END OF PRIDE (The Soteria Trilogy Book 1)
END OF PRIDE
BOOK ONE IN THE SOTERIA TRILOGY
L J Duncan
First published is Australia in 2020, by Duncan Press, Nairne, South Australia.
Copyright © 2020 by L J Duncan. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or otherwise, is purely coincidental.
Duncan, L J, author.
End of Pride
Paperback ISBN: 978 0 6488501 1 3
E-Book ISBN: 978 0 6488501 2 0
www.ljduncan.com
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SOTERIA
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If you sign up now, or click the following link, https://dl.bookfunnel.com/nz7ylnfctk you will get a FREE eBook copy of the precursor short story - THREE DAYS WEST, set fifteen years before END OF PRIDE.
Happy reading.
L J Duncan.
This first one is for my wife, Linda. Thanks for the ongoing support. Thanks for the proofreading and the honesty. Above all, thanks for your patience.
Contents
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY-SEVEN
FIFTY-EIGHT
FIFTY-NINE
SIXTY
SIXTY-ONE
SIXTY-TWO
SIXTY-THREE
SIXTY-FOUR
SIXTY-FIVE
SIXTY-SIX
SIXTY-SEVEN
SIXTY-EIGHT
SIXTY-NINE
SEVENTY
SEVENTY-ONE
SEVENTY-TWO
SEVENTY-THREE
SEVENTY-FOUR
SEVENTY-FIVE
SEVENTY-SIX
SEVENTY-SEVEN
SEVENTY-EIGHT
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Union engineers had the artificial sunlight set to mild afternoon warmth.
The conditioned air hovered around twenty-three percent oxygen. Two Union soldiers paced down an illuminated Tier 2 corridor, making their way towards the Block 3 recreational chamber. They had simple instructions. A citizen had failed to attend his Lottery. This was a crime of the highest order, an act of defiant treason. Whether it was an unfortunate case of forgetfulness or a sign of civil disobedience made little difference to the soldiers. Their instruction was simple.
Execution.
As a loyal employee of one of the many sub-plaza medical facilities, the citizen fulfilled his employment requirements with positive review. He was always on time and always dutiful. His faithfulness did not matter. The rules were non-negotiable. Instructions couldn’t be undone.
The taller of the two soldiers, referred to only as Four-Fourteen, stepped silently into the food court. He held an electrically charged taser cannon. Compact, powerful and accurate up to twenty metres, the taser cannon ejected a fatal bolt of compressed electricity. Less than a foot long and half the weight of an assault rifle, it was the weapon of choice for fast and effective firepower.
Four-Fourteen towered well over six feet in height. His Union uniform hugged his muscles like a second skin. The infamous red eagle emblem sewn across his chest was impossible to ignore. He evoked fear amongst the citizens.
The second soldier, Three-Sixteen, held a registration chip reader. Similar in size to the soldier’s fist, the device located registered citizens by scanning the nearby area. It could home in on registration chips within a 100-metre proximity. Three-Sixteen entered the treasonous citizen’s registration number. Within seconds, the device hummed as it locked in on its target. The screen flashed green.
Citizen 234-191 sat alone in a busy dining area. He ate a synthetic mushroom burger, lost in bleak thought. Slim and pale, he had bad skin and sunken eyes. He looked sick, as if he was already at death’s door. That wasn’t surprising. Whether above ground or below it, death’s presence plagued the Empire. Citizen 234-191 wouldn’t see death from the syndrome, though – he would see it at the hands of his oppressor.
With the synchronisation of a well-rehearsed dance routine, the soldiers positioned themselves behind the traitorous citizen. They rested the butts on their shoulders for accuracy and in front of a populated eatery they fired their weapons. The explosive impact sent Citizen 234-191 flying across the room.
Children shrieked.
Onlookers ran for cover.
Citizen 234-191 lay crumpled in an abnormally bent position, lifeless. The sudden impact broke his neck. His skin was charred black. Streams of putrid smoke began to fill the room.
Four-Fourteen and Three-Sixteen re-holstered their weapons and left the food court. They had been tasked with execution. Their job was done. Someone else would clean up the mess.
For those who witnessed the citizen’s heartless execution, it served as a harsh reminder that despite God’s presence, he would not be able help them. Faith and loyalty were superfluous. The Humanist Union was omnipotent.
ONE
Welcome to my nightmare.
Thursday. Block 7’s dosage day. My dosage day. While it was no different to any other Thursday, my thoughts seemed different – skewed, paranoid. Anxiety had reached an all-time high in my melancholic mind and I’d become too fatigued to fight it. I could no longer pretend that everything was all right. It wasn’t. It never would be. It just couldn’t be.
Normal for that stage in the dosage cycle, the synthetically conditioned air irritated the back of my throat and my eyes stung. Both symptoms showed that the previous week’s Fosform Five dose had run its course. Either the air quality in the sub-plaza continued to deteriorate or I was developing immunity to the anti-corrosive drug. Despite a constant battle with hopelessness, I hoped it wasn’t the latter. It’s not as if my mundane and monotonous life filled me with joy but I didn’t want to throw in the towel just yet. Depression was better than a painful death. But only just.
r /> I stood patiently in line. Minutes rolled past and the long queue before me didn’t seem to move. It’s not like I had anywhere else to be. Over the years I’d taught myself to appreciate the time to think, to drift in and out of distant memories and hopeless dreams. It inspired thoughts of freedom and escape that I couldn’t find within my sub-plaza reality. Over time I’d become better at it, zoning out as a means of masking my existence. And what a painful existence it was. My back hurt. My lungs hurt. Even my legs hurt. I could feel a piss coming on and I tried hard to ignore it. Standing in the dosage line always made me need to go. I convinced myself it was just in my head and I didn’t actually need to. I didn’t want to give up my spot in the queue.
The Union recognised the logistical difficulties of getting everyone in a numerical line based on their membership number, so they allowed us to be absent from work for the entire day when our Block had its scheduled dosage. That way, the citizens had no excuse for skipping their dose. Not that any sane citizen would go without the life-giving serum but the Union upheld accountability, sane or otherwise. So, for my fellow Block 7 residents and me, Thursday was our day off for the week, apart from Sunday, which was the Sabbath.
The line crept forward. I took two laboured steps then stopped again. The heft of my Union rubber boots dragged underfoot. I studied the three-dimensional hologram poster on the wall beside me. The Harbour Bridge and the old Opera House prior to the Artificial Revolution. The flawless blue sky and the sun’s artistic reflection on the water looked so beautiful, so calming. Although I stood sixty metres underground and had no immediate desire to see the surface, I ground my teeth knowing it had all gone to shit.
It was approaching the end of Pride, the fourth month of the year. I kept thinking about the monumental milestone I was about to reach. I dreaded it more than anything else in my so-called life. It caused night after night of restlessness. My twenty-second year on this dying planet was coming to an end. Less than two weeks separated me from my milestone birthday.
A man’s twenty-third birthday meant one thing within The Empire of Soteria: his Marriage Lottery. I feared the Marriage Lottery more than being fired or imprisoned or tortured. I dreaded the ultimate power The Union had over the rest of my existence. I struggled with the unknown. I struggled with intimacy. I always had.
I had dreaded my twenty-third birthday since the Lottery’s introduction and now its frightening shadow towered over me, drenching me in unavoidable acceptance. So many nights I’d stayed awake fretting over its senseless domination, afraid of pulling the membership number of a complete and utter stranger. Would I fall in love with her? Would she love me in return? If I didn’t like my soon-to-be wife there was nothing I could do other than grit my teeth and bear it – until death do us part.
Someone once told me that freedom exists in the mind. They told me that people are as free as they allow themselves to be. As a kid, I was naïve enough to believe them. There may have been a time when such idealism was close to the truth. There in that dosage line on the forty-second day of Pride, though, the aforementioned perception was not just overly optimistic, it was absurd.
This is Soteria: the land of safety and salvation.
Freedom did not exist. Humanity did not exist. Humanism and liberalism were just words mumbled among the older Millennial citizens. They had no real meaning in our refined society. The Union governed us helpless citizens in a way that even tenth-century barbarians would’ve called inhumane. In Soteria, under the strict rule of the Humanist Union, following your heart was about as realistic as drinking the river water or swimming at the beach.
Man, I hate the Humanist Union.
For fear of torture, I would never say that aloud, but that hatred grew stronger every day. Ever since they introduced the Marriage Lottery, it didn’t matter if you loved your partner or even shared anything in common with them. If you drew their membership number on your twenty-third birthday you had to share your apartment with, conceive children with, and assign half your annual credit rations to that person until the end of your days. Just thinking about the twisted system made my blood boil and my heart rate increase with nervousness.
In thirteen days from that very Thursday, it would be my turn to draw a number and flip my life upside down. Justified as a rite of passage to becoming a compliant male citizen, the Marriage Lottery represented the step from adolescence to adulthood. Only men took part in the Marriage Lottery and picked the membership number of a registered female citizen between eighteen and thirty-five years of age. All male citizens of the Empire of Soteria took part in the Lottery. If female citizens weren’t chosen before their thirty-fifth birthday, they spent the rest of their years alone.
Choice was a farce.
I would be forced to marry a complete stranger and there was no way out.
Divorce was outlawed. Adultery was outlawed. Homosexuality among registered men had long been a crime punishable by genital removal. Love became a long-lost fairy tale, a myth spoken about in stories and sung about in songs from before the Crusades. If that didn’t indicate the lack of freedom in our refined society, then I clearly didn’t understand the original meaning of the term freedom. If implying that freedom alluded to the ability to take your thoughts elsewhere, to daydream of a better, more hospitable existence, then I suppose that freedom existed in a melodramatic, metaphorical sort of way.
No one was free at all, though. We all served a purpose and if we no longer met the Union’s expectations for that purpose, like all things obsolete, they discarded us and replaced us with another desperate citizen trying to survive.
Welcome to my nightmare.
TWO
It was well into the early hours of the morning.
Sweat dripped from Brie’s dirty brow and the moist soil of the tropics clung to her stained clothing. The waxing moon lay on a bed of thick, poisonous clouds. The overgrown jungle was an ominous and forgotten place, no longer a region fit for humans. Especially not registered sub-plaza citizens.
Panting through her oxygen conditioner, Brie looked up at the towering wall above her, seeing it for the first time. Even through the heavy, black smog, the moonlight reflected off the gigantic concrete mass and illuminated the featureless ground beneath.
The wall itself was enormous. At a rough estimate, Brie thought it must be close to forty metres high and from the whispered rumours of the surface-dwellers she believed it was up to ten metres thick. It astonished her that the huge impenetrable wall surrounded the entire boundary of the Empire.
From the safety of the dense undergrowth, the top of the wall appeared to be free of guards, but replaced instead with a coiled labyrinth of intertwining razor wire. It proved to be a timeless yet effective security measure. Realisation became brutally clear. There didn’t seem to be any simple way of getting over that ominous and impassable barrier. Although most people acknowledged this, it was a truth that Brie refused to accept.
As the birds began to chirp their morning tune, Brie adjusted the portable oxygen conditioner strapped to her face and took a few deep breaths. She continued crawling through the thick rainforest floor bordering the wall. Even after wearing the conditioner for weeks, she found it difficult to breathe through the carbon-fibre mask. She didn’t like it at all. Having spent the previous three years in one of the Eastern Sector’s finest sub-plazas, she not only forgot the foul taste of the outside air; she had never needed to use the mask. Unaccustomed to the mask’s bulky design, the straps dug into the back of her neck and the seal rubbed on her cheeks. Friction burns, combined with the dirt and sweat from the tropical heat had become chafed blisters. The mask smothered her, increasing her agitation towards the oppressive heat. Despite this, she continued through the undergrowth one slow metre at a time. Freedom was so close. She had made it to the wall.
During her early childhood, Brie had battled with claustrophobia. Wearing an oxygen conditioner brought back those dark memories of helplessness and confinement. Given that there were
only six hours of filtration left on her mask, she would soon be forced to discard the horrible thing, anyway. The fact it had lasted this long surprised her. It had been weeks yet her lungs still felt clear. She hadn’t yet adopted a raspy, violent cough and her phlegm showed no signs of blood.
For close to three months Brie had been on the run, stopping for sleep only when she could find suitable shelter. Unfamiliar with the humidity and damp heat of the central tropics, Brie lost a considerable amount of weight through the lack of adequate food and constant sweating. Her exposed skin displayed a patchwork of cuts, grazes, chemical burns and insect bites the size of billiard balls. She was ill prepared for mosquitoes the size of flies and the acidic rain that fell daily. The absence of human influence and the constant hum of silence rattled her nerves. Brie feared that at any moment she might run into a squadron of irate Union soldiers seeking cold-blooded vengeance. As they had been trained to do, they would show her no mercy. Their power haunted her restless sleep. She remained constantly on edge.