[Backsim] MSNPC Oolwi - Epilogue
Chris Taylor
((Holding Facility, Galaris IV ))
Two Weeks After The Artemis came to Kydon.
Indeethl was wearing a civilian-dress robe. Silvers and greens, befitting her caste. Its fabric was smooth and quiet as she marched forward on bare feet. Her rank pin was attached to her chest. It got her through the first door without much talk.
She had to check her data drone at the second door. It docked itself into a numbered cubby and shut down. It would remain firewalled from any communications, from in or out of the holding facility, until she came to reclaim it. The hallway she entered was manned entirely by Kobyar corrections officers. Joint operations were starting up all over the world, but -- as she had told the Artemis crew -- the Kobyar government intended to deal with its criminals themselves. As a matter of duty. And of pride, she supposed. Time would tell if the insistence on acting as such would survive the many compromises that came with forming a planet-wide coalition.
She stopped at the next check point. The door beyond the desk was double-barred and magno-locked.
Oolwi: ::Waving her credentials to a desk clerk:: I’m here to speak with Prisoner Gleb-Ruet-451-792.
Desk Clerk: You are expected, Major. The Escort Officer will show you the way to the Visitation Cubicles. ::Double-checking digital paperwork:: That prisoner hasn’t spoken to anyone since he was taken into custody. Not even his solicitor.
Oolwi: ::Firmly:: He’ll speak to me.
The escort was a big wall of a man. He didn’t say anything until after he had delivered her to a small, blue-gray room with a single seat and a shelf of a table built into the far wall. Pure concrete and plastosteel. No computer-embed crystals to take advantage of. Above the table, a sheet of glass covered in privacy frost prevented a view of the opposing seat.
Escort Officer: The prisoner will be delivered directly.
Oolwi: Thank you.
It wasn’t a long wait. A three-beat tone informed her when the other side of the visiting room was now occupied. Indeethl put the rank pin in her pocket and faced the screen. Its frosting faded away, granting a view to the very small and very secure holding room on the other side.beside the rear door, a single guard stood.
Indeethl’s brother, Kuiclin, glared back at her. Fury wriggling in his lips. He still had a bit of growing left to do before the end of his teenage years, but there was something in his eyes that said he’d left youth and innocence far behind.
Indeethl: Hello.
What should she call him now? Kuiclin? Kui-Kui? Brother? Prisoner Gleb-Ruet-451-792? Muckbrain? Bully? Coward? Blind fool?
Indeethl: ::reaching towards the glass:: The first thing I wanted to say is, I love you. Regardless of what’s happened, I do. We love you.
Everything else she had planned to say crumbled away under his hateful stare. She pulled back, reluctantly. Offered him more space, such as it was, between them.
He said nothing to her. Just looked back at her, making some internal inventory of what he was looking at.
Indeethl: I’ve got you for the whole hour. Are you really just going to sit there?
A long moment passed in hurtful silence. When he did speak, it was with the cool even tone of someone who knew he was being monitored. The hate did not leave his eyes.
Kuiclin: I have nothing to say to you, traitor.
Indeethl: Oh, I’m the traitor? ::snort:: I’m not the one who ganged up with this Junior Defense Service pals and went through his secondary school chasing down a list of teachers given to them by insurgent ringleaders too cowardly to do the job themselves. I’m probably not the first to tell you that you’re damned lucky that Teacher Uoiopoko made it out of critical care. ::Looks around the barren, sturdy walls:: We’d be having this conversation in even drabber surroundings, for one thing.
Nothing.
Indeethl: I remember Uoiopoko . ::A nostalgic laugh:: He was old back when I was going to that school! Tell me, does he still wander off the lesson plan to talk about Kydon as it was before the war started so long ago? And about the big, Grunden trees and the role they play in their culture? The beauty of their architecture? The humble grandeur of their story-telling circles? Is that why you and your fellows targeted him? Because if he went looking for the good in one enemy he might do it for the next and the next and the next? And inspire others to do the same?
Nothing.
Indeethl: And what were your unseen handlers going to do with them all, anyway? That’s the part no one’s explained to me yet. Were they going to bag-up those ‘malcontents’ for interrogation? Or did they plan to shoot them then and there?... ::Pointing at Kuiclin:: Or have you shoot them to prove your loyalty?
That got a rise out of him. He squirmed in his seat. Not much, but enough for a trained interviewer such as herself to tell. It provided a glimmer of hope that, deep down, he had an honest idea of the sort of people he’d fallen in with. That he could be guided away from their influence and back towards the happy, helpful, adventurous person she remembered him as.
Indeethl: Did it ever occur to you that your so-called friends were going to slowly ask more and more of you, the requests creeping into demands, until your hands were too soaked with blood and your neck too squeezed by obligation to ever escape? That is how criminal organizations, work after all.
He stiffened right back up. She had reached too far. Major Oolwi of the Kobyar Defense Service's media relations wing had a counterpart now in the insurgency’s propaganda mill. A voice of knives broadcasting from bouncing holo-lines that rationalized or dismissed as Coalition fictions the basic facts of their leaders’ plot. The Orion connection. The nanopoison. The kidnappings of Griil and Nesin. Vef-Lai’s destroying Moric, his descent into seething bloodlust. The coldblooded assassination of General Kexxin, an act which still burned in her belly. For every vile deed, an obfuscation.
Maybe Kuiclin had been listening to The Voice Of New Kydon, down in the safehouse where he had been found and arrested. Maybe he had made up his own excuses. Talked himself into them in the anxious dark.
There was one thing she could probably get him to say. She suddenly, desperately needed to know how he looked when he said it.
Indeethl: It won’t be long until Uoiopoko can give a statement. But everybody already knows what you and your friends shouted as you kicked him and pummelled him and dragged him towards that rotosled. ::A pause that goes unanswered:: Go on. You said it to him, you can say it to me. Unless, dare I dream, you’ve started to lose faith in those words?
Kuiclin’s eyes bulged with unearned rage. He spoke with a zealot’s finality.
Kuiclin: War! Is! Life!
Indeethl slumped into the back of her chair as though stricken with more than words. It broke her heart to hear that mantra come from the mouth of family. From someone she had taken on fishing trips and helped with with homework and told how to talk to girls. This boy who loved grulba music and swim meets and who’d kept a scrapchip of the stories his big sister had written during her time with the Defense Service’s holozine. He’d called her his hero, once. She’d called him her favorite reason for wanting the war to end.
She fought to keep her eyes from sinking and her neck-sacs from swelling, so fiercely that she could hear her muscles straining. Within that sound were the echoes of their mother sobbing into her arms. Of their father pacing up and down the old house that he’d inherited from his father, muttering to himself. Asking where he had failed his son. Aimlessly moving from room to room as though he were looking for some scrap of evidence that might make Kuiclin’s radicalization make sense. A hidden journal. An encrypted message from his cohorts. An address code for the underground holo feed. Anything at all.
She couldn't stop her eyes from tearing up.
But that warm glow of hope in her chest refused to die.
Indeethl: ::Placing her forearms onto the table and leaning forward:: There are better ways to live, brother. Happier ones. When you’re ready to hear about them, I’ll be there to introduce you.
[END EPILOGUE FOR OOLWI]
[INDEETHL OOLWI WILL RETURN]
(OOC: the ‘will return' outro was approved by Matt)
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MSNPC Oolwi
As written by
Ensign Imril
Engineering Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240110I12