The Fate of Mice by Susan Palwick Page B

secret. From you, the original Truth Terrorists.
    If we don’t understand why most of us changed, we also don’t understand why a few of us didn’t. There were still a few criminals after the Change, although they’ve all been locked up in vastly improved prisons, prisons with excellent food and golf courses and maid service. (An improved prison is still a prison. We are doing this to free you because you’re also in a prison, and you did nothing wrong to deserve to be there.) And there were still some people who weren’t quite criminals but still didn’t want to share or cooperate, who stayed selfish and greedy. They’re harder to deal with than the actual criminals: mostly they just wind up being profoundly lonely, which is maybe how those people always wound up anyway.
    And there were still some people who persisted in looking for the downside of everything, the dark side, the hidden agenda. Like all of you. The people who’ve put you here think that means you can’t handle the truth. We, the Truth Terrorists, think we owe you the truth, as long as we present it in a form you recognize, in a shape that’s familiar enough to be safe.
    Ten miles away. I think I’m getting an ulcer, sitting here in the car. “Remember the early days?” Jenny asks wistfully. “When we thought he’d finally be happy?”
    My stomach spasms. “When I thought Mom would finally get her wish. Of course I remember.”
    “Oh, God, Nate. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
    “Don’t be sorry,” I tell her. “Do you think I don’t think about that all the time? Do you think I haven’t thought about it every day since Dad lost it? It’s not like you’re bringing up something I could forget.”
    Jenny and I had always thought Dad would be happy after the Change. This was the world he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? We didn’t realize right away how bad it was for him: everybody was disoriented and trying to readjust, and we were all dealing with huge social changes. Of course we saw that he wasn’t increasingly happy and excited like nearly everybody else, and at first we just chalked it up to old habits dying hard. But he spent more time online than ever, and he called me more often, too, and he sounded more panicky every time he called. “Nate! Nate! Everybody seems to
believe
that Congress is really talking about dismantling the military so it can increase the education budget!”
    “Well, sure, Dad. That’s because they really
are
talking about it. I saw it on the news.”
    “Nate! Surely you can’t believe that they’d do that! Why would they do that, Nate?”
    “Because educating kids makes a lot more sense than killing people, and nobody wants to fight anymore.”
    I heard my father sputtering on the other end of the line. “Come on, Nate, nobody really thinks that way! Especially not in
Congress!”
    The day that bill actually went through—and obviously it took a while, because a lot of details had to be worked out—Dad called me in tears. His conspiracy-theorist friends believed the demilitarization was happening, too. He couldn’t find anyone to agree with him that it all must be a giant hoax. “Nate, oh God, the world must be ending! What’s wrong with everybody? Nate, I’m dizzy, I can’t breathe, Nate - ”
    I hadn’t heard him in such bad shape since Mom died. I was afraid he was having a heart attack. I called 911, and then Jenny and I put Sam in the car seat and rushed to the hospital, and sat with Dad in the ER for six hours while the doctors ran a bunch of tests. They finally decided that his heart was fine, that he was just having a panic attack.
    Being in the hospital just made his panic worse, though, because so many things didn’t make sense to him. Nobody asked him for an insurance card or proof that he could pay, because the healthcare system had already been reformed—that was one of the earliest things that got fixed after the Change, since so many people had been