Wake Up Saga: Whispered Deception

Wake Up: Chapter 1 - Two Word Salute

The world was silent. It had been that way long before the gender wars. But at least back then, the government had been favorable to those who towed the line and aligned those with wealth and favorability to reward those who asked no questions, who held no spark of an original thought in their heads.

They rewarded that back then, but now they had control. Now they could kill a man's family in the blink of an eye and call it penance for their sins, to make them atone for their audacity to dare question the ones that gave them the life they should be grateful to have.

When that didn't work, they wrote into law how many words you could use to express your opinions. No matter what side of the political scale you hailed from, you knew they were in control because they told you they were. It didn't matter if you were gay, straight, or asexual. To the government, they suppressed the very communication of the people, aiming to stop unity and prevent uprisings.

Then, it all got scary.

Andy's eyes shot open with a start, the piercing intensity of his deep blue eyes dilating with fear. His breath came in short, ragged gasps, struggling to remain quiet to avoid triggering the speech inhibitor fitted within him. Each erratic breath posed a risk of being misinterpreted by the device, potentially logging it as a word and causing confusion in the nodal system.

And he knew he only had a limited number of words allotted for the day, and once spoken, they could not be retrieved until the system reset the following day. The weight of this limitation added an extra layer of tension to the already fearful situation he found himself in.

Yet, he was at peace with whatever happened today.

He lifted his hand up to his head, eyes moving up toward the ceiling of his sparsely decorated cell, each prison holding nothing but a toilet, sink, and bed, all painted white.

The chains around his waist clinked, reminding Andy of the Green Mile Walk he would be taking soon. It would happen in the evening; that's all his guards told him.

It wasn't so bad this sentence; it certainly didn't rattle him, because his execution meant an end to the hellish nightmare he had been born into thirty-three years ago.

A time he remembers vividly; a place he could close his eyes and think back to when everything felt normal; where normalcy was hearing children laugh, seeing them run about the playground, parents talking and exchanging recipes with other parents. Their children played together without prejudice, the parents ending up best friends in many cases, and their kids even closer.

Then the technology advanced. It killed the connection humans had with one another, then slowly the news moved in to capitalize on people's fear, controlled their minds, and tricked them. It was a nationwide psychosis, a change that destroyed fifteen plus years of friendships and tore families apart.

Then the government stepped in to handle everything. They were going to fix it and bring peace to those with different thoughts and different views, like a parent breastfeeding their child; it was disguised as nurturing, a way for children to run to mommy and daddy government instead of their own parents.

Many parents were turned in by their children and executed for their acts of so-called treason, and many children grew up in facilities that housed reprogramming and higher learning education.

It was through there that Andy was one of the experimental candidates to try out their new device, properly co-named S.I.L.E.N.C.E.

It stood for Speech Inhibitor and Limited Enforcement Nodal Control Equipment.

It had gone through different upgrades, unlike what poor Andy went through when it was in its primal phase.

A small electronic device was implanted in the person's brain. The small chip intercepted signals from Andy's brain, effectively blocking them from reaching his voice box. Despite his strong-willed defiance to speak after exceeding his daily word count, the activated inhibitor prevented any further commands from being sent by his brain. With the signal blocked off and none being transmitted to his vocal cords, words could not form.