Authority

The hurtful innocence of turning 16,

and realising for the first time, that me and authority would never get along. 16, and caring about nothing else than the approving grunts of my peers as I arrived back at our table with four containers of synthetic liquid, accidentally spilling some of it on the stained archaic wooden surface, which made us all laugh a laugh that you can only do when you’re 16 and want to impress your mates that you’re hard and fearless, but secretly insecure and scared, and I grew organic bars to block anyone from coming in, not realising that those bars were meant to stay and keep me locked in for the rest of my life, which seems like eternity when you’re 16.

The solitude of the only unlicensed bar in the city,

NaN, they served anyone, and it embraced us as a natural playing-field for semi-grown children. Our artificially-enhanced cheap muscles concealed our emotional immaturity; ready to release aggression on anyone who threatened to get behind our bars, and impervious to all the fallacies of the world except the one that makes you feel that you’re a grown man when you’re 16.

The lure of the cheaply fermented mind-alteration,

which descended on us too quickly, and the mood swung around our table, and there was numbness and blurriness and loud boasting and silent sickness until it all morphed into nihilistic anger.

The solemnity of the last order,

as we headed for the last train, through the inanimate city. His vomit echoed into the still landscape when it landed on the pavement in the shadow of a nearby advertising board, which flashed up a flickering holograph of hangover pills, and I couldn’t help anger build up against the blatant oppression of privacy by this chromium monster of corporate marketing. Anger, that I was yet unable to utilise but I knew it stirred up something in me, to bring that monster down, something to dedicate my life to.

The desperation of his voice as he screamed,

‘fuck off’, he was always the loudest and most aggressive of us when we played together. He started kicking the giant legs of the holo-projector, which took no offence and obediently endured the unexplained outpouring of teenage anger, and stoically shifted its projection to a caption of a nearby public school, with uniformly dressed bright teeth of adolescent happiness.

The sharpness of the clatter,

when he picked up a brick and threw it at the projecting head. Too immature to take joy in breaking hearts, we were too fast to learn to break things instead. Still laughing as we tried to outrun the solitary surveillance drone, which seemed more concerned about our shenanigans than the brainwashing that was broadcast incessantly by a faceless street-gang of holograms.

The emptiness of the station,

the last train had gone, which reignited his anger and he managed to push over one of the bins, and rats ran in all directions when the synthetic rubbish landed on the floor. The ringing in my ears from the loud bang quickly reverberated through the drunken neurons and reached my consciousness like a rallying call that I had to show them. Loud boasting no longer worked, I jumped on top of a bench, and, from there, on top of the shelter. Stamping and laughter, and frustration when the shelter didn’t even dent, then I slipped and fell, and landed on my feet, like a drunken cat, who hasn’t even consumed his first life, swearing and resorting to boasting again, so profusely that I didn’t notice the incoming drone.

The obtuse sound of my friend’s body hitting the ground,

and his spasm as the drone kept tasering him. My hands were instinctively in the air before I understood what happened, and I knew I had to lie down until the human patrols arrived, face on the pavement, still giggling like three schoolboys because we should have been schoolboys.

The predictability of human patrols,

who were slow and overweight, and they shoved us into the back of their car, but not before they smacked me for saying something I no longer remember. From the back seat, we could hear the two men laugh and snort like pigs and dribble their corrupted saliva as they watched live surveillance of a woman being cornered by two men in a nearby alleyway. They snorted again when one of them smacked me for asking why they bothered with three drunken teenagers when someone was about to get raped, unaware that authority was always going to be like that, less threatened by a rapist than adolescents who rebel without a reason and God knows what they’re capable of when given a good reason.

The taste of copper,

as I licked the blood in the corner of my mouth, which made me want to puke but I didn’t want to be smacked again so I was taking deep breaths to hold it down, watching our car pass through these empty streets of oblivion, still too imbibed to care much about our destination.

The lab-coat on the stinking man,

inside the building that looked like one of the human experiment labs that the government set up to A/B test their way to untethered mind control. The false whiteness of his coat accentuated his cynicism and the darkness of this side of the world that I was yet so unaccustomed to. ‘I hate scum from Z011,’ he said, and he must have repeated it a few times because the line stuck with me for years to come, and his conviction that they needed to burn the whole place down, the place, which raised me, and this man wanted to burn it down, with its history and its future trapped inside to stop breeding scum like us.

The needles of the receptor,

which lacked empathy as they were stabbed into my neck to hook me up with an old diagnostic pad. ‘Oi, this is a smart one,’ the lab-coat grunted when he studied the live reading of my unconscious and I swear I could hear his heartbeat get faster in perverse excitement, his eyes ogling the pad, that stripped me off my privacy, helplessly sharing every detail of my mind with anyone who cared enough to look. ‘Too smart for a slummer, keep an eye on this one,’ he instructed the two officers who later came to escort me to a cell when I was 16 and talented but born in the wrong place.

The forbidding click of the cell door behind me,

my eyes slowly adjusted to the lack of light, and noticed the man, who looked old, although he was probably still in his 20s. I sat down and tried to shrink as much as I could, and hide in my own shadow to avoid his silent gaze, a gaze he must have perfected over the many times he said he had been picked up. He never stopped talking, and it was becoming more menacing, or maybe I was just sobering up, and I shook my head, which started to ache as hangover kicked in, and I sighed, and smiled a bitter smile of realisation that I wished I was back in Z011, the place I had wanted to leave ever since I remembered.

The relief of fresh air,

when they took me to interrogation, ready to sign anything, and I did sign everything. Later, my father read how we conspired against the system, and did things that I didn’t recall doing, and things I didn’t even understand, I couldn’t have been that drunk, but maybe I was, maybe that’s what growing up in Z011 does to you, it makes you learn to forget faster.

The orangeness of the sky,

as the sun decorated the particle-rich air and managed to get a few rays of a hopeful future through the window. I recouped my belongings, and stood in front of the officer who manned the front desk and was much friendlier than the lab coat. The pain in my head only allowed me a blurred vision to rethread the laces of my boot, then walk out without asking for my friends, I somehow didn’t feel like company or the urge to boast about something meaningless, which it dawned on me, we all were.

The look on my father’s face.

He was waiting outside, he always worked hard and always walked the line. There was false anger in his voice but I saw it in his eyes that he knew, that I had just met authority and he prayed that I wasn’t going to grow up trying to fight it, but learn to be malleable, otherwise they snap me on my feet or on my knees. What does it matter, when you’re only 16 and gifted and you already got nothing to lose.