“But what if you are not ready?” asks Vaughn. “What if you see the risk as too great, the cost as too high, or if you are comforted in the knowledge that your child is perfect in God’s eyes, as all children are? Ask yourself, how long will you be able to hold the line against this new wave of parasitic technology? Because we are on the verge of an arms race. One child upgrades and leaves for an amp school. Then another. And another. Soon, your child will be the only normal child. Left behind. And even if your community doesn’t upgrade, others will. So if you don’t live in a flashy place like Los Angeles or New York City, why, you just might watch your whole town get left behind. How then will you protect your children?”

Vaughn’s voice breaks with emotion on the word. He pinches the bridge of his nose and wipes his eyes. Very convincing.

“Amps are going to work together. Amps are going to find each other. And if we don’t stop them right now, these amp communities will continue to grow like a cancer that will rot out the heart of this great nation.

“We are balanced on the edge of a cliff, my friends. When we step off that ledge, things will never return to normal. There are now nearly five hundred thousand amps. Once these implants become even more widespread, the technology will accelerate faster and faster until we are in a future spinning out of control. Our society—the one our forefathers fought and died for—will be ripped away from its heritage, cast out of the orbit of human civilization that stretches back for thousands of years. And we must not let that happen.”

Joseph Vaughn rakes a sober gaze over the crowd and then looks down at his pages, waiting until the adulation subsides.

“What can we do? How can we stop the destruction of our nation, our society, and our children’s future? Well, I’ll tell you how. We’ve got to separate the amps. Regulate the amps. And obliterate the technology that turns human beings into amps. Together, we stand as the last generation of pure human citizens. And so we must act as a collective instead of as individuals. We must fight for our nation instead of for ourselves. And we must win. Because if we fail, ladies and gentlemen, the world of humankind—our world—will come to an end.”

The crowd’s wild response is like proof that Samantha was right. Everything changed today. The most terrifying part is that Sam was smarter than me. Her eyes were open so wide at the very end—open for such a long time while mine were squeezed shut. She saw this coming and she chose to step away. Chose to have her dead body shoveled onto a gurney and pushed into an ambulance waiting quietly in the parking lot with its goddamn engine off.

No sirens, no lights.

In a final orgy of applause, the rally moves on. The smiling faces and unblemished temples march out of the park, singing, headed downtown for the next stop. They leave behind muddy footprints, crumpled flyers, and tiny plastic American flags.

The litter of patriots.

I sit in the damp grass and absorb the numb quiet for fifteen minutes. Soon, the Cathedral green is abandoned. Even my friendly bodyguard with the strange little tattoo has ambled away. Now there is just the stage and the podium sprouting from it like a tombstone.

Curious and alone, I mount the stage and stand behind the podium. Looking out onto the green expanse shaded by the slat-windowed cathedral tower, I try to imagine the power Vaughn must have felt standing here.

But I don’t feel powerful. I feel empty.

My enemy stood on this spot moments ago and declared war on people like me. His vision of how the world should be seems so stark. Now that he has the momentum of the nation, I doubt Senator Vaughn and his Pure Priders will stop at words.

A piece of paper still rests on the podium. Just an extra page that must have fallen off the end of the speech. I pin it against the wood, hold it quivering in the breeze.

The letterhead is marked with an official seal: a coat of arms with the words “Pure Human Citizen’s Council” on a circular banner, wrapped around the bas-relief image of a smiling little girl with a clean temple. Beneath her face, the word “Elysium” is embossed. Faintly, I notice the first and last letters of the word are bigger. Somehow familiar.

I’ve seen those two letters before, in a tattoo: EM.

Federal Agents to Seize Research

*** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—BREAKING NEWS ***

PITTSBURGH—In another blow to implanted citizens, agents with the FBI have been tasked this morning with seizing research equipment and documents from federally funded laboratories in Pittsburgh and throughout the nation.

The seizures are part of an ongoing ethics investigation that took on sudden urgency with the announcement that the federal government would not consider implanted citizens a protected class. As a result, the federal committee on research and technology issued a nationwide freeze on government research into neural implants and announced a recall of all related equipment from federally funded laboratories.

According to the FBI, this first series of seizures will likely be without incident. Since last July, federal research dollars have been restricted to medical studies that center on curing serious neurological disease, such as refractory epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.

“We don’t like to call our people in on such short notice, but we were instructed to take action immediately,” said Tanner Blanton, supervisory agent for the FBI’s Pittsburgh southside office. “There is no criminal investigation at this time, but based on careful examination of seized evidence we will determine whether federal funds were used outside the mandate of government contracts.”

I must have noticed the white van parked just outside my father’s office on some level, but the meaning of it doesn’t hit me until about thirty minutes later—right after the detonation.

I’m standing in the sunlight outside my dad’s medical practice, a government satellite office two blocks from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine where Neural Autofocus was invented. Vaughn’s speech is finished, but I can still hear the roar of his crowd from where it has gathered on the school steps just around the corner.

My dad answers the door. I open my mouth to tell him what happened and he doesn’t let me finish the sentence. Grabs me and folds me into a bear hug.

“It was on the news, Owen. I’m sorry,” he says.

Then, oddly, he scans the street. Pulls me into the waiting room and locks the front door. I give him a look, and my dad says something that puts a cold sweat on my forehead: “The police are looking for you. Just for questioning. But there are things you need to know.”

We march past familiar photos of my father’s happy patients: a toddler with his prosthetic carbon fiber arm clasped around his mother’s neck, preteens with their maintenance nodes coated in rainbow colors they chose from a thick binder, and an elderly man standing straight and proud with the skeletal metal of an artificial calf and foot shining below his khaki shorts.

You can’t separate the body from the mind. In the last decade, the Neural Autofocus became elective with every upgrade, from artificial limbs to medical exoskeletons to retinal implants. Autofocus makes the communication between mind and body seamless. Sharpens you up, they say. Every one of those smiling faces on the wall has that subliminal gleam of intelligence. Overclocked brains and shiny new limbs.