Humans with Free Will (4)
A man arrived from the center. Not just any senator, but the chairman of the MEGA Special Committee no less.
Dominic Habsburg. When Erisa Karan first heard the name of this noble from the Primus Arm, it stirred nothing in her. Of course not. Nobody on Forge even knew the names of senators. Hell, hardly anyone even knew what the Senate was.
The only important names here were Governor Victor Grayburn and the factory bosses. Those were the ones who decided wages, quotas, pay cuts, and firings.
Habsburg arrived on Forge a few days after Erisa had muttered, "Is there any hope?"
A small senator's shuttle entered orbit, but Grayburn didn't think much of it. Politicians from the center? Just roll out the red carpet, feed them some bullshit, and send them packing. For forty years, he'd pulled that routine on every inspector and busybody, and no one had touched him because the planet was a backwater and the production numbers were solid anyway. So he figured this was just another WWE performance—Wrestling With Ears, all talk for the central folks.
But Habsburg wasn't there for a reception. He skipped the governor's office entirely, landing in the industrial zones with just two aides. He toured Factory District 14, District 9, District 2, inspecting the insides himself.
"Damn... His Majesty the Emperor should see this."
He peeked into workers' dorms, sampled the rations, measured air pollution levels, checked the medical facilities. And then he met Erisa Karan.
Or more precisely, he met her father, Karan Evan—a 54-year-old man wheezing on an oxygen tank in the dorm next to hers in District 14.
Habsburg stood in that room for three minutes. According to his aide, his jaw muscles were clenched the whole time.
Then he turned to Erisa. "I'll cover all treatment costs. We'll move him to the center. The Imperial Medical Center on Terra can cure him."
Erisa couldn't react for a long moment. It didn't make sense. A central noble senator footing the bill for the father of some nameless welder in a numbered factory district on a numbered planet? What, some fairy tale from the old days?
"Why?" she asked. "Why help like this? I'm nobody."
Habsburg replied. The 110-year-old's eyes burned with an unnaturally youthful fire.
"Because a conscience that doesn't act might as well be on the side of evil."
It was a short sentence. But its weight pressed down on Erisa's chest.
"I've sat in the Senate for thirty years. It was a flowerpot. His Majesty said so himself. A flowerpot. Yeah... No matter how emotionally I barked that I hated it, any politician with a shred of reason had to admit it was true if they weren't an idiot. Something that looks nice but does nothing. I didn't want to be just another pretty flower growing in that pot."
Habsburg gazed out the narrow dorm window at the red sky beyond—the eternal twilight forged by smog and heavy metals.
"So I came to the place that seemed to need help most, to help the people who needed it most."
Erisa shook her head. She couldn't grasp it. A central noble worrying about a backwater welder? A senator personally dropping into an industrial dorm? It defied the laws of the world she'd known for twenty-two years.
"I don't get it. What's this MEGA Special Committee? What's the Senate even? That's all just stories from some far-off world to me."
Habsburg's expression shifted—the nod of someone who'd expected exactly that answer.
"Just as His Majesty said."
It was a mutter, but Erisa heard it. He stared into space for a moment.
"Gotta show it through actions from here on."
Then he looked back at her. "His Majesty favors those who act and praises those who work. As you know, his edicts and speeches have made that public, so following them isn't loyalty—it's just right."
His voice dropped, wary of eavesdroppers. "But the frontier worlds don't seem interested. You can feel it right here."
He was right. Governor Grayburn had brushed off the emperor's reforms with a single bureaucratic platitude and ignored them. That one line had crushed the hopes of eight billion people.
"So... what are you going to do?" Erisa heard herself ask, the words slipping out despite her earlier dismissal as "far-off tales."
Habsburg answered. "'Watch,' I suspect, is what His Majesty is doing now."
"Watch?"
"Testing those who take the exam, those who refuse and ignore it—and testing what we senators can achieve in this state. I realized that and came running."
He met Erisa's eyes squarely. "If you want, you can board my shuttle with your father and head to the center. What do you say?"
Erisa's heart pounded. The center meant Terra, and it had to be better than here. Plus, free nanite treatments to cure her father—something she couldn't afford even after saving thirty-one years of wages. One senator's offer had opened that door.
But.
"But... what about everyone left behind?"
Her voice trembled with unexpected concern for those around her. Her fellow workers in District 14, the ones beside her on the welding line filling quotas. The people in the dorm halls exchanging tired smiles, bumping shoulders in the ration line. All of them mattered.
They had no nanites, no shuttle to the center, no visiting senators. If she left alone, what about the rest?
Habsburg smiled. "Then act."
"As I said, a conscience that doesn't act might as well be on the side of evil. If you still have faith in His Majesty, prove it with actions born of that conscience. He won't ignore it—He'll see it right away."
Erisa bit her lip. 'Actions born of conscience to prove loyalty.' The words burned into her mind.
'Faith in the Emperor...?'
The hope she'd felt briefly from his speech. The rage when the governor's notice crushed it. What if she turned that rage into action?
"I've seen it," Habsburg said at last, his voice carrying near-reverence. "His Majesty personally opening and reading every letter that poured in from across the empire's domains. Buried in paperwork, sleepless, He read each one—frontier grievances, central bills, no distinction."
Erisa's eyes widened. "He... really watches over us?"
"He does. And He'll act."
Habsburg stood, his silhouette against the red sky through the window momentarily overlapping the emperor's from the hologram.
"He'll descend like an angel leading the host."
And with that, Habsburg left. Erisa couldn't see his shuttle warp out of Forge's orbit, but she could see what he'd left behind.
'A conscience that doesn't act might as well be on the side of evil.'
Erisa returned to her dorm and stared into the silent room, piled with stillness.
'It's great if I get better... but what about everyone else?'
District 14 alone had 120,000 factory workers. Across the planet, eight billion fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters breathed the same air, inhaled the same dust, caught the same diseases, marched toward the same deaths.
People who could be saved with one nanite treatment died for lack of money, insurance, or because the governor slashed budgets.
Erisa reached under her bed. Her fingers touched cold metal.
A pistol.
"..."
She'd never fired it, hoped she never would. But change didn't come easy—she felt that now.
'You need power.'
Like the emperor. Like that senator. Like the governor.
So what power did she have left? Her struggle for freedom.
That is, the violence to make it possible.
Erisa had no choice but to pull out the pistol.
'A conscience that doesn't act might as well be on the side of evil.'
She tucked it inside her work suit and headed for Sergei Holm, boss of Factory 3 in District 14.
The 68-year-old middle manager in the munitions conglomerate's subcontract chain ruled this factory like Grayburn ruled the planet—a miniature tyrant squeezing every drop.
He jacked quotas, cut wages, embezzled safety budgets, and had mid-level supervisors "quietly" handle complainers.
When Erisa arrived, Holm was at it again. Three workers who'd missed quotas were surrounded by four supervisors, beaten with electric batons.
No one had objected in forty years. It was routine, normal. And they knew humans weren't wired to accept it meekly.
So they crushed the weaker with their monopoly on force. And sometimes that force came from numbers.
Holm watched from his chair in the glass-partitioned control room, sipping coffee, basking in superiority from on high, greedily stuffing his gut while suppressing dissent.
His Majesty worked harder than any such power deserved, yet here this pig lounged.
The workers' screams drowned in machine noise, but nearby lines flinched visibly, heads stubbornly turned away.
Erisa saw it all. For six years, she'd flinched and moved on.
Today, she wouldn't turn away.
Swish—screech!
Gripping the pistol in her pocket, she shoved open the control room door with her left hand.
"What the— you? Story over already? Wait, this area's off-limits to workers—"
"FOR THE EMPEROR!!"
Erisa's shout filled the room—six years of bottled rage and her fresh resolve exploding out.
BANG!
"Guhk..."
Holm's head snapped back; his coffee mug shattered on the floor. Brown liquid spread.
For a split second, it could have been coffee or blood. Then it was clearly blood.
Holm slumped from the chair, still.
Through the control room glass, the production line stretched. Machines didn't stop, but every human did.
Workers stared up at the control room. Supervisors froze with batons raised. The three beaten men on the floor lifted their heads.
Silence.
'I... can do something?'
She could. She could. Because she'd used overwhelming force, like the dead man here.
And the silence broke—not with Erisa's voice.
A worker from Line D Block grabbed a wrench and yelled.
"FOR THE EMPEROR!!!"
That cry sparked flames that spread everywhere.
"Wh-what the hell?! Back to your stations!!"
"Wh-what about that bitch?!"
"Fuck... didn't bring my gun."
"D-don't chicken out!! Kyaaak!!!"
Wrenches, hammers, welding torches rose. Supervisors dropped batons and stumbled back.
To subdue hundreds of thousands of workers, mid-managers numbered only thousands, hundreds at most. They'd thought batons enough—and by the time they realized their mistake, it was too late.
One by one, holes bloomed in their heads.
"LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!! LONG LIVE GOVERNOR ERISA!!"
Everyone chanted the emperor's name—and hers, the one who'd lit the powder keg.
"Ah...!"
Erisa knew she'd never forget this day. An inexplicable thrill coursed through her, too vivid to erase.
And the revolution began.