Chapter 9: Villains Unveiled

The first sensation I feel when I come to is something tight cutting into my wrists. My head is pounding, and it takes me a moment to remember what’s happening. Then it all comes rushing back. Alex. Leo. Lum. The memories slam into me like a tidal wave.

I’m strapped to a chair, my arms bound behind my back and my feet tied together. Colors swim before me as I try to get my eyes to cooperate. I call for help, but something thick and dry is stuck in my mouth. The cotton pushes against my cheeks, and I gag as I struggle to breathe.

My vision finally clears, and I take in my surroundings. I’m in what looks like a conference room, one wall entirely a window. Outside, a building with a large TV plays the news, and a few stories down, I see the plaza where the protestors are gathering.

From my bearings, I know exactly where we are: The Smith Capital building.

Something moves in the corner of the room, and I look to see Lum standing there, his back pressed against the wall.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you,” he says, refusing to make eye contact. “That concoction is a bit tricky to get right.”

I gag on the cloth in my mouth, and he walks over to me. He reaches for my face, and I’m worried he’s going to knock me out again, but he loosens the gag until it falls around my neck.

“Better?” he asks, as if this is completely normal. I nod and feel something tug at my hairline. I shake my head back and forth and see wires cascading around my shoulders.

For some reason, Lum has attached electrodes to my head.

“What’s going on?” I ask. My tongue is still heavy in my mouth.

“I really am sorry,” Lum says, still standing to my side. “When they asked me to follow you, I thought it would be simple. I didn’t think they’d ask me to kidnap you. You’re not a ludd.”

“If you’re really sorry,” I say, “then let me go. I don’t have to tell anyone about this. We can both walk out of here like nothing happened.” Lum gives his sad smile again and shakes his head.

“I can’t do that,” he says. “I’m sorry.” His eyes water, and tears drop to the carpeted floor. His voice is soft when he speaks again. “Kara’s gotten worse. Her cough hasn’t gone away, and she’s barely conscious anymore. She hasn’t eaten anything in two days, but I can’t afford to take her to the doctor. She needs a doctor.” He looks at me, his face pleading for me to understand. “They said they’d pay me really well. I just had to bring you up here, and they’d give me enough money to take care of Kara. I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go.”

“You don’t ha—” I start to say, but a door slams in the hallway, making Lum startle. He scrambles forward and shoves the gag in my mouth before scurrying back to the corner. Seconds later, the door swings open, and a man walks through, a man I’ve only ever seen on billboards and television.

Alistair Smith, the founder and CEO of Smith Capital, stands before me.

He strides across the room to a computer bank to my right and faces the screens, his back to the window. His thick nose and bulldog jaw are highlighted as the screens flicker on, and his blonde hair reflects the sharp fluorescent lighting from above.

He clicks around on the keypad and screen until his face cracks into a small smile. Finally, he looks up at me.

“Good evening, Selene,” he says, his voice much too pleasant for the situation. It sounds as if he’s done this a few too many times. “I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I’d hoped you’d have the common sense to stay away from things that are simply beyond your comprehension.”

I curse at him, but the fabric muffles my words. He smiles again, flashing his perfectly straight teeth.

“I don’t normally involve myself in menial tasks such as this, but given the circumstances,” he says, gesturing to the plaza below, “I wanted to make sure everything gets taken care of properly.

“Speaking of,” he says, turning to face Lum, “you can go. You’re no longer needed.” Lum glances at me then back at Smith.

“Are you sure?” he asks. Smith’s face curls into a condescending sneer and his eyes pierce Lum.

“I am,” Smith says coldly, “unless you want to be a witness to Selene’s suicide.” My blood freezes, ice stabbing into my heart and lungs. Oh God, he’s going to kill me. The seriousness of the situation finally crashes over me—Smith isn’t going to just let me walk away. Not after what I’ve seen.

“It will be quite the tragedy when she throws herself from the top of the building, and I’m sure you’d rather not be connected to that,” he says to Lum, not averting his gaze. Lum looks at me one last time with his sunken eyes, then he slinks out of the room.

Smith turns back to me, like a tiger who knows its prey is trapped.

“Now,” he says, his fingers returning to the keyboard, “what shall we do with you?” As he types, I can see the protest scene outside. The crowd is a bit bigger, but what’s really grown is the police presence. Flashing police lights dot the streets every few blocks, and officers are in riot gear, armed to the teeth with guns and nightsticks and teargas. Their presence is agitating the protestors, which adds to the instability of the scene.

The ludds want justice, and the police look ready to give them violence instead.

“I know that girl gave you something,” Smith mutters, more to himself than to me. “Now where is it?” A sharp pain shoots through my temples, and all the features of my retina display flash across my vision. The pain has vaporized the remaining grogginess I felt from being knocked out.

I’m sharp now, fully aware of what’s going on. Smith wants the files that Alex sent me, and he’s trying to hack my brain to do it.

I know it’s only a matter of time until Smith finds what he wants.

I finally understand why Leo and the other ludds are so opposed to the Collective. To be a part of it, you have to sacrifice yourself. You have to give the world access to every part of you. I used to think it was just access to my body. After all, my mind always went with me whenever I bodyswapped. But now, seeing Smith at the computer, feeling the electrodes pulsing against my skin, I see that the Collective demands so much more. My mind. My memories. My experiences. Everything that makes me me is fodder for the Collective.

Its slogan—Individuals, Connected—is nothing more than empty words. The Collective isn’t about coming together with neighbors and strangers to become part of something bigger; it’s about being assimilated into a hive that Smith can control, have power over. It’s about becoming one more cog in the machine that allows Smith Capital to violate whoever it wants.

To kidnap ludds. To kill Alex. To invade my mind.

Smith Capital can get away with it all. They can do whatever they want because we’ve given them that power. We’ve traded ourselves for the convenience of the Collective, for the false promise of connection and meaning that the Collective offered.

Smith clicks more buttons, and the pain shoots across my brain once more, like fire in my skull. I see my retina display again, and I realize the bodyswapping and communication features have both been disabled. My heart sinks. Without those, I can’t escape. I can’t call for help.

But then I remember.

The ludd network. The one Leo said Smith Capital doesn’t monitor because it’s too outdated to be important.

I just have to hope someone’s online.

“Ahh,” Smith exclaims in delight. His perfectly manicured eyebrows arch upwards and a smile spreads across his face. “Look what I found.” I can’t see his screen, but I hear the audio that plays from the computer.

“My name is Alex Hampton. I’m recording this because I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” Smith clicks the audio off, and his icy blue eyes scan the other files in the folder Alex sent me.

He wants to make sure all the incriminating evidence is there before he kills me. He wants to make sure he’s covered his tracks.

The smirk on his arrogant face makes me want to throw him through the window. It’s the look of a man who’s used to getting everything, used to getting away with everything.

He tsks at me, like a teacher scolding a student.

“You girls really should learn,” he says, “that when it comes to fighting the system, you’ll never win. There’s a reason we’re in charge. There’s a reason we can take ludd after ludd without anyone batting an eye. And that’s because the system is designed to give people like you,” he says, jabbing his finger in my direction, “just enough so you don’t care about people like them,” he says, gesturing down to the ludds gathering in the plaza below. “And you definitely won’t be paying attention to how people like me,” he says with a flourish of his hand and a giddy chuckle, “get so. Much. More.”

God, this guy needs to shut up.

I cuss at him again, but he just laughs, amused by my garbled yelling.

“What you need to know—” he begins to say, but he’s interrupted by someone else speaking.

“My name is Alex Hampton. I’m recording this because I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Smith glances at his computer, his brow furrowed as he tries to figure out why the file is playing again without him clicking it. But he soon realizes why he can’t turn it off.

Because it’s not coming from his computer.

From the building next door, on the large screen that had just been showing the news, Alex’s video now plays.

Leo got my message. He found the files I sent over the ludds’ network.

“I’m worried,” Alex continues, “because I’m afraid Smith Capital is going to try and kill me.

“For years, I worked for councilmember Warren McKinsey. But in the past year, I started noticing he and other city councilmembers were having more and more meetings with Smith Capital representatives, and a lot of the meetings were off the record. Whenever I asked McKinsey and the other councilmembers about it, though, they never gave me a straight answer.

“So I started digging. And I finally realized what was happening. Smith Capital was nearing a crisis. Year after year, membership in the Collective had been growing exponentially, but recently, that number had started to decline. This wouldn’t have been a problem if Smith Capital’s goal was to connect as many people together as possible. But that’s not why they created the Collective. Smith Capital created it to make money, and their biggest source of revenue comes from people living outside of cities paying premiums to swap into city bodies. The Collective gave these wealthy clients the best of both worlds: city life whenever they wanted it without having to deal with the noise, pollution, or restrictions of actually living in the city.

“But Smith Capital was hitting a bottleneck: they’d maxed out on the number of people willing to live in the city and sell their bodies for large parts of the day. The demand exceeded the supply—so Smith decided to increase the supply.

“And the best way to do that? Use the bodies of people that no one would care about if they went missing. Smith planned to abduct ludds in major cities on the Collective network and use them as vessels they could sell to their clients. Not only would it allow Smith Capital to continue profiting off these body swaps, but it would also give them more of a cut since they wouldn’t have to pay the people in the city bodies. The plan was to collect ludds, keep them sedated, and only let them be conscious when someone wanted to bodyswap. They were willing to exploit ludds in order to give their wealthy clients a second body in the city.

My stomach churns as she speaks. But she hasn’t even gotten to the worst part yet.

“I thought the city council was meeting with Smith Capital to convince them to consider alternative solutions, but the documents I found proved the opposite—the city council supported the idea. It was killing two birds with one stone: it would bring in more money and reduce the number of ludds in the city. A win-win for the city council.

“McKinsey didn’t know how much I’d discovered, but when he found out I was digging around, he fired me and threatened to have me arrested. So I kept it secret, fled the city, and tried to lay low. But enough is enough. People need to know the truth, and it always has a way of coming out eventually.

“Attached to this video are copies of all the evidence I gathered in my time with McKinsey’s office. Records of the secret meetings, blueprints for the storage facilities that would hold the ludds’ bodies, even plans for how to spin the story if the media caught wind. It’s all there; no need to take my word for it. Read it and you’ll know: Smith Capital and the city council conspired to kidnap ludds and sell their bodies to the highest bidders.”

The video freezes on her face. I can see the protestors down below, some watching the clip on their own devices, but most staring up at the screen. No one speaks, and the silence settles into our bones.

Smith, who had been facing the screen, slowly turns in my direction. His face is contorted in rage: his cheeks are red and his teeth are bared, his lips curled back in a bloodthirsty snarl.

“You,” he seethes, his hands clenching the edge of the table so tight it looks like he might break the corner off. “You did this!”

He leans forward then charges at me, his hands outstretched and aimed for my throat. His eyes are wild, his breathing rapid and shallow. He’s just seen his entire plan exposed, and he knows I’m the one who did it.

“You’ll p—” he begins to shout as he runs toward me, but his voice is suddenly amplified. Live footage of him charging at me flashes across the screen outside. He stumbles to a halt when he hears his own voice projecting over the plaza, and he whips around to look at the screen. The Smith on the TV copies his motions. He turns back to me, realizing that I am the camera.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Leo planted a specter on me, after all.

Smith is wild with rage, but he’s level-headed enough to know that he can’t kill someone on live TV. He knows he’s lost. Hunched over like a feral animal, he glances around the room until his eyes land on the door. He glares at me one last time—all the violence he wants to reign upon me trapped in his eyes—then he runs for the door.

Like the coward he is, he throws the door open and disappears into the darkened hallway.

And I am alone.

I begin to work at the knots around my wrists. I have a protest to get to.

* * *

I feel at home among the ludds and other allies in the crowd. Leo told me that, once they’d hacked into the network signals and played Alex’s video on dozens of stations in the region, hundreds of people had begun coming into the city to join the protest. Thousands, maybe. They were all here to stand in solidarity with the missing ludds. With all the ludds.

The crowd now spills out of the plaza. Our numbers keep growing, but it’s about time to start. We plan to march through the whole city if we have to. To demand justice for the missing ludds, for their families, for the entire ludd community.

The news has been trying to interview the city council, but so far none of them have talked. Some members have even gone into hiding. I wish I could believe that justice would be served, but the scene waiting for us suggests otherwise.

Beyond the edges of our crowd, line after line of police officers stand at the ready. By now, they’ve had time to organize. Tanks have rolled in, as if the protesters are the problem and not Smith Capital or the corrupt city council. Both have been exposed, yet we still don’t know where the missing ludds are. No one has been able to find them. And, worse yet, according to Alex’s video, Smith Capital had orchestrated the abduction of ludds in dozens of other cities as well.

The thought of it, of ludds being stolen and their bodies being harvested just so Smith can make more money, makes my blood boil. The Collective could have been so much better. A force for good in the world. A way to bring people together; a way to connect humanity in a way that we’d never seen before. But Smith Capital had ruined all of that. Had destroyed the Collective’s potential in search of more wealth.

But no more.

Today is the day we show Smith Capital that we can be united without them.

As if with one mind, all of us in the crowd step forward.

Let the protest begin.