The Free State of Indiana

THE FREE STATE OF INDIANA

by

Maria Wickens

Outside the compound wall lies perdition.

The howls of the unrepentant echo through the night.

Padre Pete and the Warriors of the Light offer the community a safe haven, and all they expect in return is compliance.

And hard labor.

And on-demand sex.

And a pleasant smile and a thank you at the end of it.

I pace the perimeter wall of the compound. There is a world outside sanctuary, but nobody wants to go back there.

“How do you know outside is so bad if you’ve never been there?”

It is a blue shirt worker speaking out of turn. The blue shirts are drones, unnamed and not permitted in this sector of the commune. Drones have a habit of materializing noiselessly, carrying out their chores around you. I wasn’t aware they had the ability to read minds, but all kinds of weird stuff happens in the compound. I’ve learned to just go with it.

“Nobody ever leaves.” I tell the blue shirt what everybody here knows.

“You’ll leave—but you don’t usually take this much convincing.” The blue shirt smiles a wide grin. Smiling, also not permitted. “Do you remember escaping a hundred times before? Do you remember me?”

The drone peers into my face, looking for recognition. He deflates with a huff when he sees nothing but confusion.

“Let’s skip to the part where you agree to take three steps outside the wall,” he says wearily.

The opening to the wall was bricked up long ago. We are safely caged inside the compound.

The drone scrunches up his forehead and, rubbing his eyes, mutters, “Door, door, door.”

“Are you trying to blow the wall down?” I ask.

“It’s not that easy to recode exterior sets.” He glares toward the wall and goes back to muttering about doors.

He focuses on a section of wall covered with dense scarlet ivy just past the prickly pear tree. I leave him muttering and wander in that direction. The prickly pear blossom is vibrant yellow the color of a new moon. It bursts into bloom as I pass by.

Cacti only flower when they die.

I pull back the ivy, and there is a door with flaking green paint.

“Did you do that?” The drone is by my side instantly, and he twists the handle that I’m too afraid to touch. “Locked.”

In my hand I hold a rusted iron key, just like the key to the secret garden Mary Lennox discovered.

“This is new,” murmurs the drone. He pushes the door open and gallops outside without hesitation.

I recall Mary Lennox was not a child who had been trained to ask permission or consult wise opinion.

Likewise, this drone. Eventually he ducks back through the doorway and beckons toward the opening.

“No,” I say firmly. “Perdition awaits the unrepentant.”

He laughs and pulls me through the doorway. His laugh echoes through the wasteland beyond the wall. Piles of gray shingle dot a landscape stretching underneath a tangerine sky. Acrid smoke fills the air.

This is the odor of the end. I breathe in and can taste armageddon.

They cannot find us here but we cannot go back.

As I think this, the green door dissolves into red brick. Ivy spreads along the perimeter as though a kingdom lies sleeping beyond the wall.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” the drone says happily. “When did you figure out how to cheat the program?”

His words make no sense, and his assumption that we have done this before invokes a sensation of disconnection from myself. He throws me off balance with his familiarity.

“This is damnation.” I cling to the one certain piece of information I know. A howl rises from beyond the smoke.

Safety lies on the other side of the wall—but so does Padre Pete.

Maybe there is no real hurry to turn back just yet. That howl sounds a fair distance away.

“Do you remember how we got here?” The drone’s eyes cloud over. They are an intense blue. I remember his eyes from another lifetime. “I have said sorry a million times. One million and one.”

A buzzing in my brain makes the world flicker. The smoke thins, and the howling diminishes to a pathetic whimper. The drone continues to speak, but I wish he wouldn’t.

“The plan was to kick the habit while we were powering the VR with our drug-addled imaginations. We’d be clean by the time our contract was up, sleeping clean through the Haze withdrawal. But I was wrong. We’re too good at creating reality with our imaginations. They won’t let us go. We power their best programs.”

Haze. I remember the Haze, even though I don’t remember the drone.

Haze dissolves the gray, regimented world into spirals of light—vibrant oranges, pinks, and reds.

And suddenly a memory leaps into my brain—memory, not imagination, not programming. In another lifetime the drone lies next to me, chuckling at the mayhem the outlawed drug inflames. He is an outlaw, surrounded by forbidden books, indulging in illegal drugs. He is…

“Dean.” His face lights up when I say his name.

That’s a mistake. I have instilled baseless hope.

“There’s no way to cheat perdition,” I remind him.

Perdition is an eternal punishment for the sinful and unrepentant. But surely there are no more immoral acts compared to those Padre Pete inflicts upon me. Regret and disgust are a form of repentance maybe?

There’s no cure without payment. It feels as though somebody has said this to me a long time ago. There’s no cheat for that.

The earth shakes, and the Warriors burst through the wall.

“Run,” Dean says urgently. “I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.”

They throw a sack over Dean’s head and tighten the string. A Warrior of Light produces a syringe, and Dean crumples to the ground.

Padre Pete steps forward from behind his personal bodyguard of burly duplicates. He brushes back his long, dark, wavy hair from his tanned face and sets his impossibly square jaw. His eyes are golden like a tiger, and he wears a cloak like a pantomime Prince Charming.

Although in my experience, Padre Pete is anything but charming.

“He’s a bad man, a liar, and a cheat.” The Padre speaks to me as if I am a child. A faint hint of disappointment edges into his tone. I hang my head and stare at my feet. He reaches into his satchel and asks, “Would you like a peach, baby?”

The only food these days is a capsule. Nobody asks what they grind up and pipe into the plastic pills. We’re too hungry to be curious.

All the same, I know the peach flesh is orange and melting, and the juice is sweet and delicious.

The Padre holds up the peach—a perfectly round shape and exactly the shade of pink I imagined. He murmurs, “Oh, you are good.” He rolls his eyes in ecstasy as he bites into it, juice running down the side of his mouth, staining his white shirt. “The taste is exquisite. How do you think a code for taste? I’ll be sure to ask for you again.”

I am uncertain why he thinks I’m responsible for the deliciousness of a peach, but it seems I’ve pleased him. “Here’s your present, baby,” he says, and although it irks me that he calls me baby, I long to experience the taste of a peach, so I affix a demure expression, showing the deference he thrives on.

But instead, he pulls a syringe from his satchel and jabs a needle into my neck. I fall for a very long time. I fall for a lifetime. My scream dies before I hit the bottom.

When I open my eyes, the room is bright. My head is a deadweight, and there is an ungodly pressure against my temples. Chaos and shouting fill the room. Several people are trying to subdue somebody just out of my line of vision.

“Wow.” I hear a man speak to my other side. “That was some trip. I could taste the peach. She was working every one of my five senses.” The man speaking wears a helmet, but I know his voice. It makes me shudder hearing him speak.

I realize the thing covering my head is pushing through my temples, clinging to my brain.

“Nothing but the best.” A woman speaks. She wears a white smock and trousers. Her eyes glow, and when she moves her bald head, there is a faint ticking sound. Her skin is luminous and as smooth as plastic.

“Next time, keep that guy out of my fantasy.” The man removes his helmet, revealing a smudged copy of Padre Pete. His hair is lank and long, not the flowing mane of hair the Padre cultivated. The blue denim jeans are ill-fitting, and his white shirt strains to button up over his beer gut.

The radiant, smooth-faced woman holds a device in front of my face, taking a reading.

“We try, but no matter where we drop him, he finds her again.”

I tune the woman in white out, and the shouting in the background weaves into sentences.

“We’re due respite. You can’t keep dropping us into the VR without giving us time to recover.”

It’s the drone. I should remember more, but I don’t want to remember our other life. We used to be slaves to our addiction. Now we don’t crave the Haze, but we are slaves to the perverse fantasies of the people who rent our imaginations and force us to live out their dreams, our nightmares in a virtual world more real than this.

“See you next time, baby.” The other man calls me baby just like Pete. Although he is not quite Pete.

And I am not quite myself either. Not anymore.

“She’s ready.” The woman pushes a button on her device, although I’m not ready.

I have lived a thousand lives and died a thousand deaths. The weight on my head becomes a humming enclosure. Pain overwhelms me as my scream travels through darkness.

The red suns are radiant, and a breeze from the sea brings a salty taste to the air. Overhead, birds squabble, and the sound of clashing metallic wings fills the sky. In the distance, a man is waiting.

Another interchangeable man who will call me baby. I am supposed to walk toward him. He waits under a cloud of pink confusion as I resist the instruction to go forward.

Dean is here already. Skinny and unkempt, he has made no effort to improve his virtual appearance. His eyes are the color of hyacinths and hope.

No matter where they drop him, he always finds me. That’s his promise, and for what it’s worth, he delivers.

“I only ever called you by your name. Do you remember your name?”

“Indy,” I say. “My name is Indiana. I was named after the last free state.”

“Finally,” he murmurs. He squeezes his eyes shut, and veins pop in his forehead with the strain of bringing his imagination to life. “Boat,” he repeats emphatically.

“Yacht.” I take his hand, bypassing the less than seaworthy rowboat he has conjured. We wade into the pea-green sea, swimming like dolphins toward the yacht anchored beyond the breakers. In the icebox there is a blue bowl filled with pink peaches. They are ripe, ice-cold, and delicious. I know they will be there. Eventually, after the first million fantasies, you discover the cheats in the VR programming that your imagination fuels. We are supposed to use it to enhance the client’s fantasy, but eventually you have nothing left to lose.

Freedom, I think. That’s the definition of freedom, a song my mother used to sing to me so long ago. Just another word for nothing left to lose.

“Shall we sail away for the rest of our lives?” I ask.

“If they can’t stab us with the needle, we can stay here for as long as we stay ahead of them.” Dean’s smile doesn’t quite make it to his eyes. “But they won’t leave us in the hook-up if we’re not earning. We have to go back, or they’ll kill us in the real world.”

Dean need not look so stricken. Anything is better than Padre Pete slobbering in my ear, calling me baby once a week.

The cold, delicious peach tastes too good to be true.

THE END