Having been rebuffed by Viviane’s manager at the gate of Sommet Studios and returning empty-handed for his efforts to see Viviane, Kylian meandered back to the research offices of the National Laboratory. He vacuumed out his cubicle while relating his adventure to Moyenne, who, of course, pumped him for all the details.

“So that’s what happened, huh? Didn’t get to see Viviane after all that?” Moyenne looked bored. After hearing everything from Kylian, nothing interesting happened!

“I was SO close to getting in!” Kylian gnashed his teeth.

In his frustration, Kylian waved the wand of the vacuum up in the air. Not remembering that the vacuum cleaner was still powered on, the wand passed too close to his face and the suction from the vacuum caused the end of the wand to get stuck on his eye! Kylian’s thoughts of Viviane took a temporary backseat as he tried to deal with his eye getting sucked out. Moyenne, who had looked bored before, now jumped up wide awake at the catastrophe of stupidity unfolding in front of her.

“Turn it off! Turn it off! It’s sucking my eye out!” yelled Kylian.

Moyenne leapt into action, not to power off the vacuum, but instead to help Kylian pull the wand off of his eye. Together, they managed to break the suction and pull the wand off of Kylian’s eye. Kylian grabbed his injured eye with one hand while he felt around for the switch and powered off the vacuum with his other hand.

“Are you alright? Can you see?” Moyenne sounded concerned for Kylian.

Kylian removed his hand from over his eye a little bit at a time to reveal a bloodshot eye and some black and blue bruising around the eye socket. He blinked a few times.

“Yes, I can still see,” he said.

“That’s good, but your eye looks horrible. Why’d you that for?”

“You say that like you think I did it to myself on purpose.”

“Moron.”

After almost losing an eye and being called a “moron” for it, Kylian decided he had better get away from the research offices for a while and wandered into an open park on the grounds of the adjacent University.

I have to get away from it all, he thought. I’m falling apart and the parts that aren’t falling off are getting sucked out!

Kylian found a park bench to sit on while he rested his injured eye. On a typical day, Renard University was a peaceful campus. However, Kylian’s luck was not typical; therefore, it was inevitable that he should choose the wrong day to be outside.

Kylian heard a commotion headed his way. He looked up and with his good eye he saw a large crowd of people carrying signs marching toward him. They were not angry people, but they did look serious as they approached. Some of the signs they carried had painted slogans on them.

“DON’T SUPPRESS! FREE THE PRESS!”

“TECHNOLOGY IS A RIGHT”

“LIFT THE TECH EMBARGO”

“UEN POLICIES ARE CRUEL - SHAME ON THE RULING PARTY”

Kylian read these slogans and he was confused. He stood up to move aside as the crowd of mostly young people approached. He guessed by their looks that they were undergraduate students from the University.

As the crowd marched by one of the undergraduate students, a short girl wearing glasses with hair that fell just below the chin, spotted Kylian and his injured eye and shoved a sign in his hand! She pulled him along and into the march.

“You’re just in time! We’ve just started our protest march. We’ll need everyone to stick together once the police show up.” Her voice was very high-pitched to Kylian’s surprise.

Protest march? thought Kylian. This was an obvious case of mistaken identity. Kylian was a scientist, not a protestor! He had to straighten it out with this girl with the high-pitched voice.

“Um, excuse me, miss?” Kylian tried to get the girl’s attention.

But the girl with the glasses and high-pitched voice did not notice Kylian at all. Instead she shouted out to the other protestors. “WHAT DO WE WANT?”

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS!!” yelled everyone back.

“WHEN DO WE WANT IT?”

“NOW!”

The peaceful march started to get loud and that attracted the attention of other citizens and the local law enforcement. One police officer tried to calm down the crowd of young people with a bullhorn. That probably was not a good idea.

“STUDENTS, PLEASE DISPERSE! THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ASSEMBLY. RETURN TO YOUR CLASSROOMS!”

“Not until our demands for a free press have been heard and met by the Ruling Party!” one of the protestors shouted back.

“Do you know that your government bosses are suppressing the truth about what’s really happening in the world?” another protestor tried to tell the officer.

“The UEN’s policies are causing untold suffering in the rest of the world by keeping the technology embargo in place,” added another protestor.

The police officer called in for reinforcements, lots of reinforcements. Again, he tried to disperse the crowd.

“I REPEAT, THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ASSEMBLY! PLEASE DISPERSE OR WE WILL HAVE TO USE FORCE!”

“Oh yeah? You and what army?” a young protestor yelled.

As if on cue, an army of police officers showed up armed with batons and stun guns. The situation was escalating out of hand. Law enforcement officers stood in the way of the crowd trying to march toward the Administration building of Renard University where the Chancellor had his office and was a prominent figure in the Ruling Party. The short girl with the high-pitched voice was not going to be intimidated by a line of officers. She marched right up to one of them.

“Hey, we just want the Ruling Party to know that they can’t hide the truth from us anymore! No matter how much they try to control information and the media!”

“The truth?” asked Kylian to no one in particular. Kylian thought he knew the truth. It was what Luc told him earlier about the workings of the world. Luckily for Kylian, another protestor who was more in the know heard him.

“Yeah, the truth about how the technology embargo keeps other countries oppressed and their people living in squalor even while life-saving medical technologies could help them live longer and labor-saving technologies could help lift them out of poverty.”

This was not the way Kylian remembered Luc explaining it to him. According to Luc, the world was in a tenuous balance. The UEN kept advanced technologies away from the developing countries of the CoC for fear of destabilizing the world and leading to war. Kylian did not think that there could be another side to this issue, a humanitarian side, until now. He looked up to the sign that had been thrust onto him. It read, “RELEASE TECHNOLOGY TO SAVE LIVES.”

Things were getting tense. The short girl shouted back to the protestors as the police closed in. “Stay together now!”

No one knew how it started, but the first protestor to be tasered fell to the ground and then the crowd pushed forward en masse. The police were not going to let them through and officers started swinging their batons and struck the protestors as they surged forward. Bystanders scurried away as fast as frightened mice. A voice over a bullhorn sounded again.

“CITIZENS, CEASE YOUR DISOBEDIENCE! YOU WILL BE ARRESTED IF YOU DO NOT LEAVE IMMEDIATELY! THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ASSEMBLY!”

The short girl with the high-pitched voice ran from an officer with a baton trying not to get hit. She dove behind Kylian who dropped his sign at the sight of the charging officer behind a shielded mask. Before Kylian could react, the officer’s baton whacked Kylian on the side of his torso and pain blinded him for a few seconds. He staggered to get away.

The girl that hid behind Kylian dragged him away. “Time to give up. Let’s get out of here!” The rest of the protestors must have had the same idea. They all scrambled every which way. Kylian and this new girl in his life ran as she led the two of them away.