Revenge14 min read
Sweet Dream, Sour Truth
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I woke to the same metallic chair and the same cool rail under my palms. The speaker in the corner sang in that syrupy voice I’d heard all my life.
“Dear citizen of the Free World, system notice: you have been awake for thirty minutes. Please enjoy Sweet Dream and avoid unpleasant emotions. Enjoy the pleasures of the Free World.”
I rolled my fingertips over the chair’s arm like a man testing a new tool. “Pleasures of the Free World?” I muttered, so quiet no one would think me awake.
On the locker by the door a bottle waited—pink, smooth plastic, a famous face grinning from the label: Victoria Sokolov holding the same bottle, perfect teeth and perfect hair. The word Sweet Dream curved across it in bubbly script.
“You’ll be fed only after ingestion,” the voice had said on training day. I knew the law the way we all knew the factory shift. I opened the bottle without thinking and swallowed the pink. Warm happiness crawled up my throat and settled like molasses.
I smiled because the muscles in my face went that way now. It felt like smiling had always meant something and I did it because everyone else did; a pattern. The feeling settled heavy and slow, and for a while I forgot the thought I’d had the moment I opened my eyes.
At the factory, I pushed blobs of processed starch—our main ration—into trays. My partner elbowed me in the ribs. “Ulrich, you look tired. Come on, brother, take a beer. Go to the Pleasure Hall tonight. Victoria has a new episode.” Dale Cochran’s joke came out bright and quick. I’d known Dale since orientation; he laughed like the pills had taught him how.
“Maybe,” I said, the word too small for the ache that pressed behind my eyes.
“Listen to me,” Dale said. “You’re working too hard. One night out with a few beers, a Victoria show—nothing ails you. You’ll see.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be like Dale, smiling with the crowd and never seeing anything behind the screens. But there was a small stone under my tongue, some stubborn grain that made me pricky when he talked about the Pleasure Hall and Victoria like saints.
That evening the towers glowed with Victoria’s face in a hundred angles, and I walked among neighbors whose teeth flashed, eyes blank with the same inner glow. We all moved like a single machinery; voices hushed and harmonious. On a whim I went to the beverage depot. The line hummed with muted contentment. Dale stood in the end with two sacks of beer.
I stepped forward. “Dale—” I said.
He turned. His gaze slid past me, like he was looking through the air. “Hi,” he mouthed, but the words never landed. His head tilted as if he was reading a distant script. Then his face clamped back into the practiced smile.
Something inside me snapped, a little mechanism that had never been used before. For the third time that day I heard a phrase that didn’t fit the hymn.
“Washing,” a voice said, low and bitter, like someone dragging a spoon over a cracked bowl.
I scanned the room. Only the contented crowd and the glitter of the screens. Still the voice came, and then—
“I’m your conscience,” the voice said, and it belonged to a creature with two feet and a rat’s snout. It sat under the Pleasure Hall exit, a hulking rat in a patched vest. Its fur had a stripe of scar where the skin failed; teeth like chisels.
“You’re a rat,” I whispered, which was the most adult sentence I could manage.
“Call me Father,” it said with a puff of smoke. “Call me whatever keeps your mouth from turning into that brand of joy.”
“It’s—” I tried. “It’s Sweet Dream. It—it’s what we are supposed to take. People—Victoria—”
“Victoria,” the rat laughed, a wind of paper. “Yes. Victoria—the star. The mouthpiece. The smile that hides the gears. Throw that beer away and come with me.”
My hand shook around the beer sack like I’d been given a live thing. I did what the puppet inside me wanted, not what the smiling face wanted. I dumped the beer in a drain and followed the rat—Father—around the towers, along the shadowed side of Building Five. He told me the drain lid to lift, the moment the wall camera would look the other way. He moved with surprising strength and swiftness, shoved the lid aside and lowered himself, then stopped and said, “You in or out, boy? You ready to stop being a puppet?”
I did not know. My mouth tasted like sugar and guilt in turns. I breathed down and dropped.
Below, sewage pipes became tunnels, and tunnels became a secret city. Father kept talking. “The Free World is a machine of forgetting. They made a drug—Sweet Dream—and a screen—Victoria—and they built a state that smiles. If you wake, they call you a traitor and send you to the Adjustment. If you survive the Adjustment, you come back a perfect smile to fit a perfect life. If you don’t survive, they turn you into a rat and throw you out beyond the Wall.”
He spat the last word like an old coin. He said the Adjustment was a place with white coats and machines that scrubbed sentences and memories and left only the obedient face.
“So what are you?” I asked. The rat had skin like stitched leather on one ear. It winked.
“An accident,” Father said. “A clock that refused to stop.” He spat again and produced a cigarette lighter and a toothpick-sized wooden stick with cloth at the end—the old-smoke kind. He set it with care and inhaled. “Come on. You’ll see the real world.”
They called the underground people “mice” and “rats.” They called the rulers of the underground an empire with a golden throne and a blind god of teeth. I met soldiers who kissed Father’s boots and begged for death when he pointed. I saw the emperor’s hall carved from the rock like a shrine to gold—that same gold, strangely, gleaming like toothpaste over decay.
“Why do they kneel?” I asked when one of Father’s hardened allies told me to lower my voice.
“Because fear grows like mold. You kneel to grow or to survive,” the man—Karter Bacon—said. He wore armor wrong and had a white stripe across his nose. “We kneel to learn who to trust.”
At the gate, soldiers with silver armor and white fur bowed until their iron knees scraped the stone. The Emperor’s voice came from a darkness under the throne. I could feel it like a cold wind rather than hear it. “Honored General Freeman,” the dark voice intoned, “you have returned triumphant. What news?”
Father—who called himself, painfully, Freeman Bates—spoke to the dark like a man who had written his own oaths for the emperor to sign. He told tales of riots that were made up and of traitors executed. He told them I was a waking man and asked for death or exile as suited.
The Emperor decided in a voice that sounded like a thousand coins spilled into a well: “Exile to the mines. He will work and die with the others.”
He nodded at me like a landlord. “Send the new believer to the mines,” said the voice. The guards took me. They left Father a step back and a clenched hand full of dirt.
They put me in a truck with nine others. The truck rattled on a road that sounded like an old machine trying to keep itself upright. Men, rats, a few who still looked human and wore the color of old uniforms. When they threw us out, they beat us. A man in an embroidered coat—Avery Christian—laughed as people were shot as if a new instrument tuned to fun.
In the pit, I found names carved into rock and blood like water. I crashed a hammer against stone and found a slit in the wall. I fell through. Below, a torch revealed a face I knew as if from an old photograph—Remy Andre. He said, “We meet again,” and his voice slid into something else: a recording, a prophecy, a memory.
“Which brother?” I asked, because his face had the size and the gravity of both brothers I’d seen hanged by the mines.
“Both,” he said. “And neither. Names are costumes; we choose what fits the work.”
Remy spoke like a trick. He said the truth: the Free World began after famine and war, when governments fed people synthetic starch and a drug and called it a new dawn. They set up the Hero—Victoria—and they made the drug mandatory for those who accepted the new life. The drug dulled hunger and pain and made smiles real to the people using them. The others, the dissenters, were made into something else—rats with names and tiny societies in the tunnels.
“You woke,” Remy said. “That makes you dangerous and useful.”
Then he showed me the mountain top where the Free World sat in a ring of walls, fifteen high, fifteen unforgiving. Around them, the land was dead. “This is all we have,” he said, and his eyes went distant. I could not tell if he grieved or planned. He kept talking of cycles and seeds, and I felt myself swept in and out of truth.
Sometimes Victoria’s face swept across the horizon like the sun. Sometimes Father’s rough laugh warmed me. Mostly I felt carried—by ideology, by scent, by the tug of memory. I began to dream the old life as a wound: soldiers in yellow hats charging through smoke; bodies falling; men with metal helmets screaming. The scenes came unannounced and stayed until they burned their place into me like a brand.
In the underground we learned that the Emperor’s fury had many faces: greed disguised as governance, ritual as truth. Men whose breath smelled of metal told us that the "Adjustment" was a state process to remove pain and curiosity. The Free World’s rulers had sold the world a vaccine and a lie; they had swapped pain for compliance.
We trained in the caves. We buried the dead. We learned to make tools of scrap. The more I moved among them, the less the Pleasure Hall’s smile looked like joy.
“We must strike,” Freeman said one night, the red torchlight making his scars like maps. “We will take the mines, then the city.”
I believed him until we marched and found confusion: a crowd in the sanctuary eating a can—a single can—and turning on the man who had held it like a god. They tore him apart. They chewed and fought for scraps as if hunger had baked them into beasts. I saw eyes that had been mild flick into predatory light. I saw bodies, once neighbors, become cannibals under stress.
“Why?” I cried, and Father answered, “Because hunger is a terrible mirror. It shows you what you are willing to be.”
He did not seem regretful. He seemed resolute.
Then a week later I stood in a hall where the Emperor sat like a stone and we were bringing evidence to a throne. A guard—Karter Bacon—proclaimed, “He must be sent to the mines.” The emperor’s voice folded into the room. “Do it.”
I looked at the crowd: soldiers in silver armor, farmers in torn coats, children with salted hair. I thought of Victoria’s smile on the tower. I thought of the drug in the bottle. I thought of the moment when Father had told me to throw away the beer and come with him.
After the mines and the fights and the hunger, it came to this: we took the tunnels because the Free World could not see below its smile. The underground people came out and the walls trembled with an unheard roar; people saw shadows move where the rim of the Pleasure Hall had been.
The public downfall came later, and it was not clean.
The night we brought the Emperor down, the cave was full. We had dug out the square under the palace and made it our stage. There were thousands—miners, workers from factories, the ones who worked the daytime shifts that kept the Free World shining, the very people who smiled when they saw Victoria. They watched from shadows and scaffolds. The silver guards formed lines that shivered like fish.
We dragged the golden idol, the statue that had sat in the Free World’s central plaza—Victoria’s likeness etched into gold—and set it on a stone slab in the open, while above a cracked speaker still tried to chant the old slogans. The crowds were quiet in the way water is quiet before a storm.
“Here stands your comfort,” I shouted into a megaphone Remy had found. My voice was strange and fierce; it trembled and then steadied. “Here stands the thing you eat when your mouth is dry. Here stands the thing you adore instead of each other.”
A thousand faces turned. Among them Dale’s—blank, at first, then slow as a puppet finding a new string—then the man who had sold beer to everyone and whose laugh once covered the factory floor.
When the Emperor was brought in—Glenn Bradford, crowned with ridiculous gold and a paper note stuffed under the coronet—the crowd’s breath sucked like a held thing. He had the posture of a man who had never been touched by real failure.
He smiled the smile that belongs to a man used to his face being the law. “You are—” he began.
I held the megaphone level. “You sold us a lie.” My teeth clicked. “You made us forget hunger and then sold us back the memory at a price of obedience.”
He laughed. “They are grateful for bread,” Glenn Bradford said. “They are content by your design. Who are you to call this a lie?”
I moved slowly forward. “You make us smaller by removing what makes us us. You starved us of books, of memory, of our past so you could trade happiness at the counter. You fed us Sweet Dream and called it mercy.”
A woman in the crowd—a seamstress who had known hunger before the screens—threw a handful of dust at his feet. The guards bristled. Karter Bacon’s hand brushed his blade. I saw fear ripple through the ranks like a shadow.
“Take him,” I said quietly to the men at my side. “Show them.”
They pulled Glenn Bradford from his throne like a puppet from its rigging. His face went white in a way no actress on the Pleasure Hall had ever displayed; the crown skittered and clanged. He was dragged across the stone. A gaunt man—Avery Christian, with a voice like a saw—stood and spat into the Emperor’s face.
“You built your empire on erasing us,” Avery said. “You deserve the loss of that which you stole. Taste a little forgetting.”
They stripped him of the insignia: the paper crown, the gilded armor, the carved idol of his own face. They set him on a low block and put a microphone by his mouth. “Confess,” they said. “Tell them the truth.”
At first he sneered. Then, seeing the hundreds of faces peering at him, something in him tightened, as if a muscle he had never needed had to do a new job. His mouth found words: “I sought order. I sought to prevent suffering. We had to make hard choices.”
“Tell them who made the drug,” a voice demanded.
“Tell them who ordered the Adjustment,” another cried.
He shifted. The posture of a ruler cracked into something puny. He tried to speak, but the megaphone did that terrible thing—made small excuses sound huge. Someone rolled out a small cart and chained the golden statue in front of him. The idol’s eyes caught torchlight and the crowd’s reflection looked like a thousand accusing stars.
“Do you recognize her?” I asked. I saw the emperor’s lip tremble. He was a man who had eaten the world and had no room in his stomach for remorse.
The crowd leaned forward like an animal. Someone from the factory—an old woman who had been feeding gruel to children for years—stood and told the truth. “They tested on towns. They gave us Sweet Dream and told us to forget our dead. They promised comfort and watched curiosity die. They forced people to take pills until the memory of pain faded. Then they called it salvation.” Her voice was a sandpaper rasp, but her eyes were bright.
It was not an execution in the old theatrical sense. There was no scaffold, no grand guillotine. This was worse in its smallness and intimacy: our public punishment was to strip the emperor’s armor of respect and make him say aloud the things he kept locked in a ledger. We forced him to face faces he had taught to smile as coins smiled. We fed his own words back to him a hundred times over. He tried to deny and then staggered between anger and pleading, between the rote vocabulary of governance and a sudden, real panic.
“Nation,” he said at one point, hand to mouth, “I did it for the nation.”
“You did it for power,” shouted Dale. He stepped forward without smile. “You did it for the feeling when a man obeys you. We are not playthings.”
For an hour his voice rose and fell: confession, denial, pleading, rage. A dozen times he tried to build the armor around him again by invoking articles, laws, the names of donors. A hundred hands took each word from his lips and threw it back like a stone. Children shouted “liar” and women spit in his hair. A scholar—where scholars sprang from I never knew; perhaps from the dirt under our fingernails—produced a recorder and played names: names of fields, of towns, of experiments, of shipments. The crowd grew louder and louder with the sound of being awakened.
When the climax came it was not a death but a fall. They dragged the golden statue through the dust and threw it into a pit we had dug for it. The idol hit stone with a sound that was both final and hollow. The emperor staggered, his knees going first, then his back. For the first time in his life the smile left his face and the raw human animal peered out.
He wept, but the weeping was not for the dead or the victims. It was for himself. The crowd watched him fold into himself like a paper bird. A roar rose—neither cheer nor cry but the sound of a world rearranging its furniture. People took his robe and burned it. They spat, they laughed, they recorded, they shouted. The emperor’s humiliation was public and total, his changes of face stark: superiority, rage, denial, bargaining, collapse. None of it could be fixed by a smile.
“Take him to the Adjustment chamber,” someone said abruptly. The suggestion hung like a new smell. Murmurs circled: “No—let him tell the truth.” “Yes—make him work the mines.” “No—turn him into a rat.”
In the end, they chose a lesser cruelty. He was paraded through the city, his face unmade, to the great screen in the plaza. We played the footage of men being dosed and smiling, of the Adjustment devices sweetly humming. The crowd watched the emperor watch himself. They recorded him and streamed the recording back to the towers. People—our people, the ones who had slept through days—saw his face on a screen and understood that their smiles had cost lives. The reaction was a storm of sharp, clear horror and a hot, immediate hunger for repair.
Karter Bacon and Avery Christian were stripped of rank. Karter’s mask fell off like a cracked shell; he tried to hold his chin up and the crowd pushed him down. Avery’s robe was ripped and wrapped into a banner we burned. Their renunciation was public. They begged briefly; then they were given tasks. They were forced to dig, forced to carry the same loads they once commanded others to carry, to eat from the same tins they once denied. People took pictures with them—not in glee but in documentation. The punishment was not merely physical but social: the men were turned from rulers into laborers under the eyes of those they had scorned.
The crowd watched, and the crowd decided the scale of punishment. It was long, it was witnessed, and it was raw. The men’s faces changed in the slow, excruciating arc of someone who has lost everything that justified them. That was the true cruelty: the loss of the mask that made them human to themselves.
“Remember,” I said to the crowd when the torches had burned low and the chains on the emperor had loosened, “we are not to become what they were. We will not make a new game of humiliation and power. We only need to undo what has been done and learn what hunger taught us in the dark.”
People cheered because the sound was easier than thought. Some stayed silent because the taste of vengeance was bitter and they were still learning which hunger to feed.
After that night the towers glowed differently. Victoria’s face continued to show on screens—for a time—and our people watched and felt something like nausea. We intercepted the broadcast and replaced her smile with footage of fields, of names, of letters read aloud. The Pleasure Hall fell silent for a while.
Yet the world after the purge was not Utopia. Men who had once bowed to gold had new burdens: to repair, to forgive, to remember. In a square in the lower quarter I held the box that Father had given me long ago—the “carrier”—and I opened it. Inside were pages and a small crude map and a list of names. Names of farms. Names of children. Names of towns. The city reassembled itself slowly with a kind of terrified dignity.
I found Dale later, outside a burnt depot. He looked at me and the smile trembled then—not the old automatic smile but something new and not yet practiced.
“You were right,” he said, like a man admitting something private.
“No,” I told him. “I am not right. We are awake now, and what happens next is the hard part.”
He laughed a wet laugh. “Do you want a beer?”
“No,” I said. “I want to remember.”
We walked toward the place where the mines dissolved into fields and the fields became a city stitched back together. Around us old jokes and new plans tangled like wire. People argued and sang, and a few still clung to the old comforts. There were days I wanted nothing but the pink bottle and the bright star on the screen. There were nights when the memory of the tunnel—that wind, the rats, the miners—bent my thoughts toward a sharp and beautiful grief.
I keep the box close. When I sleep I sometimes hear Victoria’s voice, the Pleasure Hall’s melody, and the rat’s spitted laugh. When I wake, I pick up a hammer or a pen and start work. Sometimes I speak at gatherings. “Do not forget,” I say into the megaphone. “Do not exchange your memory for comfort.”
“Why?” a woman asked in the crowd last week. “If the world offers you a soft place to rest, why refuse it?”
“Because,” I said, and the answer surprised me with its simplicity, “a soft place that costs your past is not a rest; it is a silence. A silence that other people write the names into.”
We are rebuilding. We are punishing and forgiving in the same breath because we have no other tools. The public punishment taught them that power can be broken under the watching eye of those it once ordered. The men who thought themselves above pain now know it intimately. The men who wore crowns now carry clay. The old structures will not return if we help it, and sometimes I think that is our only duty: to make the trade-off of comfort for memory impossible.
But the truth is not tidy. There are still vaults beneath the towers. There are still instruments that make small drugs with a pink hue, and a smile can go back up on a screen if the night is long and our guard drops. That is why I keep the box. That is why I ask my people to read the names aloud on cold nights. That is why I sometimes go to the edge of the wall and look at the ringed towers and remember the way the Pleasure Hall told us to sleep.
I am Ulrich Busch. I have smiled under a mandate. I have vomited the taste of it and crawled through pipes to new truth. I have seen the Emperor cry and the crowd decide what shame means. I keep the pages and the map and the names, and I try not to trade my memory for one more soft night.
“Do you regret coming?” Father asked me, once, when the bells were silent.
“Every day,” I said. “And every day I am glad.”
The world is not free yet. We are not saints. But we are awake. And for now, that will have to be our work.
The End
— Thank you for reading —