Chapter 5

While devastatingly effective on the onset, a closer inspection of the developments on Cirrus Prime would have made laughably obvious the violence that would shortly erupt. Jurisdictional Lieutenants proudly chirped into their shoulder terminals that their varying sections of the city were managed; locked down - no one in our out. Piece by piece, the authorities locked themselves in with hundreds of thousands of agitated protesters. The resulting bottlenecks created approximately 120 proxy protests, a couple as large as 25,000. Travel from the bottom of cirrus to the 30th level had ceased and the crowds, crammed into the areas surrounding the inter-level lifts, were angry. Chants of Let us through! and Class Traitor Pigs! sounded around guards of the various levels.

On the 14th level, someone threw a rock and gored a guard’s face. The guards began to shoot immediately.

On the 19th level, a burly drunken deadbeat got mouthy with a guard, who then threw the man to the ground. The surrounding crowd descended onto the guard and tore him apart. Then the shooting started.

On the 24th level, someone managed to get behind the line of guards blocking the lift and placed an improvised explosive on the structure. The saboteur detonated his explosive while standing next to it and rocked the entire fourth level, killing everyone within half of a block. 56 in total died instantly, most of them guards, but the first several rows of protesters were also engulfed in flames. The remaining guards opened fire on the protesters.

All the way back on the 10th level where the protest had started, Clarence Bartel breathed in the energy of the crowd he’d slipped into and smiled. This was his destiny - his father had told him so. It was his lot in life to kick-off the next revolution - the next event - his father had phrased it to him years before.

Something was wrong elsewhere in the city - Clarence could tell by the way that observed head guards listening and shouting back into their shoulder terminals. An alarm blared and a voice boomed out, advising all in the area to evacuate immediately; This site is now under martial containment, evacuate or face detention.

The line of security officers that had been passively standing around the facility now formed a line in front of the complex - inches from the line of protesters shouting across the mesh fence. A whistle sounded and the fence fell as the line of security officers marched toward the line of protesters. With their routes of escape blocked, there was no choice but to fight. The line of angry citizens stood their ground to meet the security officers.

Batons swung, blood flowed, and Clarence threw a flaming bottle of liquid at the security complex. Fire blazed and littered the street with shrapnel as shouts rose to command the various forces occupying the street.

Clarence smiled and briefly observed his father’s handiwork. Clarence had thrown the firebomb, but Clarence’s father had orchestrated all of this. Decades of elitist rule was finally coming to an end. Clarence’s chest swelled with pride that he was the one to fire the starting pistol. He turned and located the alley that he’d planned for his escape and found his way out of the chaos to a jet that was waiting to take him away from Cirrus Prime. His father would be pleased.

It was starting.