Delusional Read online

  Lunch was then followed by another three hours of boring lectures, or as Jacob and Adrian call it, intellectual training. Intellectual training mainly consisted of Ethan and I learning how we were supposed to behave in certain situations, being the default figure heads of the White Knights.

  The White Knight’s motto was slowly singed into our brains, until it became impossible to act without it looming in the back of our heads: one darkness, one light, one truth.

  Sometimes I would wake up from a nightmare, breathing heavily under the comfort of my sheets, with the motto chanting in my head. The darkness was anything and everything they deemed to be against the human pursuit of happiness and wealth, and the light was anything that was working to stop the evil from hindering what would be a perfect system. And the truth—the truth was whatever they deemed the darkness and light to be in the real world.

  Ugh. I sighed, my head hurting from having so much bullshit thrown at it. In the sea of information that inundated my mind it was impossible to disseminate the truths from the lies, if there were even any truths at all.

  I knew what things were, but I didn’t know how they felt. I knew how the world worked, but I didn’t know why, and from the sounds of it no one did. I knew I was an 18-year-old female named Natalie Parker, but I didn’t know who that girl really was. And filling the void of empty space was an irrepressible urge to get all those feelings back—to get all my memories back.

  “But how do we get our memories back?” I would ask Adrian or Jacob every day, for one of the seemingly dozens of times.

  “Natalie,” Jacob would turn towards me with a warm, almost sympathetic look in his eyes, but his face would take on a firm stature. I could see his body holding back all the emotions in his tense muscles. “As much as we would like to try and retrieve your memories from inside Area 51, it’s just too risky. We aren’t in a position where we can take valuable resources towards hacking into the mainframe of a computer that could potentially cause the government to bomb us.”

  “Why would they care if you were trying to get the memories back of just two people?”

  “I said no.” His tone was now more arrogant than firm. “There’s things you don’t understand. There’s things you don’t need to know.”

  I rubbed my hands against my temples, trying to alleviate my mind of the numbing pain that was throbbing in my head. The days started to bleed together into an awful colored mixture. Red filled my eyes every morning and every night as the news feeds came in of people being shot and blown up mercilessly by the dozens, sometimes even thousands. However, the American people cranked on, never failing to spur up a protest or riot every night. Eventually people had even begun to create their own militias to attack military personnel, and government buildings. Meanwhile, the White Knights worked non-stop to hack into the infrastructure in the enclaves for the ultra-rich, pro-government sections of the population and stir up support from the people to enact a guerilla warfare against the government in which an ultra-democracy of thousands of federations would be consolidated under one collective government of deputies that would regulate peace and well-being throughout the world and promote science as the only way to protect against the perils of human nature.

  And to begin the consolidation of the new American regime and overthrow the power of President Ash, I was supposed to be an example for others in starting a new era in human existence, in which the ultimate freedom of impeccable health and immortality is achieved for all. In fact, I was supposed to be interviewed in a broadcast that would air all over the world to explain not only how I shut down the mind control program, which is a largely dramatized version scripted by Jacob himself, but the plan of the White Knights to decentralize control of the nanobots and allow each individual to customize how they want their mind and bodies to function.

  It was a lofty plan that would require the dismemberment of multiple government systems and thus the upheaval of the government itself, which would have to happen in a matter of months before President Ash found a way around the safeguard of the blue pill and created a new way to gain freedom. Then, the entire country would be his to rule as his personal dominion indefinitely. However, the White Knights had been prepared for the Retributioners to shut the mind control program down for about a year and had stored up hundreds of millions of manufactured Raxodone pills, or commonly known as the blue pill by everyone who had no idea what it was, and within twenty-four hours of the program shutting down, both the Retributioners and White Knights had worked together to distribute the pill to almost all of the American population. Now, the race was to see who would gain control or destroy the very system that teared the country apart, and all sides were working feverishly to attest to their own truth.

  The sharp clicking noise that the loading of a gun makes echoed through my head as I sat down for breakfast inside the main room. Guns blared in rapid succession as a convoy of about ten people ambushed a federal building in Knoxville, Tennessee. That same deafening roar of hundreds of bullets being unleashed followed me throughout the day; in my morning training, in the afternoon when they showed us videos, and at night when the same newscasts of horrific images played.

  I have to try and lead these people. I could feel a surge of adrenaline course through me as I glanced at my ICL that Jacob had given me. 12 more days until the interview. I picked up a strawberry, and the hairs on my arms raised just thinking about it.What am I going to do?

  The thought coerced shivers to spiral down my spine, and I instantly felt myself in need of warmth. I found it easier to have my conscious mind slip into fantasies of my past that now had a foundation buried underneath the colorless sludge in my mind. Dulce had managed to tell Ethan and I what she knew about our pasts just a day after refusing to do so. She said that at first she didn’t want us knowing about a life that we could never get back. Then, she finally relented.

  Although there was no way to tell if she was telling the truth and as she continued to share more and more about the life I used to live I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to believe her or not. Apparently, I was born in Las Vegas and I lived there for a couple years before my grandpa suddenly committed suicide and my scientist dad disappeared, and as a result my mom in a frenzy moved my brother and I to Arizona. That’s where I met Hunter, who I was allegedly particularly close with, and Ethan. Hunter, similarly to me, had his dad mysteriously disappear after writing an article condemning the regime of President Ash, and Hunter and his mom had to find a way to make enough money to survive while adjusting to life without him. Ethan on the other hand, had three younger siblings, and his dad worked at Auto-bots, a robot manufacture in Phoenix, while his mom ran her own business online from home.

  We had all managed to survive the initial threat, although our families were taken away by the government agents during what had been dubbed the Great Purge and had managed to make our way to Camp Camel, just as Dulce and her older brother Carlos had. While at Camp Camel, Carlos was captured by government agents along with dozens of others, and eventually John, the leader of the camp, was disposed from power and although she didn’t explain much, somehow Ethan ended up stealing a car and leaving without Dulce during the attack of the government. After that we were separated, and Dulce didn’t know if we were dead or alive until the day the mind control program was shut down and all the dark secrets of the country came pouring forth for everyone to see.

  The secrets of my life, however, were still locked away inside some computer one-thousand feet underground. So instead of ruminating on all the uncertainties, I tried to block it all out by submerging myself in the moment.

  Instinctively almost, I began to scan the room for Colton. He was the only one that I could be free with; he was the only one that could understand me. He was the only one that made me feel like I had a bit of happiness and a bit of my past with me when I felt his body intertwined with mine.

  On an almost a daily basis we would go on long walks amidst the dream-like fog and bright colored flowers
. We would stare up at the clouds watching the sunset for hours, as he would tell me about the joys of life, about the simple things lost in time. He would tell me about love, about failure, and most of all about family. He would, with a tight arm around me, assure me that it was all going to be okay. That we had each other.

  “Natalie,” Colton put a warm hand on my shoulder as he looked around, almost answering my subconscious calls for him. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere. “C’mon outside.” He whispered. There was a serious, almost grave look in his eyes that instantly caused a wave of anxiety to flare up inside me. “I have something to tell you. All of you.”

  I looked up at him with startled, wide eyes. What could he possibly have to tell us?

  I mindlessly followed him outside into the cool, crisp air to our usual table that was blanketed in the rays of sunlight. Ethan, Antonio, and Dulce were in the middle of a raucous laughter, a truly rare sight, but I could hear their chuckles abruptly come to a pause as Colton glared at them with an almost perilous look in his eyes. I sat down feeling half panicked, half curious as Colton glanced at all of us with a serious stare.

  Dulce looked at me suddenly alarmed. I could see her mother instincts kicking into gear, sensing that a danger was lurking.

  “Colton what is up with you?” Antonio said as he narrowed his brown eyes at Colton almost playfully.

  We all waited a moment for Colton to respond, but instead let the deafening silence permeate through the air.

  “Well okay then.” Dulce shifted in her seat, as she smiled at me passively.

  I wanted to slap him in attempt to try and wake him up from the vision he seemed to be so immersed in, but after about what felt like an hour of intensely staring at the ground, he looked up and finally began to speak in a grave tone.

  “Before I begin, I need you all to promise that whatever I say here, stays here, no matter what.”

  “Yeah, of course.” Antonio immediately responded, his surprisingly deep voice for his young age resonating in my ears. Despite only being in his early teens, it was visible in the sharp look in his eyes that he had been hardened by all the pain over the years.

  “Uh,” Dulce stuttered, I could see the exhaustion in the dark circles that were engraved beneath her eyes. “Yeah, all good here.”

  I glanced at Colton for a second, trying to search the blank expression across his face for some sort of deeper meaning. What is up with him? “Yeah.” I finally spoke up. “We are here for you.”

  “So,” He paused staring blankly into space for a moment, almost like the words just flew out of his head. “So, I’ve been thinking for a while now,” He paused once again, and I could see his fists clench, like he was trying to battle back the emotions inside of him. “And if you guys don’t want to come with me you don’t have to, but I have decided to leave the White Knights.”

  “What?” Antonio said his dark skin radiating in the sun, as the air seemed to let out a collective gasp. I on the other hand sat breathless in my seat, my brain still trying to process the words that spewed out of his mouth with such precision.

  “Why would you want to leave the White Knights?” Dulce questioned with a sharp tone.

  “Because they aren’t much different from the government.” The passion in Colton’s voice boomed off the building, if he wasn’t careful other people would hear him. “They control us exactly like they did. They force our actions to always benefit their mission without giving us any options. We are trapped here, and frankly, I’m done. I want to be free.”

  Dulce chuckled, an almost pitiful look on her face. “You want to be free?” She cackled even more madly now, the skin on her cheeks jiggling. “Free.” She repeated the word again, as if it was the most preposterous thing in the world. “Freedom is bullshit. Freedom just means free to suffer, free to die alone, free to lose yourself in the hell of our world.”

  Colton interjected. “So, you would rather be sheltered from reality, and sheltered from all the pain, rather than being in the real world?” I took a deep breath as he fired the words out of his mouth, his smooth jaw forcefully moving up and down with each word. “Being trapped by either the Government or the White Knights isn’t going to help up us. We are living a meaningless existence. We are just cogs in the rusted machine of hope that never ceases to fluster, yet always fails in producing any fruit of meaning. We are nothing here. And I refuse to accept this reality.”

  There was a short silence, as Dulce bit her tongue to refrain from snapping right back at him. I had since found out that Dulce had it out for Colton since he tried to slide in and flirt with her when she arrived, only to find out that she was four years younger. After finding this out, they both had become disgusted with each other, and out of principal felt the need to hold a grudge on the other person, even though Dulce herself wished she was his age.

  “I agree,” Antonio finally sputtered out, a wild look in his eyes. I could see his skin glowing, his whole body appeared hungry for change, desperately longing an escape from the darkness. “This place is awful. He’s right, we have no more freedom here than with the government. They don’t trust us enough to even let us walk without trackers embedded into our ankles.” Antonio sighed, and I could suddenly see the anxiety and doubt come to the surface of his eyes. “But who is to say that the world out there,” He glanced at the rolling golden pastures, laden in the relentless rays of the unforgiving sun. “Who is to say that’s it not even worse out there? Who’s to say that with freedom, the price of our security and livelihood aren’t put up for grabs?”

  “I am.” Colton responded, a fierce, determined look in his eyes. “Nothing is worth living this stagnated life. We go through all this training and all this hell, but for what? In the end, the most exciting thing we will ever get to do is sit here, while our brains continue to get smaller and our asses even fatter. There’s nothing here for us. The White Knights have been around for years and haven’t made any progress against the government, and frankly they never will. They are just using us for their own power. They are just screwing us over, like everyone else in this world.”

  He paused, the sun beamed down on his hair illuminating the blonde streaks into flames. “Natalie,” He said looking right at me. I could hear the urgency in his tone and feel it in the tension in the air. “They are using you and Ethan as their little pawns. They are manipulating you guys into projecting the image of the White Knights for the whole world to see, so that they can further their mission. They are creating a fake past for you both and have no plans of getting back your real memories. They have even told you both not to ever talk of Hunter, who supposedly helped you two shut down the mind control program. They want you to pretend like you both never lost your memories, but why?” The question rang in the air, and I could see some of the heads start to nod silently in agreement. “Why should we agree to any of their bullshit? And why should we sacrifice ourselves to a cause that will never even benefit us?”

  The echo of his voice and the looming silence suffocated the air. I could see Antonio tentatively raise his hands like he was going to applaud. Meanwhile everyone else just sat there still staring at Colton waiting for him to continue, but he never did.

  “Wow,” Antonio gaped, “You really make a point there.”

  “So, what if he has a point?” Dulce blurted out, her angry tone combined with her light voice sounded funny. “Where would we go if we decided to leave the White Knights, and how would we escape?”

  “Easy,” Colton countered. There was a fretfulness to his tone, a pressing desperation that finally seemed to break past the wall in his eyes and erupt forward in his shaking hands. “I will be able to interrupt the signal between the embedded trackers and Jacob’s monitoring system, and we can throw away our ICLs, so that we will be able to leave in the middle of the night undetected.” His face lit up with excitement, but his eyes remained eerily motionless. Colton had once mentioned he was on the Intel team with Antonio and I guess it was for good reason. “Then
we will hike down to the coast where we will follow the coastline to San Francisco. From there we can make our way through the city and over the bridge into Oakland where one of the Retributioners operation centers is located.”

  “Retributioners?” Ethan and I both questioned. I suddenly wondered whether going back to them would allow me to get my memories back. The Retributioners often organized largescale demonstrations where government buildings would be destroyed, and entire cities set afire, just to make the point to the government that they had the power to do whatever they wanted. And maybe, just maybe, they would use their power to get back the one thing that I wanted.

  “Yeah,” Colton smiled, he always looked so cute when his lips parted. “They are a much bigger rebel group than the White Knights. They have bases all over the country, like in Miami, Oakland, Dallas, Atlanta, Boston, and their headquarters are in New York City.”

  “So, what?” Dulce shot him a snarky glare. Her instincts were to immediately reject the idea, but I could tell there was something inside of her that wanted to leave. I, on the other hand could feel my body innately latching onto the escape.

  Dulce continued, “Even if they are a bigger rebel group that the White Knights, that doesn’t mean they are any different.”

  The heavy tension created a visible tightness in the air. Our group was clearly divided, but my mind felt even more sundered. I couldn’t just leave the White Knights; I was supposed to lead them against the government. I had a responsibility to the people; I had a responsibility to the White Knights for saving me.

  But, ultimately, I had a responsibility to myself. I needed to get my memories back; I needed to get my life back, and the White Knights were not the place to do it.

  “You’re right,” Colton said, and for the first time in the conversation I could hear a hint of doubt in his voice. “We don’t know if they will be any different, in fact, they could be even worse. But we know one thing for sure, the White Knights are not changing, and they are not here to help us.”