An Exalted Depravity

By Logan Judy

It all started with the rebellion. Teens in the streets, throwing bricks through every storefront, slashing every tire, and beating any stranger who looked at them twice. Social unrest demanded change at every level of society.

 

But sometimes the solution is worse than the problem. This is the lesson Zak learns after being ripped from his family and thrown into a new society, where hedonism is the highest good and self-control is a vice. There, the cost of doing what is right is finally made clear. Does he have it in him to pay it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Logan Judy
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9798201526436

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An Exalted Depravity

Logan Judy

An Exalted Depravity

Copyright © 2016 by Logan Judy. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Editing by Tony Held and Octavia Stremple, tonyheld.hoboandbrowser.net

Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

Book Layout © 2016 BookDesignTemplates.com

An Exalted Depravity/ Logan Judy.—1st ed.

ISBN 978-0-0000000-0-0

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

―G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

GENESIS

PARANOIA

LUXURY

APATHY

REHABILITATION

EDUCATION

ACCLIMATION

EXPOSURE

ADDICTION

VOIDNESS

DEDUCTION

DUPLICITY

SEDUCTION

ILLICIT

EXPLORATION

EXPERIMENTATION

CONFRONTATION

HYPOCRISY

PROSELYTE

ULTIMATUM

SUNSET

CONQUERED

VICTIM

CLIMAX

DISSENSION

RENEGADE

TRIAL

CHAPTER ONE

GENESIS

There’s a ton of rubble in the streets; you can hear the screams from miles away.

Buildings on fire, glass broken everywhere; people’s homes are being violated, their children taken.

Citizens are calling for the former days of the Pentagon, shedding tears for their children’s blood.

The White House today has called for the execution of all adolescents ages 14-20, citing rebellion, insurrection, and terrorizing and destroying the freedoms of this sovereign country’s loyal citizens.

The President’s order of execution began today, as the National Guard went from house to house and executed the rebels.  Some question the ethics of doing so in front of their parents.

The National Guard is being met with a great deal of resistance from the families of adolescents, who are refusing to give up their children.  They are fighting back with guns and even explosives in some cases.

A band of rebel adolescents attacked a National Guard squadron today, killing three Guardsmen and injuring five more.  The remaining soldiers successfully laid down the 20 rebels.  The President today said this was an act of treason and terrorism that will not be tolerated.  He instituted an anti-terrorism division of the National Guard today, which he named the Civility Corps.  He swore that the remaining rebels will not rest in peace but will be brought to justice.

Congress today passed an ordinance to prevent future widespread terrorism through the Adolescent Peace Act.  At the age of twelve years old, each and every individual will be removed from their respective natural environments in order to receive anti-terrorism education and activism, to continue until the individuals in question have reached twenty years of age.

The government of the United States of America fears widespread rebellion as mothers and fathers across the country have refused to submit their children to the Department of Education’s new year-round facilities. 

National Guard officials reported today that thousands of adolescents have suddenly gone missing from their homes.  Many parents are claiming to know nothing of their children’s disappearance, while others are fully admitting that they have formulated their escape.

We are at the White House live, as the President is delivering a statement.

In order to ensure future security and peace, certain sacrifices must be made.  There is no pleasure without pain.  There is no reward without sacrifice.  There is no liberty without a price.  The price of this generation is our children.  The rebellion that this sovereign nation witnessed at the beginning of this year was not an event lacking cause nor was it a spontaneous generation of strife.  It was a result of a long stream of events which has led us to this very moment.  All adolescents involved in the rebellion have one thing in common: they were isolated in their homes, away from any intervention.  I am here to tell you today, my citizens, that it takes a village to raise a child.  I am not here to tell you that the parents of these children have failed.  They have only failed in that they did not seek the help they so desperately needed.  For no one or two or even three individuals can or should be expected to bring up securely the nurturing and care and direction that a child, bearing so blank a slate, needs for his or her development.  This must be a community project.  This is why I, along with your Congress, have made the painful decision of doing what is necessary.  Our carefully selected chosen staff of development professionals will see to it that this painful series of events never takes place again.  To do that, we need your cooperation.  It is up to you to ensure the safety and security of our nation and our citizens.

PART ONE

ZAK

CHAPTER TWO

PARANOIA

The shaking had to stop.  I knew it.  My parents had told me as much.  My older brother had warned me as well.  But still, here I was, standing in the mall, my hands shaking like I was pumped full of adrenaline.  Maybe it’s because I was—or some other fear-induced hormone—because looking straight at me was a blue-clad police officer, looking suspiciously in my direction.

They gave everyone that look.  I told myself that every time, and every time they eventually turned away, but I still couldn’t help wondering if this time was going to be the time that they stopped; if this was going to be the time that they finally got suspicious enough to investigate.  And if they investigated, my parents went to prison and I got sent straight to a propaganda-infused death trap.  I couldn’t let that happen.

Even as I pulled my gaze away and looked down, walking briskly past the scantily-clad manikins and practically pornographic movie and video game posters, I knew I had held his gaze too long.  I was far too obvious, with my short brown hair and clean-shaven face.  It was too mild, too conservative in a public place where naturally-colored hair was only found on toddlers and designed facial hair was as common as December snow on an evergreen.  I wore no colored contacts on my hazel eyes, no loud and fluorescent graphics on my black t-shirt. 

My older brother had urged me to dye my hair or get a piercing, or do something that would make me stand out less, and my parents would have been supportive of that.  It was about survival, he’d said, not caving to superficial peer pressure.  But I didn’t want to, all the same.  It wasn’t my style, and I would feel fake and artificial trying to conform.  When it came to style, I valued simplicity.  It worked for me, but my unusual appearance combined with my lingering anxious glance at the blue-clad officer was too much, and I knew it.

I walked a little faster, conjuring every ounce of self-control I had to refrain from looking over my shoulder.  I needed to move fast while avoiding the typical identifiers of guilty behavior.  My heart beat in my throat and my breathing rate sped up despite my attempts to calm myself.  I tried to consciously take deep breaths in order to keep the situation from escalating into a race. 

I darted outside and walked briskly back to the mall parking lot, clutching my tablet close to my chest.  The trip wasn’t worth it, I chided myself as I walked back to the car.  E-bookstores existed only for hipsters like me who still liked the experience of looking through media, but it drove me crazy staying in the house.  But as I stepped into the car and turned it on, the jets lifting it into a hovering position, I knew I wouldn’t leave the house again for several days.  It was just too dangerous.

I flew past the towering holographic advertisements, for once not noticing the faulty equalizer that caused my ten-year-old Falcon to fluctuate in height at stoplights.  I changed the digital screen from radio mode to rear view, scanning quickly for any sign of a police car.  The car behind me honked as the light turned green, and I carefully pushed the gas lever forward.

My Falcon was one of the few hybrid cars still in the air, with all recent models being completely electric, so if they wanted to follow me, it would be easy.  I clumsily shifted the screen to rear view again, and breathed a sigh of relief as I saw no police cars in the backdrop.  As my anxiety slowly started to dissipate, I again noted how much more convenient it would be to have a newer model with complete voice command and resolved to make that my goal for career life which could start in three short years.

Three years.  One-thousand and ninety-five days, give or take a few, and I would be able to breathe.  No more looking over my shoulder at the bookstore, no more watching my mirrors with trepidation, no more wearing hoodies in the summer so the officers couldn’t see the youth in my face.  All I had to do was reach twenty years old, and then I’d be free.

It was a bit of an arbitrary distinction, really.  My parents could still be convicted, but if the Department of Education found out right now, before I reached twenty, then they could also be charged with child abuse and inciting a riot, landing them in very hot water, possibly life imprisonment by the time all charges were implemented.  It wasn’t fair, I often told myself, that my parents would meet such a strong penalty for something that was largely my fault.  But the law said what it said, and their radical measures to meet what they believed was best for me was the most sacrificial thing I’d ever known in my life.

Things didn’t start out with confiscation and incarceration, of course.  First they required all private, charter, and home schools to register in the Department of Education.  Then they raised the standards for teachers in each, at penalty of fines and, in extreme cases, a court-mandated school transfer.  It seemed reasonable at the time.  But rising incidences of juvenile delinquency set the legislation leaning further and further towards mandatory attendance. 

Then a homeschooler turned rotten.  Some sixteen-year-old whack job, Jeremy something or other, blew up a county courthouse in New Jersey.  Somehow he managed to pull it off without getting caught at the time, and by the time they had caught him, he succeeded in inciting a statewide riot.

That was all the push they needed.  Homeschooling was outlawed, then the private and charter schools, suffering from being grouped under the same alternative education umbrella as home schools, went out of business by the dozens.  Nobody wanted their families to know their kids weren’t in the proper system.

Eventually the Department of Education combined with the welfare system to provide education and sustenance for orphans.  It became a horrid cycle – less and less people were getting married and children were seen as more and more of a burden which meant a lot more kids were being raised by single parents, or neither parent wanted them.  People were urged to give them up to OrphanCare, as they called it, rather than aborting them.  So it passed, little by little, bit by bit, until it was only a scarce minority that needed to be forced into the Department of Education’s childrearing program.

The mandatory year-round boarding school started at age five, but like many guardians did, my parents sent me to the optional preschool experience when I was four years old.  You could go home every day, talk with your warden about what the experience was like, and the warden in turn took steps to help prepare you to deal with the eventual reality of the public school system.  It was supposed to be a training experience, but I’d had a very different reaction to the experience than many. 

At least I believed it was different.  I still couldn’t fathom how any kid could react positively to what I’d been exposed to, but I was the only one I knew of who had been so horrified.  To think that the same thing happened to every other child, that they were forced to strip in front of each other, to be under the spotlight as a way of acclimating ourselves to each other . . . thirteen years later it still made me nauseous. 

When I came home in tears, telling my parents what I’d been forced to do, I had never seen my father so livid.  At the time, it frightened me.  I was terrified of sleeping alone, so I slept with my parents and brother that night, but my father didn’t come immediately to bed.  I heard several crashes downstairs.  I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I came downstairs the next morning to find our dining room table turned over and the living room end tables in splintered pieces.  He had since told me that he shouldn’t have done that, but it was still scary.  At the time, I wondered if I had done something wrong and what else I could have done in that situation.  As I got older, however, that memory communicated something else to me.  The fact that my father, who was normally so even-tempered, would lash out in that way—it showed me I was important to my father.

My importance was communicated even clearer when my father told me we were moving.  We left the house mostly as it was, only taking absolute necessities.  We adopted aliases, doing everything we could to live outside the growing system of government documentation and so-called accountability, moving every six months to avoid detection.  When we missed the cut-off date for registering for the mandatory boarding school, we had to be even more careful.  Homeschooling was very, very illegal.

I reached my family’s subdivision just as the sun was beginning to set.  Our home looked very similar to others on the outside, with a chevron-patterned blue and green paintjob and a black mahogany door along with several windows on the front of the house.  Realistic holograms occupied the front lawn of every home, although my mother had kept ours to a few simple garden gnomes.  In a couple weeks, she would install a winter-themed hologram, with Santa, elves, and reindeer, much to my Grinch-like father’s chagrin.

The large wooden door creaked as I stepped inside.  The wonderful greasy smell of bacon reached my nostrils about the time I set my tablet on the dining room table.  I walked into our small kitchen to greet my mother.  I leaned in to the pancakes cooking on the skillet, taking in the scent of frying batter for a few moments before she yanked me away from it. 

Do I need to install a security gate in the doorway? she threatened. 

She smiled more than she would have admitted and I chuckled before heading back into the living room.  My dad wasn’t home yet, probably because he was still out looking for a job.  We had only been in Seattle for a couple of months, and he had just last week finished making all of his documents appear official and legal.  He had once looked for work that wouldn’t require government documentation but that had led him to some very dark paths in work that was unethical as well as illegal, so he backed out as quickly as he could. 

Dad was good with numbers.  He’d been a top-notch accountant before they started homeschooling me, a job that Dad usually described as fudging numbers for the government.  The tax code was so complicated that it took them a six-month period to file everything, and it usually involved coming up with realistic numbers for required items of record that no company kept track of because it simply wasn’t practical. 

These days, he usually tried to work freelance as a stock-market broker, although he was worried that someone might catch onto him if he showed up in different cities always doing the same job with the same haircut and the same style business card.  He switched it up every few moves.  This was one of those times that he needed to switch it up, and things weren’t going too well so far.  But I wasn’t worried.  We always managed to find something.

I took a quick peek through our curtains