Freedom Isn't Free

Sarah knew what it meant when she came home from work to find her sister in tears and two men in dark suits standing in their living room. One of the men approached her, badge held out, but she didn’t need to read it to know what it said. Department of Information Integrity. The DII Boys.

           “How could you?” Lizzie cried. “After what Mom and Dad did to us? How could you do this to me?”

           “You didn’t have to turn me in,” Sarah said, but she didn’t have it in her to be angry. Lizzie had always been terribly predictable and her familial loyalty conditional at best. She wasn’t malicious, just incapable of thinking for herself.

           “Of course I did!” Lizzie shouted hysterically. “You brought a banned book into our home! You know the kind of damage that type of disinformation can do to people if it’s allowed to spread.”

           “I love you, Lizzie,” Sarah said sadly as the DII Boys cuffed her hands behind her back and led her out the front door. “I’ll always love you.”

           “I hate you!” Lizzie screamed.

******

           No one except the Underground referred to the detention center where Sarah was taken as a brainwashing camp. In private, the DII Boys and others in the government might have called it a deprogramming and reeducation camp. In public, the camps had fancy names that tried to make them sound better than what they were, but since each camp had a different name in an attempt to hide just how many there were and Sarah wasn’t sure which one she’d been taken to, she couldn’t have said for sure what her particular camp was called. It wasn’t anything like the ones they showed on the nightly news, though. There were no dormitory-style rooms with cheery-yellow walls and wooden bunkbeds, just a large open space with a concrete floor, bare mattresses with thin blankets on the ground against one wall and a few toilets and sinks against the opposite one.

           The space was over-crowded, the mattresses all occupied, but one of the men who looked to be in his early sixties gestured her over to sit beside him and offered her a spare blanket to ward off some of the biting cold in the unheated room. Gingerly, with a quiet murmur of thanks, she accepted and eased herself down. She’d always suspected the camps would be like this, had always known the probability of winding up in one was strong. She faced the reality now with nothing but resignation.

           “So what are you in for?” the man beside her asked wryly. Sarah couldn’t help but laugh.

           “Common criminals now, aren’t we?” she said. “I read a book.”

           “Pretty sure there’s more of us in these camps than there are in prisons these days,” he said. “Which book?”

           “We Used To Be Free,” she said.

           “Oh, that’s a good one,” he said. “Good history of how things got this way, weeds out all the propaganda and just gets straight to the facts. Top of the books the DII Boys hate, of course.”

           “Yep,” Sarah agreed. “I’m Sarah.”

           “Josh,” he said, stretching a hand out from his blanket for her to shake. “So who was it who turned you in? Mom? Dad? Husband? Kid?”

           “Sister,” Sarah said.

        “Yeah, it’s almost always family these days,” Josh said. “They did a great job with all that indoctrination BS, you got to give them that. How mad are you at her, scale of 1 to 10?”

           “Zero,” Sarah said. Josh raised his eyebrows skeptically, but Sarah just smiled gently. “From Lizzie’s point of view, I betrayed her. You have to understand, our parents were part of the Underground. They were arrested when we were still pretty young. I was angry with the people who arrested them, but Lizzie was angry with our parents for abandoning us. She couldn’t understand that the only reason they were part of the Underground at all was because they wanted something better for us.”

           “Ah, she’s one of those, huh?” Josh said, understanding dawning on his face. “Bought into all the crap they fed you kids in school.”

           “Yeah,” Sarah said. “Lizzie was always the sweetest kid you would ever meet. Always had lots of friends, always worried about hurting someone’s feelings. But if you told her the sky was green and grass was blue, she would believe you completely without question. I was the other kind of kid. I questioned everything. Why, how, what, when, where. I asked it all, about everything. Teachers hated me.”

           “Your folks ever show up again after they were arrested?” Josh asked.

           “No,” Sarah said. “You know how it goes. People are taken for ‘deprogramming,’ but since they aren’t actually brainwashed, ‘deprogramming’ doesn’t work and they never come back. I suspect they were quietly executed a long time ago. No real way to know for sure. The media sure isn’t going to report it, and any alternative sources of information were banned for ‘inciting violence’ years ago now. It’s just been me and Lizzie since they were taken.”

           “You weren’t part of the Underground, though,” Josh said. “You could play along, pretend you’ve been deprogrammed, seen the light, go back to your sister, play by the rules from here on out. They do let some of the minor offenders go back so that they have someone to interview and pretend for the public that their programs are working.”

           “I could,” Sarah admitted. “I’ve thought about it. What I’d do when I was caught. I never really thought I’d get away with reading banned materials or holding unapproved opinions forever. But I’m not going to.”

           “Why not?” Josh asked.

           “For Lizzie,” Sarah said. “Maybe I betrayed her. Maybe she betrayed me. Depends how you look at it. But the truth is, she’s my sister and I love her. Every time I look at her, all I can see is the damage that’s been done to her, growing up in the world as it is now. All I can think about is the damage being done to all the other kids growing up in this world. Once upon a time, we used to know that freedom isn’t free. That it requires risk and sacrifice. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that. So if it costs me my relationship with my sister, or my cushy job and apartment, or even my life, that’s a price I’m willing to pay. If we keep cowering in fear, we’ll never be free again.”

           “So if you get out, you’re going to join the Underground?” Josh asked.

           “Yeah,” Sarah said. “Though more likely than not, I’ll die here before I get the chance.”

           “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Josh said. “You probably noticed conditions here aren’t exactly what they like to show on the boob tube. Reason for that is the DII Boys have been bringing in more people than the camps were ever meant to hold. Got a little ahead of themselves making everything a criminal offense. Turns out pretty much everyone is reading, saying, or thinking something that violates their rules. So they had to put all of us overflow folks out here in the stables instead of in the well-secured deprogramming palace they used the initial funding on.”

           “Sounds like half the country will be in here before long,” Sarah said, smiling.

           “Not much of an exaggeration,” Josh said seriously. “Things are going to reach critical mass sooner than they thought. But that’s still a bit down the road. The more immediate effect is that this warehouse they got us all stored in just isn’t very secure. We outnumber the guards here twenty to one, the fences aren’t electrified like they are in the main campus, and the security camera coverage is spotty at best. So if you’re serious about joining the Underground and you don’t mind that you might get shot in the back trying to do it, you just might have your chance when they take us out for our morning brainwashing session.”

           There wasn’t much to think about. Sarah had been thinking about it for years. Weighing the pros and cons, wondering if she could make the sacrifices that would need to be made in the name of securing freedom, not for herself and maybe not even for her sister, but for those who would come after. Maybe she’d betrayed her sister by not giving up and giving in, maybe her sister had betrayed her by believing the lies she’d been raised on. Maybe they’d both been betrayed by all the people who came before them and gave into their fear instead of standing up for what they knew to be right. Sarah wasn’t going to repeat the mistakes of the past.

           “I’m in.”