Hoods and Bots: Part One by Irena Szirtes - inspired by a '555' prompt -

  “They passed Lester’s, the coffee shop on Eighty-fourth where Robert used to take Grace for breakfast sometimes before school.”

 The fifth line of the fifth page of the fifth chapter of “The Horse Whisperer” by Nicholas Evans

credit Canva-Irena Szirtes

In honour of Wilhelm Imiołczyk, whose name I've taken for this story.

In the living hell of WW2 Poland, his forged papers saved lives.

Hoods and Bots: Part One

     It began with Veganuary, and ended with Bubonic Plague. Struggle for political power waxed violent in the wake of WW3, and every civil liberty lay assassinated by 2043. A third of the UK population shared their grave, before the 2080 plague was anywhere near halted.

   “Despicable Bot!” I thought, eyeballing the Greenshirt, the Regime officer cradling a Cappuccino by the cafe window. I watched him savour the fear his presence spawned as customers sloshed through the footbath, before selecting a table as far from him as possible.  Even non-Resistance called Greenshirts ‘Bots’, after chat bots of the 2010s, the ones that only answered pre-selected questions in pre-programmed ways. But Regime Bots were malicious as well as blinkered. It struck me he might be a groper too: it was just a gut feeling, but I’d learned to trust those long ago. 

  “A man whose integrity's so small,” I thought, “there’s a cavern for his giant ego.”  But I shuddered. I wouldn’t want to find myself in his interview room. I wondered how many tortured souls he’d forced to confess real or imagined crimes, crimes against a dictator who decreed plague-bearing rats had more rights than any human being.

   As the Bot noticed my expression sour, I pretended to stare through the window behind him, at rats running the street, in and out drains, up and down drainpipes, over people’s feet. Cars couldn’t avoid them, and the crushed were soon fought-over fast-food for hungry comrades.  I hated seeing so many rats, hated coming to town, but it was necessary evil: I had my mission to fulfil.

Still, I longed to be home, out in the ailing forest, with the combat dog and rat-pack I wasn’t supposed to own. While the rest of Europe found ways to tackle climate change with increasing success, the Animal Rights Regime had their own ways to wreck our ecosystem, along with the centuries-old partnership between mankind, farm stock and horses.

“Come on, Mia,” I told myself, “Chill! No point a Hood drawing attention to herself. You know you’re too young to die!”  I never used to be so careless, so openly defiant, never used to grapple with such strong emotions. I once calmly accepted Resistance life for what it was, content to play my part, but betrayal trauma had changed me. Best return my gaze to my oat milk Spanish latte. 

   Like all outlets, Cameron’s sold only vegan food. We took venison, and sometimes feral pork, but it had to be stored, cooked and eaten in our underground complexes deep in the Gloucestershire forest. Ordinary citizens bought it on our black market, usually prepared and cooked, to make detection of their crimes less likely.

    As my attention shifted back to coffee, the Greenshirt scanned my identity chip from his seat, so I flashed a cheeky smile at him. I was actually smiling at spiteful speculation his bits and brain were no doubt small as his integrity, and crowing over my superior Resistance technology. Some of Britain’s finest scientific minds were double agents and had developed the wafer-thin devices we stitched into our clothing and controlled with our phones. While it was invisible to the Regime system, it enabled us to locate Bots within a five-mile radius, and could override our chips with false identities, generating fake records to back them up at one touch. We’d got many key figures and persecuted citizens safely to Europe and beyond, using new identities.

    A rat rapped the window, another scrabbled the outside wall, but they couldn’t get through metal reinforcements girding the building like flood defences. Tappity-tap, tap, tap. My contact was late, and I was trying to make my coffee last. I held it under my nose, trying to breathe its sweet scent, because a barista was sloshing fresh disinfectant into the footbath.  I began to sweat. I hadn’t been as careful as I once would have been, and the continued presence of the Bot made me uneasy.  He seemed to be lingering, casting odd glances toward me, sometimes a leery apology for a smile. Creepy. Tap, tappity-tap. I held my nerve and ordered a sandwich, though I felt quite sick. Where was my contact?  

   A sudden rainstorm scattered the rats, but they began re-emerging, scrabbling and scratting, the instant it eased. Our spies had chanced on classified information: the Regime was considering a U-turn, the use of rat poison. This was not because Bubonic Plague had wreaked death, agony and heartbreak, but because the Regime feared its own downfall. Anger had run high, ordinary citizens had organised gatherings and riots; there were even arson attacks on parliament and civic buildings throughout the country. Of course, the Regime blamed the Resistance, circulating media headlines such as ‘Hooded Hooligans hold country to ransom,’ or ‘Hooded Hooligans Hamper Hopes of Peaceful Settlement.’  Benson Parry, like any dictator, declared he was right when he was wrong, and invariably found someone else to blame. He failed to acknowledge mandatory veganism had starved the earth of organic fertiliser and conservation grazing; that substituted chemicals depleted soil quality further; that the land was either overgrown or dead, and that yields from single-crop fields were fast diminishing. Nor would he admit he’d been wrong to ban rat-packs for vermin control. Ironic! Terriers could kill scores of rats within minutes - instantly by a single shake - but the Regime was now considering poisons to disintegrate rats from the inside out. I sighed and ordered another coffee. I was beginning to think my contact had scratched, but he finally appeared, sloshing through the footbath and metal detector as it sounded the all-clear.

   I hadn’t anticipated the chemistry between us but suppressed any impulse to flirt. Since discovering my ex-husband Frank was a serial philanderer, my opinion of men had taken a nose-dive. Besides, my fellow-Hood and I had our parts to play, pretending we’d met to haggle prices for bags of puny, but rare and precious orchard-grown apples. We still talked in code after the Bot left. It’s true an increasing number of citizens were finally joining opposition to a Regime which banned the culling of deer, yet made people disappear faster than Bubonic Plague ever did. Vegans were ditching evangelistic zeal and beginning to agree we need a world where everyone is free to follow conscience and calling. But many were still infused with Regime misinformation, and opinions were rarely shared openly. Propaganda was relentless, and fear of reprisal, more relentless still.