PROLOGUE

“Look into the camera and state your name.”

“My name is Emerson Barnes,” I announce, but there is no wind in my sails. There is no joy for anyone who sits where I currently am.

“State for the record why you are here.”

Silence.

“Please look at the camera, Mr. Barnes.”

I mumble something.

“You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear you if you don’t speak up.”

I see my reflection in the camera lens. My drab uniform with a barcode on the chest.

“Is this going to hurt?” I ask.

“You don’t know? I would have thought you knew the procedure.”

I eyeball the man next to the camera holding a clipboard. He is neatly attired in his white lab coat and performing his role impeccably. Can’t blame him for doing what he’s doing. He’s just following orders, stepping through the procedure like he would have done a thousand times before.

“The gorilla lives in the rainforest with a chameleon, yet the gorilla doesn’t know how the chameleon changes color.”

I can tell he isn’t impressed with my response, and eventually, he taps the camera.

“Just keep looking up here.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Just keep looking at the camera.”

And so I do. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to stop asking so many damn questions.”

There is no point in fighting it. My future was planned a long time ago, before I was born. Everything else was just a series of seemingly random events getting me to the end point. All that matters is my son is safe. But I’m not about to tell them that. I try to remember every little detail about him before it’s too late, before the image is washed away in a storm of propaganda overlay with startling overtures. I know my wife is in a different room here—somewhere—probably thinking the same thing. I wonder how long it will be before we turn on each other, before we drop the other person in the shit to save ourselves. Love doesn’t survive here. Nothing does. There is no way out, so why bother fighting it?

“Why don’t you tell us what happened? For the record.”

“It’s a long story. Where do you want me to begin?”

“Wherever you like.”

“It starts a long time ago.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Before me,” I continue. “Before you. Before all this.”

I stare into the camera and take a deep breath. I rub my hands together and cast my mind back—allow myself to be taken back—to the start of what I can remember.

It was a new brand of politics that shook the country to the core. No one had seen, let alone experienced, such unanimous alignment towards a specific platform. Mainstream parties united as one, folding in factions along the political spectrum. There was no longer an us or a them, more of a we against a common enemy. Or so they said. There was no head, there was no tale. There was equality at the decision-making tables, if one was lucky to make it to that table.

Overnight, before the news outlets knew what was happening, reform took place. They funneled family support payments into a new program, one aimed at longevity and sustainability. “Securing a future,” they spouted over the news channels. There were, as in every country, deeply rooted challenges that needed to be addressed. They had allocated time, money, and resources for decades to solve the problem, and yet the issue grew instead of shrinking.

When the Child First laws were first introduced, there was a contradictory response of overwhelming peace knowing that they would save future generations from cycles of poverty, and at the same time, people took to the streets to protest the atrocity. On one side were the people that believed the laws would allow the human race to grow and prosper. Childhood literacy would increase a thousand-fold, and poverty and child abuse would diminish into nothing. Communities would thrive. Economies would soar.

While on the other side of the street, people rallied, marched, voiced their protest at the highest office possible. They took to social media, outlined their concerns on every channel that would listen to them. It made no difference. The logical argument was sound, the social benefits even more so. Sure, there would be short-term pain, however, the long-term gain would benefit the greater good.
Members across the political landscape answered the same questions from the same reporters.

“Why not increase the benefit amount to pull families out of poverty?” A journalist would ask amid a swarm of camera flashes.

“Look where that has gotten us,” the official would bluntly respond. “Great amounts of poverty, neglect, abuse, not to mention astronomical debt levels, for parents, and the country as a whole. Parents and guardians take the money and spend it on cigarettes and alcohol and entertainment. There must be a new way of doing things, a new solution. A way for parents to take accountability for their actions. And the Child First laws are the answer to this plague.”

A scripted response to which there was no comeback.

The government arrested the uprisers, ordered them to be sent to Re-education centers to help them understand what the government was trying to achieve. They were told about the bigger picture, the end game. Then they would return to the community with all the stigma of a common criminal. And so, in what seemed like a blink of an eye, it achieved a sense of normalcy, where people couldn’t even think about the way it used to be done. It was the new benchmark, the way of life. Embedded in DNA. A part of us. That’s when the walls went up. It was like it happened over night, and before anyone knew it, we were shut off. We weren’t keeping people locked in, we were keeping out those who tried to disrupt our way of life. Or so they said.

It all happened before my lifetime, yet people speak about it like it happened a year ago.

As the years rolled on, murmurs rose of a way to live outside the boundaries and constraints of the government. The rules weren’t new, known amonge every single adult living in the metropolis. There was a common understanding of how and why the Government created and enforced their protocols. Yet people continued to defy them, they continued to seek freedom. Father included.

His face conjures vague recollection; lanky arms that could wrap around me twice, a smile that brought warmth, and doting eyes that befell Mother. She always appears in my thoughts as well dressed, standoffish, and pregnant. Some of my memories have frayed edges, recollections lost to time or education.

But while some memories are cloudy balls of nothingness, I remember clearly the exact moment we became Runners. The house had grown cold and quiet in those last days. The music had stopped, and with it, the dancing. The television shows soon followed, Father choosing to let the bulky black screen watch us from the corner of the lounge room, repelling anything else it might offer. Until the appliance itself disappeared. And so, we went about our time together in silence, where any sound, no matter how small, reached the magnitude of an earthquake. And then the ground opened up and swallowed us whole.

My name is Emerson Barnes.

But it wasn’t always.

When I was growing up, my parents called me Boy.