Honor of the Fallen

Chapter 6

The floor that swallowed him spits him out into a new room.

The screen plays clips over and over, from every angle. He is chained to the floor. He is chained to the podium. He is chained to the walls. He is clothed only in chains.

He stands in the middle of the mighty Coliseum of Justice. He hears news commentators focusing on every piece of his anatomy and deviant personality from every news, gossip, talk and trash show on the net. Stripped n***d and on display again in front of all of justice, and peers, and the Empire, and the Nobility, and the Emperor.

Tragically, the beautiful girl bares witness to it all at the Emperor's side, chained to her position, muzzled as silent witness and hostage. He cannot look at her. He cannot see her. He cannot draw attention to her... the one he has pledged his soul to protect. He can't, if he does he will draw his shame onto her.

He knows this is ripping her to pieces, as she sits silent and still.

The Emperor slams his hammer of doom before pronouncing his fate. His was now the fate of an arrested, humiliated and judged s*x offender. The fate of an arrested, humiliated half-man, and charged with lewd conduct. The fate of an arrested and shamed man, drummed out of service as an oath breaker and coward...

"You will burn in the underworld for this! Your name is now and forever John Smith! You will die as John Smith! Should anyone ever be fool enough to procreate with you they too shall carry your name of shame and dishonor! Were your parents alive they would feel your shame and stain too! So be it forever recorded in the records of the Empire!"

John Smith woke. He didn't bother opening his eyes.

The chaos that swirled in his mind was the symptom of a guilty man's crime that only a moral man could feel, in his fall. Shame and failure was his to bare. The only honorable escape from his prison is death in combat, from old age or starvation. Or very rarely with a death redeemed.

Only cowards and weaklings picked suicide... Suicide was the only way to dishonor the name of ultimate dishonor, because not only was one flawed enough to earn the loss of name and honor, but too cowardly to face their own moral corruption.

Until then the honorless and nameless hell, was his prison. 'John Smith', the name of the Empire's honorless untouchables, was his...

1)

John Smith opened his eyes, and groaned. It wasn't the worst dream he had, but it certainly was the most common.

His head rolled to the right, across his pillow, 0559, changed to 0600, and his alarm went off. With a sigh he pressed the button killing the noise. He trailed his hand up the c***k toward the wall mounted light switch. Still in the dark he followed the c***k in the ragged wall to the wall notch and over to his switch.

The cheap overhead light fixtures flickered on, in his interior apartment room. 'Interior' was a nice way of advertising a miserable cave with no windows, a single door and miniature six leg co-tenants, that only tolerated his presence.

One of his co-tenants stared at him from his knee.

The roach turned to face him as its feelers twitched and tiny head turned this way and that. "What a jacked up way to start the day, after a miserable night," John sighed as he flicked the roach, with a finger, sending it flying across the room. There was no point hopping out of bed and running over to smash it, there was probably another one in his shoes anyway.

"I wonder if any of the filthy 'humans' living in this building even bother to poison these things," John asked himself, as he shook out his shoes... "Good! No surprises this morning. The day is looking up already..."

John pulled pieces of clothing from, where he had left them the night prior on the foot-board of his bed and dressed for his morning workout. With his towel on the floor, he finished a lengthy battery of crunches, leg lifts and back work. He moved to some free weights and then pushed his cheap couch against the entertainment unit.

The twelve by twenty prison cell the advertisement called an 'apartment' included the bed, dining area, kitchenette, entertainment nook and bathroom. How the designers crammed all that together on a set of plans and finished their day saying to themselves, 'yeah that will work', was beyond John's comprehension. Nothing fit anywhere and he could not move anywhere without bumping into something. He dreaded the shower, most of all.

His fold out 'efficiency' table that served as the 'dining area', left an interesting question of 'what to do with the chairs,' when the table was collapsed up into the wall. Like everything else about his apartment, it was listed as 'seating four', but those four child size people would be crowded, or would need to eat in shifts if they wanted to have room for any food on the table, with them. The one chair he used faced the door, through the kitchen. It was enough, for his lonely world, and his Spartan meals.

Across the far edge of the table as he would have sat facing the door rested one of the last remnants of his previous life. It was the only remnant, which he kept in the rattrap apartment.

The consummate 'ant', John Smith was a planner and a saver. He stored, stocked, horded all the essential resources and tools he could ever need. He had done it for decades, in preparation for 'winter'. It was a product of his early years when preparation was the difference between survival and 'not'. He consumed only enough to stay alive and maintain his physical requirements, everything else was saved.

While John loved the good things in life, his present circumstances were not enough to permit luxuries. There was no point in depleting horded resources on luxuries that were not required to improve his odds of survival.

In his new life, he woke up every morning at the same time, worked out, buried himself in work, and when he came to the apartment he worked out again until he needed another shower in the evening. He then read free publications, before sleep. It was a simple life for a man whose requirements had become very simple.

John's 'winter' had come. This unexpected winter had nothing to do with calendar seasons and was approaching its fifth month. He knew it could last the rest of his life.

His hand reached across the tiny fold out table. It closed firmly over the black mass of steel and leather, real hand wrapped leather, not the cheap imitation stuff.

At thirty-four 'Earth-standard' years old, his last twenty-nine years had honed his spirit, mind, and body, in repetitive, precise training and brutal application.

The blade sung as it leapt from its scabbard. The precise movement of the steel. The whistle of the very air parting. The weight and feel of the tool of war masters in his hands, made him remember he was alive.

It made him remember that he had once been 'alive', and not always just another disgraced 'John Smith'.

For as long as he could remember he had loved that sound; the music of a fresh drawn blade. Hearing that sound in the morning made it worth waking up.

Before he started his real work, something nearly forgotten nagged at the back of his mind, and abruptly ended his sword play... With an irritated flourish he spun and whipped the blade around and slapped it home in the scabbard.

Pulling his comm, from the tangle of harnesses and equipment his current trade required. John opened his calendar and flipped through the irritating windows of advertisements plugged into his 'free' comm. "I need to just suck it up and get a real comm one of these days; I'm tired of deleting all this crap every morning before I can work. I can't even tell what time it is through all this nonsense." His aggravation ebbed as he bored to the bottom of the daily barrage.

He was not late for any appointments. The boss hadn't called any last minute meetings. There were no projects due other than the standard surveillance, and the field work was done on that. Just paperwork remained to close out that one job.

Then he saw the date, and said to himself, "Happy late birthday old man. Thirty five and I'm so old I forget my own birthday. Idiot... What the hell am I complaining about, not like I had any plans anyway. Just another day in the life..."

The comm clattered to the table, and the blade sung into the air.

John stepped into the 'close form' he was working that morning. Legs bent and low to the ground he worked the lower body strength and isometrics to maintain his form and physical conditioning.

2)

What wasn't advertised in the ads for his apartment was that the tram maintenance terminal was housed in the lower floors, of the next building over from his.

The constant traffic didn't bother John. He had no window for trams to thunder past, in the middle of the night, so noise was irrelevant from a standard of living viewpoint. However it made finding an open seat easy.

Through all the centuries of human media, print media still existed in paper form. Apparently general news, corporate sports teams and event information still needed to be displayed in tactile form, even after thousands of years. It could also have to do with the theft of vid screens from the public transportation system, which made the print medias important.

John could only stare at a comm for so long, reading news before his eyes started to hurt. There was no point wearing out the comm's finite battery life, with something as trivial as which team won whatever sport the night before.

Then there was the added incentive print media had - no one had figured out how to insert annoying pop-up advertisements into paper pages... yet.

He had two purposes for his morning news purchase. The first was to collect the sales offers and save them for later. The second and more important was to insulate his bottom from the early morning condensation that formed on the interior of the trams at his apartment's level.

The 'weather section' was the first section assigned to go to that particular mission. John often asked himself 'what is the point of a weather section when it is always foggy'. The rhetorical question was yet another of his menial morning rituals. The paper said it had rained the night prior, but that didn't really matter to him, he didn't have a window and the tram stop was covered.

The tram inched through the faded brown and yellow advertising banners hung every few feet from every building and available centimeter of space that was not allocated to traffic and vehicular use. Were it not a violation of the Emperor's law to hang banners in to the sky ways and tram lines, some unscrupulous corporate boss would hang signs over the signs and out into the air arteries. Traffic was dangerous enough with so many idiots flying their own skimmers. Add obstacles to the mix and the broken and scuffed signs that insulated the sides of buildings from the reality outside their warm confines would see no end of idiots crashing themselves into signs, buildings, and each other.

Somewhere far above in the clean air some lucky person could see the sun this morning.

The sun would not penetrate down to John's level of the world until just before noon, when it broke the man-made canyon walls between the buildings, and shown directly down the airway. At least until the sunlight reached the mist. There it would evaporate a little of its mass until the sun moved on to bigger and better things elsewhere on the world, leaving the vast majority of the mists unmoved.

With his back straight and off the wet cushion behind him, and his bottom dry on the 'weather' section, John could engage in another hobby of his, 'people watching'. He always worked his way to the back of the tram where he could watch the comings and goings of fellow travelers. John liked being one of the first on the tram for the morning commute. He also liked keeping his back to a wall, but he didn't like dwelling on that personality quirk or the cause for it.

This morning he observed that one of his few fellow travelers had finally caught on to his 'paper and dry bottom' trick. The traveler was already seated and luxuriating in the small comfort, when John entered the tram. There weren't many comforts at their level of society. Dry pants were one small comfort that was apparently catching on, thanks to John.

The tram rapidly filled with additional riders. At every stop John was more and more crowded in his back seat, but it was better than having all those strangers pressing in on all sides and breathing down his neck. John hadn't liked having people behind him for as long as he could accurately remember. After the last decade and a half of his life, he hated it. He was getting better but was still uncomfortable with people behind him.

The press of unwashed humanity flowed in and out of the tram over his hour plus commute. It was enough to drive him to distraction. The back seat in the corner kept him relatively sane on the way to his insane 'job'.

You could not hold your breath for the entire hour long commute to avoid the stench of packed people, or the coughed, sneezed, and farted germs that fellow passengers competed to produce in quantity and share at an alarming rate. John wiped the corner of his eyes for the thousandth time on the five months of his work commute, with his every day clean cloth. He removed the disgusting garbage that collected at the corners of his eyes. His nano filled body fought off and slaughtered, what his 'little mechanical friends' considered a biological weapons attach.

John felt the press of bodies on the tram increasing on his knees and side.

The air got thicker with perspiration and exhale the longer he remained on the claustrophobic commuter t*****e chamber.

He finally snapped and tortured himself by checking how much longer he had shaking back and forth in the early morning cocktail of humanity. Twenty seven more stops.

He was less than one third of the way to work. It wasn't even a very long trip, but sixty to ninety seconds at every stop, plus travel time between made it purgatory.