The Revolution

Chapter 3

Note: Grammar updated 071424

There was something about seeing the burning General Assembly that snapped something inside Jackie Hodgeson. His therapist always said that he was "watching for the other shoe to drop" when things "were going a little too good." The world had somehow become a darker place, the pallet of Gaia becoming more muted and dangerous in the days that followed. The old coping habits became intrusive.
Jackie had always liked a couple of ales before bed, a habit he probably picked up from his mother--a Flux transporter who had tragically died five years ago on a notoriously dangerous bridge in Shapsville which DSI had refused to fix for the longest time. Since the collapse, he drank himself into a stupor every night to get some sleep.
The upward trend of the dosage of the pain meds he took to offset the physical effects of his heavy drinking led to running out of his prescription too early for a refill, and he began looking for other options through the black market.
This increase in his budget was thrown for a spin as two days after the Jasmine explosion, Jackie arrived at work to find all his clearances expired. A video call with the IT Department was how he found out two things, first that his job had been cut as some sort of "cost saving" measure, and the second was that there wasn't a lot of jobs out there for a guy who had next to no real marketable skills. After a month of dwindling savings, he took a job comparable to the analyst job he had for half the pay he was receiving
Jackie wasn't sure of it was the overuse of pain meds, or the increased alcohol intake, or even just the increased anxiety level, but Jackie had began to notice things.
Many of these things he began to see, such as the strange precision and pattern he noticed in the flights of various pack animals he encountered in his various walks about town Jackie could write off as his ability to see patterns many people couldn't. This skill had helped him to some minor success in his vocation, but also kept him at arms length from the humans around him. There were other events he couldn't quite justify with an over imaginative brain.
A couple of days after his new job began, he began to notice a man wearing a red cap walk by his window seat at the Beverage Bar at the same time every day: 0948. He could almost set his watch by the mechanical precision at which Red Cap would walk by the window. The pedestrian never looked inside, never did anything explicitly suspicious, he just walked by the window at the same time, with the same briskness in his step and blankness in his face and then was gone.
The third time Jackie saw Red Cap he looked a little closer. It seemed Red Cap had a bit of a limp, it was enough for Jackie to take note of. Oddly, it seemed the man had the same rhythm to his limp every time he crossed Jackie's view, right in front of the almost seamless spot where the panes of glass of the window split. Upon further inspection, he noticed that it was as if Red Cap just began another cycle of his walking as he passed the new pane of glass.
For some reason he thought of a computer animation class he took when he wanted to be a game designer where he learned about walk cycle animation.
The next day he saw Red Cap he decided to stand up, and walk out the door of the Cafe onto the street, but the man in the red cap was gone.
Strangely he never saw Red Cap again.

Rebecca's train pulled up at the Grandville Depot just as the sun was beginning to set across the eastern horizon of the flat plains which encompassed most of the state of Grandville. Rebecca disembarked her car and lit a SmokeStik, coating her lungs with the abrasive dry leaf smoke. The feeling of dust permitted everything, the air smelled thick with dirt, a smell which elicited a strong nostalgia in Rebecca's chest. She was home.
The one-two punch of the collapse and her father's cancer diagnosis pulled her heart toward the safety and certainty of the farm she grew up on.
It was true that she was running from what she had until the funeral of Councilman Rangler, or more accurately his memorial service as not enough remains were found on site for positive identification, known in her soul was her calling. She couldn't stand looking at the walls of her apartment where she had forgone sleep during deep strategy sessions. She couldn't stand looking at the roads she used to commute to her office multiple times a week. If she couldn't stand those places, then she surely didn't want to be within any distance of her office.
In the days between the explosion and Rangler's memorial, she had tried desperately to find some project to work on, any project, but she lacked the motivation to do anything when she had no idea what her future would entail. It was almost a sick sort of relief when her father called to ask her to help at The Farm, a parcel of land on the Grandville side of the Grandville-Shapsville boarder which had once been a fairly major source of income for the family, but through a series of weather events over the past decade had left only a quarter of the land usable for growing grain.
Being on the border had led to a longstanding stalemate with some DSI Corpo or another which wanted the land for some business deal and had tried several tactics financial, legal, and even occasionally destructive to take the land for themselves. Rebecca's father Michael prided himself on being "independent in the way the founders intended" and refused to budge an inch when dealing with corporate interests on his land.
Rebecca finished her smoke and crushed it under her boot as she saw the dust covered, long bed vehicle her father had miraculously kept running since her child hood mad the turn onto the road in front of the Depot. As he pulled up to where she stood, she noticed what looked to be tears on the weather warn face of her father, Michael James, a sight she hadn't seen since her mother died two years prior.
"Hey, dad." She said as she threw her one suitcase into the bed.
His voice was soft as he said, "Hello, sugar pee."
"You OK?"
"Joel White died today. Y-you know the High Reverend?"
Good, Rebecca thought, that old ghoul is gone. Out loud she said, "Oh no, that's terrible."
Mike had always told people he met about how the High Reverend had done his baptism in his younger years.
"It was them Fires of Heaven terrorists. They found him hanging over his statue in front of his church with one of them manifestos on 'im."
"Are you sure, dad? I mean the man was basically a walking around skeleton. Maybe he tripped and fell." She subdued her urge to laugh.
"Becks, I knew that you cavorting with," he looked physically ill to say the next word, "northern sissies would lead to you having some weird ideas, bit I won't hear no jokes about such a great man after he's been murdered."
"I'm not trying to start a fight. I just got here, we'll have plenty of time. How's the farm?"
"Those Gaiacrats from DSI are trying to get me to sell again. I telled 'em, 'you corpos can take the deed from my cold dead hands.'"
The term Gaiacrat took Rebecca by surprise, it was a term used mostly by a small group of conspiracy theorists who believed that the politicians up north were trying to soften up the populous to extinguish Gaia's fire and introduce impurities into the DNA of the populous to make them more docile and subservient. Certain chapters in the Founders Book had been used as proof of their claims. Where Michael James had heard it was a mystery to Rebecca.
The rest of the ride was spent in silence. Rebecca looked out the window at the miles and miles of flat land with the occasional livestock herd or farm house, and for a while she was a child again, adventuring around the farm, playing with critters at the little lake they had used for irrigation for the crops. For a moment the anger and fear and mourning of the past couple of weeks disappeared into the ether of nostalgia.
The sun was down by the time the pair pulled up to the farm house. Rebecca was astounded at the sheer number of stars in the night sky, far out pacing the number of visible stars in the light pollution of Scarsmon. Gaia was simply more beautiful in the rural areas than the overdeveloped cities, she thought, it's little wonder people worship this. As she entered, she saw the TV was still turned on to the news. Her natural curiosity, and fatigue got the best of her and she sat down on the sofa to watch the news feed.