Digital Venous by Richard Gohl Read Free Book Online Page B

group of a hundred or so local men moving in through the gate. She had no skin ID but in desperation hoped to enter Napea by blending in with them. The closer she got to the front of the queue, the more she realized the insanity of what she was doing. She looked back toward the transdome and saw Sylvana come barging through the double doors. Guards’ and workers heads’ turned to look towards the commotion.
    Sylvana had spotted her. “Alia!” she called. “Alia!” Guards walked straight passed Alia, guns raised towards Sylvana, ready for an attack. Alia, sensing her moment, broke and ran in pursuit of the first group of workers who were now disappearing down the road into Napea. She made it about thirty paces before she was dropped by a paralysis dart.
    A stunt like that would normally see a Sub taken to the life center. Napeans looked for any excuse to reduce to the population; they were obsessed by it. Most people couldn’t believe they didn’t just shoot to kill, as per normal. But today she was lucky—there were far too many witnesses, and by the look of it, she was a well-known lady. Fearing a revenge attack, the guards allowed two male workers and, with Sylvana, they took her home.
    Sylvana and Alia’s relationship soon ended; Alia’s grief was insurmountable. She became impossible to live with. Her personal habits deteriorated. Her spark and sense of humor vanished. The old Alia was gone. Sylvana left to be with family in Greenhill.
    For Alia, the obsession to find her child became intertwined with the struggle against the Napeans. It became the central focus of her life. Naturally, in time, she met others suffering the same affliction, and together they thought about ways of wreaking havoc in the world above.
    Bes Zini, a twenty-two-year-old Blackwood woman, had been looking for her child for forty hours when she was found by friends curled up next to a Stirling gate skylight. Suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, they couldn’t get her to talk. Her baby had gone missing on a Tuesday and they had found her Thursday morning.
    There were no police in the real world. No one to go to for help. People had to fend for themselves.
    Bes lived and worked as part of a growers’ cooperative, which meant that she shared housing and food and the hard work in the hydroponic gardens. She had struggled at night to maintain her sanity, looking after the baby on her own.
    When her boyfriend died in an accident while working in Napea, Bes was numb with shock. Her friends at the co-op talked her through it, but in between looking after the baby and working, there was no time to grieve.
    Then her child went missing. Bes had nothing left to hold onto and nothing left in her emotional tank.
    She had a breakdown and went wandering, searching for her child. She was eventually found and transported back to the commune—now just another statistic. In fact, the third baby in as many weeks. Everyone knew where the children were going, but there never seemed to be any witnesses. There never seemed to be any proof. And in any case, there was no one to tell.
    It was twelve months before she could talk about it to anyone. But when she met Alia and her small group of friends, she drew strength from their desire for justice and retribution. Joining them may not have been the healthiest option for the recovery of her mental health, but in reality, as they all found out, one doesn’t recover from that kind of loss.
    Big, bold, blonde, and brash, Madi Johnson was the last one anybody ever thought would be the maternal type, but when she suddenly became pregnant, the excitement and joy seemed magnified by the unlikely nature of the whole situation. The fact that there didn’t seem to be a man involved at all was not surprising, nor was the fact that she gave birth to a big and brash baby boy.
    Like all the real people, as they called themselves, she lived on a subsistence level, underground, where survival was a full time occupation.