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quantumrealityPremise: Paige makes some unpleasant discoveries about her future prospects.
Paige Jennings was not a happy girl.
She was now fifteen years old, having been sent to Boston, Massachusetts. Her foster parents... tolerated her and Henry. She honestly couldn't blame them. The news had inevitably leaked out about the fearsome Directorate S agents woven deep into American society. Mom and Dad's pictures had been splashed all over the newspaper, and some wise guy of a reporter had managed to ferret out Paige's and Henry's current location, bombarding them with questions before getting a door rudely slammed in his face.
Paige still resented Beeman. She hated that she couldn't hurt him, couldn't make him feel like she'd felt - cut utterly adrift from her moorings, her world turned totally upside down. It hurt even worse because out of his apparent kindness, the stipend a foster family got had been doubled for both Paige and Henry.
What this meant was that Paige and Henry each had the most minimalistically desultory attempts at conversation; they were treated as interlopers, and money was shoved at the two of them in lieu of any attempt to find out what they really wanted. And she would as soon not repeat the total farce that was Christmas, 1982.
She felt tainted. She could even see why they would do this. Paige had said it to Agent Beeman: Paige and Henry were like a Russian cancer, even if nobody ever actually said it; even if they were treated as completely (and legally) American citizens.
A kind of horrified fascination had drawn her to the U volume of the Encyclopedia at school. "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", the article was titled. Page after page detailed Lenin's ascent to power - Stalin's brutal rule - Khrushchev's reforms - Brezhnev's decade-plus rule over a seemingly stable Soviet Union. "Communism" led her through a tale of Marx, Engels, dialectical materialism, Lenin, central planning - a seemingly completely rational, perfect system. It was even seductive, she realized, the idea that if you could just tell everyone exactly what to do and they did it, that you could in one stroke wipe out all the inefficiencies - have no unemployment, no poverty, no crime, have all you wanted or needed...
What, she wondered, would it be like if she were in Moscow? Would she and Henry be taken in, hailed as heroes, innocent victims of the seemingly-endless war between Capitalism and Communism?
It was certainly more than the toleration she seemed to get from her foster family. Luckily, no-one at her new school had made the connection to her now-very-famous parents.
And Henry. He had turned hard, like stone, over the last several months. He answered as laconically as possible to any question. He only warmed up slightly more to Paige than he did to anyone else.
It was Henry who had first spotted the gilded cage they lived in.
One day, during the bus ride home, they were at the back of the bus. Henry had nudged Paige's elbow and said, "The grey car."
Confused, Paige shifted, trying to make out the car through the dirty rear window. Sure enough, a nondescript grey Pontiac rolled along, two cars down from the bus. She frowned at Henry. "What about it?"
"Every day, Paige. Same car."
Skeptical, she'd kept an eye out after that, morning and afternoon. She realized that yes, indeed, the same car was often to be seen hovering nearby. When she got on the school bus in the morning to when she got off the school bus in the afternoon, the car stayed a discreet distance from her school, camped out in the parking lot of the warehouse across the street.
When she and Henry would go on their infrequent outings in their foster parents' car, the same vehicle would be trundling along nearby.
Disgustedly, Paige wondered what made the FBI any different from the horror stories of the KGB. An FBI agent had summarily arrested her parents, threatened to murder them. The KGB, she had been told, could break into anybody's house in the Soviet Union and tell a pack of lies about them and consign them to prison for years.
And certainly the KGB followed "persons of interest" around as they pleased, as did the FBI with her and Henry.
What were they afraid of?
The Soviets couldn't be interested in her. She was too obvious a target, either for recruitment or for assassination.
Or—
Could they be afraid she would seek out the Soviets?
The nameless men in the grey car weren't her guardians and protectors. They were gatekeepers. If she should ever do something out of the ordinary, the gun at the back of her head wouldn't be a Russian's.
It would be an American's.
How could she feel like an American citizen if her own country didn't trust her?
Feel free to suggest a title, or just comment. :)
Paige Jennings was not a happy girl.
She was now fifteen years old, having been sent to Boston, Massachusetts. Her foster parents... tolerated her and Henry. She honestly couldn't blame them. The news had inevitably leaked out about the fearsome Directorate S agents woven deep into American society. Mom and Dad's pictures had been splashed all over the newspaper, and some wise guy of a reporter had managed to ferret out Paige's and Henry's current location, bombarding them with questions before getting a door rudely slammed in his face.
Paige still resented Beeman. She hated that she couldn't hurt him, couldn't make him feel like she'd felt - cut utterly adrift from her moorings, her world turned totally upside down. It hurt even worse because out of his apparent kindness, the stipend a foster family got had been doubled for both Paige and Henry.
What this meant was that Paige and Henry each had the most minimalistically desultory attempts at conversation; they were treated as interlopers, and money was shoved at the two of them in lieu of any attempt to find out what they really wanted. And she would as soon not repeat the total farce that was Christmas, 1982.
She felt tainted. She could even see why they would do this. Paige had said it to Agent Beeman: Paige and Henry were like a Russian cancer, even if nobody ever actually said it; even if they were treated as completely (and legally) American citizens.
A kind of horrified fascination had drawn her to the U volume of the Encyclopedia at school. "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", the article was titled. Page after page detailed Lenin's ascent to power - Stalin's brutal rule - Khrushchev's reforms - Brezhnev's decade-plus rule over a seemingly stable Soviet Union. "Communism" led her through a tale of Marx, Engels, dialectical materialism, Lenin, central planning - a seemingly completely rational, perfect system. It was even seductive, she realized, the idea that if you could just tell everyone exactly what to do and they did it, that you could in one stroke wipe out all the inefficiencies - have no unemployment, no poverty, no crime, have all you wanted or needed...
What, she wondered, would it be like if she were in Moscow? Would she and Henry be taken in, hailed as heroes, innocent victims of the seemingly-endless war between Capitalism and Communism?
It was certainly more than the toleration she seemed to get from her foster family. Luckily, no-one at her new school had made the connection to her now-very-famous parents.
And Henry. He had turned hard, like stone, over the last several months. He answered as laconically as possible to any question. He only warmed up slightly more to Paige than he did to anyone else.
It was Henry who had first spotted the gilded cage they lived in.
One day, during the bus ride home, they were at the back of the bus. Henry had nudged Paige's elbow and said, "The grey car."
Confused, Paige shifted, trying to make out the car through the dirty rear window. Sure enough, a nondescript grey Pontiac rolled along, two cars down from the bus. She frowned at Henry. "What about it?"
"Every day, Paige. Same car."
Skeptical, she'd kept an eye out after that, morning and afternoon. She realized that yes, indeed, the same car was often to be seen hovering nearby. When she got on the school bus in the morning to when she got off the school bus in the afternoon, the car stayed a discreet distance from her school, camped out in the parking lot of the warehouse across the street.
When she and Henry would go on their infrequent outings in their foster parents' car, the same vehicle would be trundling along nearby.
Disgustedly, Paige wondered what made the FBI any different from the horror stories of the KGB. An FBI agent had summarily arrested her parents, threatened to murder them. The KGB, she had been told, could break into anybody's house in the Soviet Union and tell a pack of lies about them and consign them to prison for years.
And certainly the KGB followed "persons of interest" around as they pleased, as did the FBI with her and Henry.
What were they afraid of?
The Soviets couldn't be interested in her. She was too obvious a target, either for recruitment or for assassination.
Or—
Could they be afraid she would seek out the Soviets?
The nameless men in the grey car weren't her guardians and protectors. They were gatekeepers. If she should ever do something out of the ordinary, the gun at the back of her head wouldn't be a Russian's.
It would be an American's.
How could she feel like an American citizen if her own country didn't trust her?
Feel free to suggest a title, or just comment. :)
