Truth City

Chapter 1. In Truth City, no one can ever escape the Truth Machine. The thought had been running through his mind over and over for the last two hours, and when he was not thinking about the Truth Machine, he thought about the Red Book. Just past midnight, the chilly dew of the midnight sky descended over the rooftop, where he sat. Peter Savante has been sitting over the concrete ledge at the edge of the building, his legs dangling precariously, and his heels tapping the side of the building as he looked straight down toward the street, a hundred floors below. Sweat oozed from his palms, and his breath seemed choked in the windpipe. If he were to nudge forward a few inches, he would plunge down to the street below, to his death. Standard housing construction dominated this part of the city. To see the true architectural marvels of the city, the sky-scrapers that defied gravity, that embodied grace and beauty and human ingenuity, one had to go fifty miles west to the center of Truth City, to the seat of power and wealth, where the dreaded City Hall resided. In a few hours when the sun came up, he would have to go there, and he would have to go to answer for his crime. “Do you hate biospliceds?” Peter had said now and then, purposely grunting, making his voice artificial, imitating a machine. Then he mumbled to himself, “No. No. No.” No way to escape, no way that he knew of anyway. The Truth Machine was the law. He has sieved through all his knowledge and found only dead ends, and the harder he tried, the more florid his mind became, so florid and convoluted that for a moment the idea of nudging over the edge and plunging to his death seemed strangely reasonable. But he dismissed the thought. His nature would not allow giving up. What about running away? Disappearing into the wilderness. Behind him, the building and beyond the city wall, vast wilderness stretched in empty darkness. Instinctively he turned to look at it, as though to check and verify its existence, and therefore to know that an alternative solution existed. But light illuminated only a few yards past the city wall, and at best he could only discern the shapes of trees, bushes, and scrubs, and beyond that only two colors draped over everything- the translucent darkness of the sky that was punctuated by the distant lights, and the impenetrable opacity of the vegetation. Only wild animals lived out there. The ambiguous scents of the wilderness floated toward him- a sweet fragrance of flowers that had just blossomed, the pungent chemicals of wild plants, and even putrid odor of decomposing animals' corpses. Somewhere out there, the Outcast Zone waited. No hurry to join the wilderness, he thought. First of all he hadn’t the slightest idea of how to survive by himself, and secondly he would end up there anyway if he were to fail the Truth Machine and the subsequent rehabilitation. He turned back to face the city. The collective power of millions of individual light bulbs, florescent tubes, various screens, headlights, neon lights, street lights, and flood lights that scanned the sky and served to guide sky traffics, imparted to the atmosphere the glow of a small sun. High above the sky, lights from long procession of vehicles blinked like distant stars and crisscrossed the darkness into a twinkling patchwork. Accompanying the glow of the city, an unceasing rumble of hovercopters, trains, automobiles, and unseen machines percolated throughout all the space and even the small crevices where the light couldn't reach. Finally, when all possibilities to escape the Truth Machine had been exhausted, catchy phrases from the Red Book began to intrude into his thoughts: Hereditary Oligarchical Neo-Capitalism, Illusion of Freedom, Controlled Evolution. The Red Book had more than instigated in him a sense of rebellion- after all that was its stated purpose- it had helped him accept his place in the world, and confirmed his suspicion that something was not quite right with the world- the perfect world that the Truth Machine had created. When he first read it, his mind couldn't quite comprehend the words, which spoke of indescribable human folly and machination, the stuff of evil. “Do you hate biospliceds? That’ll be the question, all right. That’ll be the question it will ask me,” he muttered absent-mindedly, then after a moment of silence he relented, “Yes.” At last, Peter, like all citizens of the world, resigned his fate the Truth Machine just as he had done all his life, as far back as he could remember. At five years old, he had been thrown into the dim chamber of Truth Machine, and the door squeezed shut, and the artificial voice from rickety loud speaker crackled the question: 'Did you steal the cookies?' And afterward the thrashing from his mother- no, it was not right, she was not his mother, only the woman who took care of him- she had intended to thrash the stubbornness out of him. The dank chamber of the old Truth Machine welcomed him when he scored a perfect score in his high school entrance exam and had to prove that he did not cheat. Even when he did not have to go inside its chamber, its presence hovered above him; he remembered the time in ninth grade when Lisa Fontenat said she would kiss him only if he could prove that he loved her. Of course he did not, and the dream of touching and kissing her remained only a dream so long as the Truth Machine remained an easy way to prove anything- even love. Then during college, the Truth Machine had been there for all occasions, all exams. As he graduated and got a job, it followed him unceasingly, and the artificial voice from the loud speaker inside the Truth Machine would mark out the stages of his life: Did you cheat? Did you fabricate the data? Through the thirty seven years of his life, the Truth Machine has been there to goad him on a straight path, to guide him through his career, to enable him to attain great achievements- a genetic engineer with a triple nine rating. And now the Truth Machine inevitably would take away everything.