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“Dyad is the pounding heart of the future. While our rotting world churned out disease and destruction, we thrived and created a future for Protos and Derivatives alike,” Rachel says, her wide eyes gleaming from behind a screen. “You are safe in our hands.”
Sarah stalks past the lit facades of houses, glancing in the windows to see Rachel’s perfect face in every television, and dips into a darkened alleyway that leads to the plaza like a clotted vein to its heart; cluttered with relics of the old world and burned couches, it makes the perfect getaway.
Felix lives on the fringe of the city in a sector designed for celebrity Protos, and is surrounded by peers he likes to call ‘a compost pile of rotting talent.’
He is commissioned by Dyad to paint the propaganda broadcasted on the morning and evening reports. Everyone knows of Felix Dawkins, but despite his success, he wears a mask of sardonic cynicism, as if he were living in a comedy sketch that has yet to drop the punchline.
This morning while at work, she found him waiting for her. His assistant, Collin, had just left for more paint and left them alone in the room. He gave her his usual twisted smirk and said, 'We should get to know each other better, yeah? Come over later. We'll have a regular piss up.'
A stubborn man, he spends his day weaving from the damned lower-class vernacular of the clones. She never could understand why he bothered to lower himself to that level, but she wasn't one to question.
Either way, she interpreted his invitation as chance to get a clean bed and a hot meal for the small price of a quiet romp between the sheets; she felt incredibly lucky this morning, and would have continued feeling so if she weren't stalking the backstreets of the city an hour after curfew. Now she's beginning to feel like a wobbling lamb prepared for sacrifice.
The majority of the "derivative" population lives in the heart of the city, packed on top of each other in dilapidated apartments; the narrow breathing space between each complex is suffocated by the crisscrossing clothing lines that hang clothes like corpses on their wire. They live like sardines in their tin rooms, breathing in the cough of a neighboring clone. Although, there have been cases of "Protos" falling deep in poverty's slime and of clones climbing out.
Clones such as Rachel.
So maintains the paradox of their existence: past experience has labelled them as criminals, or degenerates, but onscreen smiles the face of the future.
Rachel Duncan is the beautiful example of a new, progressive world. Worthy of jealousy, she shines onscreen with images of brighter and greater technology. Meanwhile, clones squallor in filth, spreading their disease and cancer to the masses. They are drones to the queen bee, and therefore worthy of the public's single bone-crushing boot.
Sarah worms through each corridor, careful to avoid the pieces of cobblestone that jut out like crooked teeth.
When she enters the plaza, she meets the telegenic smile of her copy on the central television.
Rachel appears to survey the dark streets with a vague and cutting gaze before curling her lips into a faint smile to murmur, with genuine reverence, "You are safe in our hands."
These clips are regimented to the public for daily viewership. Every morning at midnight Rachel appears onscreen with a new outfit, a fresh smile, and a different quote for the day. When curfew ends, all working-class citizens are required to enter the plaza and watch the clip in full, which lasts around a minute, before continuing to work.
It will play on repeat until midnight of the next day and is broken only by the morning and evening reports of current events. Despite this constant repetition, it never seems to get old.
Each iteration feels freshly cut and pressed as if she were sitting in front of you with the energy of the morning, telling you the most urgent news. In the safety of his studio, Felix likes pointing out the moment of lag that occurs while Rachel’s ending smile transitions to her beginning frown, but the loop looks seamless to Sarah. You are safe in our hands.
Even she cannot deny the warmth emanating from those worn-and-wearied words.
You are safe in our hands.
Who knows what she'll say tomorrow, but today she promises protection.
"Hey missy," a man calls from behind her. "Are you lost?"
"Want some help?" Another voice sounds from the blackness before her. The third man joins the block of darkness with a smug laugh.
"Did your pretty little head forget the curfew?"
Interlaced in their cordial voices is the steel chord of contempt characteristic of a monitor.
"Shit," she whispers, and balks as one of them snickers. The three stocky shadows surround her, smiling as she stares.
"Is that what you say to people who offer help?"
"Maybe the bitch doesn't want help."
"You're right,” the man says, and makes a low whistle. “Does doggy want a bone?"
"Fuck off," she spits.
"She's a rough bitch, isn't she?"
One of them laughs, a short burst of sound, and procures a bludgeon from his jacket pocket.
"Aren't they all?"
Sarah searches for an escape route with quick, frightened glances, but finds only shadow. She crouches onto the ground, making herself small, and searches shakily for the canister of mace hidden in her boot.
She grasps it for a moment before fumbling with the cap and losing it to the surrounding darkness. Before the men have a chance to find it, she springs from her crouch and lunges unsteadily into the darkness. Her pounding feet bring her pummeling into the entrance of a corridor before catching on the jagged cobblestone floor.
When she gets to her knees, she feels layers of her rubbery flesh stick to the gnarled-tooth stone. Then her eyes find the end of the corridor: a brick wall and an overflowing trash can.
There's no escape; she's trapped like a mouse in a maze, cornered on all sides by contraptions of death.
A terrified sob rips from her throat as the excited shouts of her pursuers grow louder.
Bile succeeds the scream with its acidic touch while her mind races through the prognosis of their intentions.
Curling into a tight ball, she tucks her head under her arms, and anticipates the moment that would deliver the first of many blows.
The men bound toward the entrance like hunting dogs, noses keen on the scent of fear, but stop short of her curled body by a few feet.
She can hear them panting, their tongues lolling, but they don't come any closer. After a moment of eerie stillness, she peeks out from under her arms and finds a fourth figure standing before the men; the strange and foreign shadow of a woman.
Everything but the blonde coils that unspool from her head like strands of metal wire is covered by a forest-green parka. Her gloved hands cross behind her back, brandishing an axe.
One of the monitors takes a flashlight from his back pocket, flips it on with a click so that a beam of yellow light pierces the blackness. When he directs the beam to the shadow’s face, he nearly drops the flashlight, and the other men swear.
Beneath that head of lightning-bolt hair lay a face not of flesh, but of plastic.
Its features, although contorted, clearly imitate the face of Rachel Duncan: a dead smile lay fixed on its colorless lips and twist the once-demure expression into something manic; the black slits of her eyes stare blankly in the men’s direction, turning their insides ice cold.
“What the fuck are you?”
The shadow says nothing, but a faint click resounds in the space between them and is followed quickly by a familiar voice oozing into the air like a thick fog.
“I am the face of the future.”
Sarah’s innards turn to sleet when she recognizes the line, but she doesn’t make a sound. The men haven’t looked at her once since the shadow’s arrival, and she’s been eyeing the corners of the corridor for the best route of escape.
Even so, the line was snipped from one of the first-aired morning reports, ‘My name is Rachel Duncan, and I am the face of the future.’
Whatever this woman is about to do, she’s been planning it for a long time. The voice continues on with an even more familiar tone, “Dyad is the pounding heart of...our rotting world.”
“Alright I’m done with this bitch,” says one of the men as he bends down to pull a gun from the strap of his ankle.
The singular click of a magazine in the butt of his gun is immediately overshadowed by the whine of metal on air, and succeeded by a wet thump. A low, animal scream comes from one of the men as his friend crumples to the floor in two thuds; his head, followed by the heavier body.
Sarah’s heart constricts with new-found terror and sends her surging into flight once again.
Windows close and shutters fall as the men's jaybird screeches fill the air; it's odd knowing that, had the shadow not intervened, her own gutteral dying sounds would have been similarly received.
Either nobody wants to get involved or they simply don't care enough to know.
The rhythmic sound of the axe cuts through each scream with mechanic precision and leaves an aching silence behind. Except in her head, where their screams are tangible strings that weave into discord within her skull.
She climbs on top of a trash can, jumps onto the lowest window of an apartment, and begins scaling the building.
Her feet dangle in the air and occasionally tangle with the clothing lines as she swings for purchase with each cobblestone brick. She feels like crying when she reaches the roof and, heaving a sigh, rolls over the barrier to hide between it and an air vent.
The empty night sky stares down at her as she lay sweating and twisted on the floor. 'Coward,'' it seems to say, 'You'll die a coward.'
While she waits for her heart to slow its rocking painful pulse, she watches a column of smoke billow from the chimney of a house a block away.
When Dyad came to power they disabled the less-efficient electric energy and replaced it with green technology, but most protos couldn't afford the switch; in winter, the coal-black smoke that accompanied the briskest nights became red flags indicating poverty in the community.
It was shameful to have smoke because it likened them to the apartment-bound clones, who had neither green energy nor chimneys and were forced to burn their belongings in the alleyways between complexes.
A distant cadence pricks up her ears and forces her breath high up in her chest. Already her mind is coming up with escape routes, but only two options come to mind: jumping several stories to avoid the axe, or getting hacked to pieces after trapping herself in the stairway. When she peeks around the air vent, she sees the round toes of those combat boots facing her and closes her eyes.
“You’re going to kill me,” She says, more out of the desire to speak than hope for denial; to speak is to prove that she’s alive and conscious, and not just some simple flame extinguished by the wind. Even if she is the only one who cares to understand her final words, she can die knowing that they existed—if only for a moment.
“No,” replies the woman. Sarah twists into a sitting position with her legs folded beneath her and stares at the masked figure with wide eyes.
Her heart pounds loud in her ears, too hopeful for her own good. The mask's maniacal grin creates fixed ripples in its round, dark cheeks. The axe has disappeared from her gloved hands.
“You can speak?”
“I can speak,” she murmurs, repeating the words almost affectionately. "May I ask where you were going tonight?"
Her voice is peculiar, so unlike the voice she played in the alleyway, as if each word was mangled before falling off the edge of her tongue; yet the syntax of her speech is drenched in manners.
"A friend's house," she says, still unsure of the shadow's intentions.
"But you won't be walking to their house tonight, yes?"
Sarah says nothing, feeling her heart skip into nervous palpitations.
The woman shifts awkwardly and continues after a beat of silence, "Would you...like to join me?"
Sarah eyes the stairway one more time, but her muscles have slackened with exhaustion. It would take her longer to reach the stairs than before.
"Where?"
"To the ledge!" She says, gesturing behind her with sudden excitement. "I want to show you something."
Sarah's eyes bulge in her skull as the image of being pushing over the ledge by the gleefully gleaming mask worms through her mind. She backs up against the wall and seals her lips.
At that, the woman cocks her head in confusion; her curls form an aurole around the gray mask.Then, suddenly, she makes a low sound at the back of her throat fitting of the mask's maniacal grin.
"I won't hurt you," she says, holding out a gloved hand.
Sarah stands up obediantly and walks near the woman, but not directly in front, and peers over the ledge.
It looks over the plaza, illuminated by the central television. Rachel sits at her desk, hands crossed, and smiles gently as she continues her speech, 'Dyad is the pounding heart...,'
"Of the future," the woman finishes, sagging her shoulders. Sarah side-eyes the woman and surveys her dipped head, their aligned shoulders, and equally small chests.
"Why do you wear a mask of Rachel? I can bet you look identical to her underneath it."
"No, I don't," she mutters sharply, "And neither do you."
Sarah scoffs and looks back at the screen as Rachel cuts in with her subtle and reserved accent, 'For Protos and Derivatives alike.'
"Well, that's what we're supposed to look like," she says, eyeing the glamorous curve of Rachel's hair.
She had once tried maintaining her hair like that and almost ran herself into the ground with the cost of hair products and stylists.
"Yes. Hence the mask," the woman murmurs; the black slits of her eyes burn into the television screen.
"But why is it so ugly?"
Her question is interrupted by a another click, and then met with silence.
"May I ask your name?" The woman asks, changing the subject entirely.
"Sarah. What's yours?"
At that moment the screen flickers and draws black, cutting Rachel off midway through her speech.
Sarah rocks forward and leans on the cement barrier, squinting at the blank screen.
The woman doesn't move, but her hands clench at her side and crack the leather of her gloves.
A new clip flashes onscreen after a moment, but not the anticipated one. This is not the clip set up for the next day; this one is entirely different. The camera peers at Rachel through granulated lens, not at all like the soft glow of a studio.
She appears to be sitting in her bathroom in front of a large concave mirror. Her three reflections stare back at her with drooping eyelids and vague eyes.
She runs two fingers down the side of her cheek, and then over her lips. Her eyes examine the three versions of herself with almost intimate care.
"This is the face of the future speaking," she says with her finger flush against her lip, feeling the words as they form.
Then she makes a high-pitched sound and smiles at one of her reflections. Her lips stretch wide across her face and create a cavernous split between the upper and lower hemispheres of her face. Deep, dark lines carve in her cheeks as she rocks gently in her seat. She giggles in the company of herself.
The last image we see is a flash of the masked woman standing before a white screen. Her mask perfectly replicates the last image of Rachel; the face of the future, a grinning maniac.
"The future has expired; she went mad on the recycled words Dyad feeds us. It's time for us to claim a future of our own. Tune in tomorrow to hear something new."
When the screen turns black, a whif of sulfur wafts in the air, and then the screen explodes into a thousand fragments of broken glass.