Red Sky: Chapter 27
I turned my back for only a few seconds and heard a loud smash like the sound of shovel breaking rock. I turned to see Max holding his front teeth.
“What did you do?”
“It’s the teeth. That’s how they blocked the messages. That’s how they track us.”
He smiled a horrific smile. “I’m invisible to them now.”
“God, Max, with the collars, with the airtags, the shakes, the wrist cuffs. You think they need to track us through our teeth?”
“It might be implanted in our brain, too.” Max looked frightened by the sudden realization.
He came up very close. “I could hear Goodwell talking at night in my teeth, that’s how I knew.”
Off in the distance was the clanging and chatter of other teams and here was my partner, my friend, holding his teeth in his hand like a madman.
“What happened to you in there?” I asked in the softest voice I could.
“Where?”
“The box.”
“The box?” Max seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.
“The box,” I said again, more emphatically than the first time. Max stood there for two seconds, three seconds, five seconds. I thought he was thinking the question over. He turned away without answering.
He was down in the dirt on his hands and knees, burying the pieces of his front teeth in the ground.
“Now, they’ll never find them.” He looked up and gave a toothless smile again. “Let’s go find that tunnel to the other mineshaft.”
I had continued to hold on to any positive sign that the Max I knew was still there, that this new Max was only a temporary change, that the blank moments were only moments and not his new state of being. After the teeth, I knew it was irreversible. He had broken in that box and the old Max wasn’t coming back.
*
“Did you two get in a fight?” Dexter noticed Max’s destroyed mouth that night at dinner.
“He got hit with a shovel by accident,” I said unconvincingly.
“That was some accident.”
A commotion on the other side of the cafeteria saved me from the rest of an awkward explanation. The Lion was personally inflicting damage on one of the few remaining newts in his faction. He had stepped up his intimidation campaign. Down in the mine. In the cafeteria. Everywhere. His teams roved in groups ganging up on other teams and stealing their ore.
The near open warfare in the mine wreaked havoc with productivity. For several weeks Goodwell’s reports of mined ore kept declining. The veterans knew he would find a way to make us more productive. It was tempting to think the Lion was the problem and getting rid of him and the Snake would solve everything. But the Lion kept things in order. And Goodwell liked order. Goodwell didn’t want a bunch of rebellious newts any more than the Lion did.
“Why would he think that would convince anybody to stay with them?” Brin wondered as the Lion continued to kick and punch the newt.
“Sometimes fear is a better motivator than kindness,” Com replied.
“I wouldn’t take it like 44 does.”
“Maybe you should go help him.”
Brin didn’t go help.
“I don’t know why they take it,” Brin repeated as the Lion finally stopped beating 44.
“One can get used to anything,” I said. “Look at us.”
“What do you mean?”
I looked up to the guards on the balconies, then to Brin, words formulating in my head. I didn't say those words.
“I don't know,” I said, dismissing my earlier statement.
But I did know. I knew it was easier to pretend we were the perfectly normal ones. Of course, we weren’t normal. We had evolved just as the Lion’s faction had evolved, only in a less brutal way.
The most abnormal of conditions become bland normality if one is exposed to them day after day. From the highest luxuries of royalty to the lowliest humiliations of a beggar, we will adapt to survive. My father was a fervent believer in the military government and fully supported having no democratic responsibilities. He didn’t mind that only those involved with the military or the well-connected could serve in government. He didn’t mind being a different caste. He said it was better this way. He had adjusted to a certain life, even embraced it.
Surviving on the red moon was another one of these adaptations. The inmates survive, some even thrive, under these circumstances. A culture develops, relationships are formed, alliances built, enemies made. At times the day-to-day existence can seem much like it was back on Earth. But it’s a life without any of the freedoms a person on Earth takes for granted. In many ways our lives were constant torture at the hands of Hades and the other guards. But one can even adjust to torture in the fight for survival. And then after months or years you turn to your partner or the inmate next to you and say, “this isn’t so bad.”
I often wonder if that's what the expired populations back on Earth thought as they were progressively quarantined and eliminated from society. At every small step did they become used to the new normal and adjust to it. We never expect extinction. It’s programmed into us. To believe that no matter how badly we’re treated or how explicit the threat, we will somehow survive. The absence of existence is too unfathomable. We always believe that life will carry on, until it doesn’t. A prisoner gladly marches to his execution for the simple reason that, emotionally, he believes it won’t happen, can’t happen, some act of god will intervene to save him. It’s this denial that allows us to survive the most extreme circumstances while overlooking the fact that very few survive the most extreme circumstances. My mother didn’t survive the plague. The inmate in the cell next to me during my trial didn’t survive his death sentence. Half of the inmates wouldn’t survive the red moon.
No, I didn’t want to try explaining any of that to Brin. In many respects he was right not to contemplate such things. He had adapted and by adapting he had a better chance of survival. Maybe that’s all that matters.
I started wondering how I had adapted in the last year and a half when Max abruptly got up from our table and walked with his bowl of paste to the drop-off at the front of the cafeteria. As I watched him, I realized not all adaptations increase the chance of survival. Sometimes, the change in us is a perverse mutation, a drastic alteration that leads straight to death. Max dropped off his bowl and stood there facing the wall, as if he would have kept marching straight ahead if he could, out into the red desert until he died from lack of food or shelter. How was I going to keep him alive for another year and a half? I didn’t know if I could keep him alive for one more week.