t remember why or for what reason, though. Most of these agents did all kinds of bad stuff for The DOC. All of it was for The DOC now that he thought of it. Now that he thought of it, he probably worked for The DOC too. Somehow, through some complicated mix of various cover corporations or government agencies. It was hard to tell. It’s hard to tell anything from back then.

Even before any of them knew there was a DOC running things, Ryan knew something had to be up. There seemed to be a plan. Somewhere, someone had a plan, and it was working. For them. But not for everyone else in the country or the world. It was working against citizens. Against the country. Against freedom and justice. But no one knew it for sure, there was just no evidence and no one knew how to identify it and stop it.

It hadn’t only gone on in the old United States either; it affected or infected countries throughout the entire world. There was sabotage, bombings, sensationalistic murders, riots, terrorism, chaos, all set up to destabilize. Terrorism became an all-out war after 9/11. It was going on in every country in the world. Terror was used to destabilize the world. Or at least the industrialized world. The various financial panics were worse. The Third World and the Developing World really didn’t matter much. They were hardly even players and certainly never stable. In this drama, they were the booty. The plunder. Their crap was all under control. They weren’t going nowhere they weren’t told to go.

The industrial world was something different. But even the nations of that world were all becoming unglued. Ryan just wondered who would be there to pick up all the pieces and glue the entire mess back together again into some semblance of order—and what that order might look like.