I had seen Officers use injector pens before. Six inches long and thick, the pens could be easily concealed in the hand when approaching someone, but everyone knew the Officers carried them. That was the main reason why few fought back when confronted by an Officer. Those who did were off their pills, and no longer cared to maintain the status quo. A few weeks before I left the Colony, I ran into a woman on the monorail who had stopped all her pills at once, and she had had a haunted, hunted look about her I now knew too well. She’d been careless, though, and I wasn’t the only one who heard her talking about the pills. The screen at the front of the train car picked up her words and sounded an alarm. Officers waited for her at the next platform. When she wouldn’t go quietly, they used an i
