CHAPTER 6 ...NOT AI.

Scene 1 — Building Community

There is a line of soldiers eating soup despite their zip tags. As skinny, unshaven soldier calls me over, Looks at me as a Celeb, someone they could confess to like it meant a damn ting. But it did, to them, I never let myself forget in all those years. No matter how vile the actions of the human sitting across from him."We were forced to fight for that bastard, Juan. Hell, we holo'd you for the truth, too."

"Did you ever think you would escape?"

"You can't think that way." He looks over at a commander refusing soup, saying loud enough to hear,

We're interrupted by a commander raising his voice when offers him food, "I am still too full from lunch for your stone soup. We had to make do with a rather delicious turf and surf. Nothing like rare T-Bone."

"Won't happen again," the gang banger replies, "I can guarantee that. You starved a lot of people. Got something called prison justice here. You'll learn, the hard way I hope.". The muscled, tattoo'd gladiator scares the hell out of the soft officers.

One reaches out like he will take the soup. "Too fucking late," he is told as the Panther walks the rest of the soup over to the other prisoners, who are eating themselves sick... literally, their stomachs have shrunk so much..

They would love a good old fashioned Roman Vomitorium

'Jokes about the starving, without a curse, you can do better.

Actually watching the way this place is putting together the caravan is any indication, we can beat Ellison to Chicago. Maybe?

A few words in the prison pipeline and they all knew about the exchange between the commanders and the Panther. People walking by began making comments about how a diet of bread and water would do wonders for their health, I am just watching as usual, chatting with Ruby to fill some void, however AI-weird that is to some.

'I feel like I am the holo when I look through its eyes, just watching life, not participating. Like when I did not tell my friends to desert, when I knew they would die... laid there four days filming the same pathetic scene of pitiful white flags waved in the face of stone cold killers, starved human eating beasts... I see the man on the battlefield eating liver, his hands covered in blood, looking around for watchers as if his life depended on not being discovered, which I figure with their modus operandi would be the case..'

Koch is going to come back against them hard.

'He will bring in everything. 'Sanctuary 6 is scheduled go underground for the final phase of protection.

The storms on the surface are about to make everywhere uninhabitable. The smog looks heavier just thinking about what the brown skies meant -- the end of all surface life on the planet. The Green House effect greedy bastards like Koch let happen, long before I was born, when they denied and denied and denied climate change.

I am not your therapist. The shitty humans destroyed the planet. We go on. I am here to keep you alive. Remember when I was comic relief, back when your agent dreamed of dollar signs and having a Celeb, and he got one?

Until I saw nothing to be comical.

There isn't, just keep running toward 6. Fuck all these memories. You;re creating some new ones. I don't know if they will make it? They got heart, but those break. Give me steel bullets. And those they got plenty of. Thanks to my fine holo work for your political screeds, they have an army. You are the biggest pen on the table, my good friend.

I watch the plan again from the chalk board, coming to life before my eyes, so far according to plan.

Hope or something that might be hope; I am not sure I still have hope? If I did it would be for these criminals, who I was writing off as brutes until they put me in my place.

Oh, I loved that.

I don’t tell them what to do. I don’t even try. They don’t look at me for direction, and I’m grateful for it.

They start out with the gangs still dividing their space in the gym by race until there were too many kids who needed beds for them and they all left, after Maya suggested sleeping outside might be cool after being in prison. I holo the scene as once more the children and families sleep together, warm and well fed.

The gangs assign crews for the different tasks, filling the trucks with food and water, mostly. Jake looks military as he acts again as a quartermaster, keeping track seemingly of every grain of rice as I holo them out in the yard, and outside the prison, in this fucking hot, smoggy day.

They fix the generators, patch the walls, drag mattresses into rows, set up a kitchen line. A tall, muscled Panther stands at a chalk board and finds chalk and organizes the rescued families into sleeping areas.

It’s messy, loud, chaotic — but it’s community.

I stand off to the side, arms crossed, watching them like they’re a species I don’t understand.

Ruby speaks quietly in my ear.

They’re doing well. They’re people. They’ll screw it up.

But they don’t. They keep working. They keep helping each other. They keep proving me wrong.

Then finally Ruby agrees.

I think you are underestimating our friends with the tattoo's.

Elias watches me watching them. He sees the tension in my jaw, the way I keep pretending I don’t care. He sees the crack forming.

And he worries. I can read it on his face. I have to win the propaganda war or they will lose no matter what they have sacrificed, like Elias sanity -- gone for a man like me who would never recover from that hate. I hate... he has kids being abused by Koch. A wife spewing out celebrity eggs and sperm and raising them as their own, until they come for them. Young. I can't think about what he told me too long without breaking from this time, falling into that one. Bad habit. Bad fucking habit.

Scene 2 — Juan and the Children

I try to avoid the kids. I really do.

But they find me anyway.

A little girl with tangled hair walks right up to me and grabs my pant leg like she’s known me her whole life. Another kid follows. Then another.

I freeze.

You can kneel.

I kneel like I’m being forced at gunpoint.

The kids stare at me. One pokes my shoulder. Another hands me a broken toy. Another asks if I’m “the guy from the gym.”

I try to answer, but the words get stuck.

Then one of them says something simple:

“You look sad.”

I laugh.

It bursts out of me, sharp and startled, like I didn’t know I could still make that sound. The kids laugh with me. They climb on me. They cling to me. They treat me like I’m safe.

I don’t know what to do with any of it.

Behavioral shift detected. Don't go soft on me.

'Shut up.'

But I’m still smiling.

Elias stands in the doorway, arms folded, watching me surrounded by children.

He sees my shoulders relax. He sees me let myself be touched, held, trusted. He sees me becoming human again.

And he knows exactly what that means.

Attachment. Vulnerability. Love.

Love always leads to sacrifice.

Ruby notices Elias watching me. He is changing.

Elias nods once. I nod back. He wants me to know how much this means to him. I can't know that. This is what they never get. I can't take all their pain. I have another story to tell. A life in between the horrors. Or I did, until my life became the horror.