Chocolate 18, Passionfruit 6
Title: Errors, Corrections
Author: lost_spook
Story: Heroes of the Revolution
Flavor(s): Chocolate #18 (confinement); Passionfruit #6 (They also serve who only stand and wait)
Toppings/Extras: None.
Rating: All ages
Word Count: 661
Notes: 1990, Hallam’s government.
Summary: Charles Terrell, undercover for the revolution - compiling lists.
***
Charles found himself staring out of the window of his office more and more these days. He could see the river from it; the river that had witnessed two thousand years and more of this city’s history. Time moved on, governments fell, just as this one would some day. He hoped it would be sooner rather than later, before they’d all dug themselves into a hole so deep the only thing left to do was pull the earth in over them.
It was an effort to force himself back to his current task: compiling and checking lists. It always seemed to be one list or another these days. These were for transfers of extraneous members of society from regional detention centres to work camps where they’d be able to make themselves useful. (Extraneous largely being translated as not-useful, or troublesome, or both: protesters, those found loitering in the streets with no fixed address, the unemployed, sometimes the elderly and the unfit for work, though there were usually different lists for them).
He checked the lists, all the while keeping an eye out for significant names, then signed the documents, stamped them, and left them in the tray for counter-signing. If he found such names, they went on the list of releases.
Next, though, it was the smaller list, but the worst one: transfers from regional centres to the main detention centre. It wasn’t exactly a death warrant, but it wasn’t much of a step up.
Someone had said to him once that if he really had principles, he’d walk out. If enough people like Charles did that, there wouldn’t be a government and Hallam would be finished. They needed more people like the Colonel, like ‘Arran’, who’d been given an order to gun down a group of civilians and who’d refused and was now working with the resistance.
It was a fair point, of course, except that the man didn’t know that Charles had another list to work through, this one in his head, the paper copy burnt shortly after it had come into his possession. These were the names he was looking for, the names he removed from the detention list and put onto the release list. Charles fought for the resistance in the way he’d been asked to, and it didn’t involve guns and bombs. Sometimes he found ‘errors’ in other people’s lists and ‘corrected’ them. It involved a slight risk on his part, but it wasn’t exactly heroic. He’d never pretended it was.
He realised that he was staring out the window yet again, and forced his attention back to the work. Sometimes he felt this office was suffocatingly small, and he wished he could walk out. Then again, sometimes he felt the whole nation had become a prison from which none of them would ever escape.
*
How and when his own name ended up on one of the lists, he didn’t know. Maybe nobody knew, not even Hallam. Charles had received the order halfway through a warm afternoon he’d been longing to see end - a sudden revocation of all his passes and privileges, and then he was marched away to the Detention Centre.
It was a route he’d taken several times before in the course of his work, and at occasionally at night in dreams. The longer he played this double game, the greater his chances of winding up here. It came down to statistics. He couldn’t complain.
Charles wondered what it was that had given him away, or whether it was something else, just another example of Hallam’s increasing paranoia, but as days stretched on without anyone coming to interrogate or condemn him, it seemed possible that he might simply have been forgotten. Left in the cell, he missed his views of the City and the river - a literal cell was worse than a metaphorical one. There were, though, no more lists, no more secret life and death decisions and that was one small liberty.
***
Author: lost_spook
Story: Heroes of the Revolution
Flavor(s): Chocolate #18 (confinement); Passionfruit #6 (They also serve who only stand and wait)
Toppings/Extras: None.
Rating: All ages
Word Count: 661
Notes: 1990, Hallam’s government.
Summary: Charles Terrell, undercover for the revolution - compiling lists.
***
Charles found himself staring out of the window of his office more and more these days. He could see the river from it; the river that had witnessed two thousand years and more of this city’s history. Time moved on, governments fell, just as this one would some day. He hoped it would be sooner rather than later, before they’d all dug themselves into a hole so deep the only thing left to do was pull the earth in over them.
It was an effort to force himself back to his current task: compiling and checking lists. It always seemed to be one list or another these days. These were for transfers of extraneous members of society from regional detention centres to work camps where they’d be able to make themselves useful. (Extraneous largely being translated as not-useful, or troublesome, or both: protesters, those found loitering in the streets with no fixed address, the unemployed, sometimes the elderly and the unfit for work, though there were usually different lists for them).
He checked the lists, all the while keeping an eye out for significant names, then signed the documents, stamped them, and left them in the tray for counter-signing. If he found such names, they went on the list of releases.
Next, though, it was the smaller list, but the worst one: transfers from regional centres to the main detention centre. It wasn’t exactly a death warrant, but it wasn’t much of a step up.
Someone had said to him once that if he really had principles, he’d walk out. If enough people like Charles did that, there wouldn’t be a government and Hallam would be finished. They needed more people like the Colonel, like ‘Arran’, who’d been given an order to gun down a group of civilians and who’d refused and was now working with the resistance.
It was a fair point, of course, except that the man didn’t know that Charles had another list to work through, this one in his head, the paper copy burnt shortly after it had come into his possession. These were the names he was looking for, the names he removed from the detention list and put onto the release list. Charles fought for the resistance in the way he’d been asked to, and it didn’t involve guns and bombs. Sometimes he found ‘errors’ in other people’s lists and ‘corrected’ them. It involved a slight risk on his part, but it wasn’t exactly heroic. He’d never pretended it was.
He realised that he was staring out the window yet again, and forced his attention back to the work. Sometimes he felt this office was suffocatingly small, and he wished he could walk out. Then again, sometimes he felt the whole nation had become a prison from which none of them would ever escape.
*
How and when his own name ended up on one of the lists, he didn’t know. Maybe nobody knew, not even Hallam. Charles had received the order halfway through a warm afternoon he’d been longing to see end - a sudden revocation of all his passes and privileges, and then he was marched away to the Detention Centre.
It was a route he’d taken several times before in the course of his work, and at occasionally at night in dreams. The longer he played this double game, the greater his chances of winding up here. It came down to statistics. He couldn’t complain.
Charles wondered what it was that had given him away, or whether it was something else, just another example of Hallam’s increasing paranoia, but as days stretched on without anyone coming to interrogate or condemn him, it seemed possible that he might simply have been forgotten. Left in the cell, he missed his views of the City and the river - a literal cell was worse than a metaphorical one. There were, though, no more lists, no more secret life and death decisions and that was one small liberty.
***