Amanda Lewis held the knife up to her neck.
There was no funeral when Cameron’s mom killed herself. There would be none for his sister either.
“You can’t do this.” Cameron lunged towards her, but every step closer only brought her grip tighter around the glowing rubber handle.
“I’m doing this to honor her.” Amanda’s eyes shifted away from Cameron as her wrist shook with force.
They both stood on the rotted platform of their backyard treehouse. It had been a project Cameron had worked on with his father. Now, it only reminded him of the life he lost.
He was determined to get it back.
“You are just playing a game with yourself.” Cameron sighed, the sounds of the waves of the Long Island Sound crashing against the rocky shore soothing his mind from spinning out.
“Sean already did it.” Amanda scoffed, twirling the knife around, teasing him. She always mentioned her junkie boyfriend who had been kicked out of his house and severed from his family’s carbon allotment. He was a bad influence on her. Leeching off the carbon she made at her serving job and convincing her to skip college and help him shack up in an old West Hampton cottage.
Cameron shook his head, fists clenched.
Amanda teased him, her feet dancing at the edge of the platform, one misstep sending her down the hundred-foot-tall cliff of Port Jeff Harbor. “He found an anti-civilization colony in the upstate. We are gonna escape this all!”
“The neighbors could come out here and call the police.” Cameron eyed each neatly manicured lawn, the McMansions separated by a white picket fence and lavish landscaping.
The people of the hills lived here. The ones who didn’t have to worry about a carbon allotment. The ones who climbed to the top of the capitalist food chain. Managers at big corporations, venture capital entrepreneurs, doctors, and lawyers. They would do anything to protect the system that cemented their rule—the system that saved the world from the supposed horrors of climate change and ushered the biosphere into a new golden age.
Amanda was out to destroy it. Just like their mother aimed to do.
But she was going to have to kill herself to do it.
“Shoot me! I dare you!” Her voice boomed through the calm, salty evening air. No doubt the neighbors were stirring now. They had already kept close eyes on their house ever since their mother’s passing.
“You can’t tease these people.” Cameron hushed her. Sweat dripped off his dark skin from the last rays of the warm, summer sun. “We have no leverage. We have nothing.”
“That’s what they want you to believe.” Amanda dug the edge of the knife into the flesh of her arm, tiny beads of blood effusing out of her skin. “I can throw this chip out, take the poison patch out of my arm, and I am still me. They can’t take who I am away. Even if they shoot me!”
“Take a deep breath.” Tears welled up in Cameron’s eyes. “I’m on your team.”
“Bullshit.” Amanda shot her arm into the air, the blade of the knife sparkling in the golden rays. Her curly hair was tied back into a ponytail tail, the deep brown tinge to her eyes the last bit of warmth Cameron felt in her cold, tense expression.
“Since everything fell apart, I have been scrambling to figure out our lives. I’m not going to college anymore; I’m doing everything I can to support this family—what’s left of it. And you just wanna throw it away.”
“You have no right to tell me that.” Amanda spit, two heavy droplets landing on Cameron’s face. “You entered into the Millennium Game. It’s a death wish. And without you here you give me no choice. I have to do this. I can’t survive without you, and you are leaving me.”
“I’m not leaving you.” Cameron said. “There’s only a 1% chance the United Nations lets me in off the lottery. And even if they do, it’s a chance for us to be able to have unlimited carbon. No more timer hanging above us. We don’t have to work 80-hour weeks forever trying to pay back the loans and keep up with the bills.”
“That little fantasy you have going on conveniently leaves out the fact that everyone dies in the experiment, except the one winner. It’s a suicide mission, and you are only helping to promote the dumb carbon system that got us here in the first place. The same system mom wanted to destroy!”
“And going rogue isn’t a suicide mission either?” Cameron dug his fingernails into the bark of the tree next to him. He wanted to so badly break down and let the sadness overcome him.
Since the moment his father died of an overdose the day of his high school graduation his life had felt devoid of color. That’s when he discovered that his father had been a gambling addict in secret for over a decade. An investment banker in Wall Street, he was supposed to be among the elites. They all were. But his addiction had eaten him alive and when all hope was lost, he left a suicide note and empty pill bottle on the bathroom floor.
Cameron still remembered how the police and ambulance clogged his street for hours, the authorities asking endless questions, the neighbors watching with nervous eyes from their homes. Their great fear had come to life, and it was destined to kill everyone in his family soon.
Ever since World War 3, a conflict triggered by global drought and famine, the remains of civilization came together to ensure nothing like that would ever happen again. It was a solution to climate change. A way to view humanity and its desires in the larger context of the biosphere, treating all animals, plant life, and the earth’s natural resources with a sense of dignity and care.
That plan was called the Millennium Initiative and it converted the global economy to a system that ran on carbon instead of the dollar. Every good was priced according to its carbon footprint. So was human life. And once one reached their limit of carbon for their lifetime, the poison patch embedded into the arm of every United Nations citizen was released.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
They would die in an instant.
Cameron’s father, Robert Lewis, had forced his wife and two children up against that limit. At their current burn rate and with all the loans they had to pay off, they would be out of carbon in a matter of weeks.
“Sean has been able to survive for almost half a year without getting caught by the bounty hunters.” Amanda said, Cameron narrowing his eyes at her.
“He would have starved to death if it wasn’t for you. We don’t have anyone to lean on like that. There’s too much for anyone to risk providing us any shelter. Everyone here is brainwashed anyways, they think the Millennium Initiative is what saved the world.”
“They are too scared to say how they really feel.” Amanda smiled, holding the knife tighter with a new determination in her eyes. Cameron knew she was just burying her sadness beneath the flames of rage inside her. “They all hate it. Everyone is scared out of their minds. But they are fearful of death more.” She sighed pacing back and forth until she locked eyes with Cameron.
“I’m not.” She grinned, a fiery passion in her voice that sent a surge of adrenaline through Cameron. “And the more people we get to see the light, to see that tying our worth and livelihood to a stupid metric that some government bureaucrats decided on is something worse than death to begin with, well then maybe we can just change how this world works.”
“It’s not going to happen.” Cameron said. “Some guy desperate for extra carbon will kill you for the bounty placed on your head and Mom’s sacrifice will have gone to waste!”
“You are the one tossing it away! She wrote 100 Days Left on the roof of that car for a reason.”
“Yes, because she was giving us more time to live. She was giving us an opportunity to increase our carbon without the pressure of feeding an extra body. She was giving us more time to live so we can fix this mess. And that’s what I’m going to do with the Millennium Game.”
“You are no better than our father.”
“Shut up.” Cameron hissed.
“It is true though.” Her voice softened. “You’re just a gambler like he was. Self-centered, thinking that the world will conform to your vision. That you can make it all better forever by rolling the dice and aiming for a big score. I’m the one trying to do the right thing.”
“We are both trying to do the right thing.” Cameron relented. His teeth grinded against each other, a painful scraping reverberating through his jaw. “But nothing is going to go our way unless we work together.”
“Right, that’s what the United Nations has preached for years about this dumb carbon system. Do you see where that got Mom? Her body is trapped at the bottom of the Sound. We are all trapped, and we won’t be free unless we fight for it.”
“Okay.” Cameron breathed, the tears now falling down his face and landing on the dirt-stained wooden planks beneath him. “So, this is it? There’s nothing I can do to change your mind?”
“I’m not the one who needs my mind changed.” Amanda blew a round of hot air out of her nostrils. “Just go. You don’t care about me. You don’t care about this family. You just wanna get rich.”
“I want us to be safe. That’s it. I just want to be safe.”
“No one is safe if a young woman can be killed because she was born into the wrong family. Our father was diseased. But his shit shouldn’t be our shit. And if I don’t do this, we will have no other choice but to be buried in it.”
Cameron watched in silence as Amanda gripped one hand against the side railing of the treehouse and the other around the knife. His throat vibrated, his lips frozen shut as the last rays of sun dipped below the horizon, leaving only faint splashes of red and pink to adorn the sky.
In an instant, Amanda sliced the knife deep into her flesh, a chunk of blood, skin, and a chip falling out. Next was the poison patch, it’s clear, glob-like patch, containing enough nerve agent to paralyze one within seconds upon its release.
With the chip unable to get an accurate pulse on Amanda’s body, she would be immediately entered into the Rogue database with the aid of a machine learning algorithm recognizing the discrepancy in milliseconds. Until the United Nations found her dead, she would be hunted by hundreds of thousands of hired professionals and amateurs all aiming to capture defectors of the Millennium Initiative— dead or alive.
“Ow.” Amanda dropped the knife, cupping her hand over the wound. The blade made a sharp clank as it hit the ground, it’s force sending chills down Cameron’s spine. Every drop of blood that oozed out of her flesh was a piece of Cameron’s heart falling to the ground and splattering into thousands of broken memories.
“C’mon.” She grunted. “Take the knife. Just do it. We can both runaway.”
“I can’t.” Cameron stood with his arms crossed. He had to bite his tongue to hold the tears from bursting out. “I’m doing this for mom. And I’m doing this so that one day we have a better life.”
“I might be made of carbon, but I refuse to die by it.” Amanda already started down the flimsy ladder, it barely wide enough to fit her feet. It had been built for days long gone, days where they didn’t understand much about carbon or how each second, they were ticking closer to an artificial death bomb set to explode in their arms.
“Amanda, you don’t have to go.” Cameron stood at the edge of the tree fort, the grandiose visions he had of building a tree fort empire as a kid hitting him as he imagined the soft smile and warm, dark skin of his father.
“I’ll be at Kings Park. There’s a camp of rogues there, Sean has already scouted it out. I don’t know how long we will be there, but you can come.”
“But you can stay—"
“No, I can’t.” Amanda’s hand returned to cupping the river of blood as her feet dug into the soil. “You may be willing to throw yourself into the hands of the government and get yourself killed, but I’m not doing that to you. They will kill you too if they think you are helping me.”
“Amanda—"
“Chances are I’ll be dead by weeks’ end. But that’s not the point. I’m taking my life into my own hands. Hopefully, others will follow me.”
Cameron gulped. He wished he could pin her down like when they wrestled as little kids and out the chip back inside of her. He wished he could just stitch her flesh back together, stitch their family back together, stitch his life back together.
“I love you, Cameron.” She said grabbing the backpack at the foot of the tree. It had some rations of food and water that would last her a few days. Her only way to travel was by foot now. Hitch hiking was too risky, and with her name in the rogue database, her fingerprint would no longer be valid for payment. Every action ran the risk of leaving a paper trail, clues that would only kill her faster.
Cameron managed to say the words I love you in return but by the time the words left his mouth he closed his eyes and let the sadness wash over him.
Amanda walked out of the yard, a determination to her stride that begged Cameron to follow her. He almost caved into the desire.
He wheezed, his nostrils full of snot and his chest clogged with stress. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to do.
He always had a plan. He always had a goal in front of him to conquer, whether it was the next down in a game of football or an exam in school. Now, he had nothing.
He laid down on the hard, splintered floor of the tree fort, the darkness filling the sky as the chill of night seeped into his bones.
There were now ten tons of carbon remaining left to his name, an amount that would last him no later than the end of summer. With his sister gone, there was one less person in the Millennium Initiative Database. One less human polluting the atmosphere, consuming carbon intensive goods, and harming the natural world.
At least that’s how they viewed it.
But to Cameron, with her left a piece of his heart. And instead of chasing after it, he wanted to face the monster that took it from him head on.
He quietly prayed he would win the lottery and be accepted into the Millennium Game.
Little did he know, the nightmare that awaited him.