Chapter One

Inside Marlene’s apartment, on the far wall from the main entrance, there was a couch.  A tan couch that was a little too small to seat Marlene and both her children all at once, but that they all crammed onto anyway.  The couch was the center of everything that ever happened in their humble apartment.  It was where Julianne and Sophie did their homework, where Marlene sat to balance their very unbalanced checkbook, and where, most importantly on a day like today, they all sat to watch Gifting Day.

They had been talking about it for the months and weeks leading up to, just like everyone else in America had been.  Fanaticizing about what this year’s gift might be, and re-living their favorite Gifting Day moments from previous years.  The television media lived for Gifting Day, and the new channels talked about it 24/7 for the weeks preceding it.  Some of the channels focused on interviewing the key members of the Committee. The Agriculture Chair, for example, strongly believed it was time for another agricultural advancement. 

“It’s been 14 years since we’ve received any new seeds.  When they gave us the waterless seeds in 2312, it truly saved humanity.  We couldn’t have made it through the drought that followed in 2313 without them.  Our population has doubled since then, and I foresee a serious food shortage within the next 5 years.  Now is the time for a new, more sustainable and higher yield crop,” he explained to the eagerly listening nation.

The Engineering Chair, not surprisingly, differed in his views.  “The transporter gift from a few years ago still seems incomplete.   It was no doubt ground-breaking to give us the ability to instantaneously be transported from one place to another anywhere on Earth; but we have been unsuccessful in replicating the technology, so we are still limited to the single unit which was initially delivered.   We have identified the key components which are beyond our current technology to manufacture (or honestly, to even understand) and I believe that this year we will be provided with some key element or guide that will allow us to complete construction of more transporters.  Surely their intent was never to have only a single transporter; but rather to give us the tools and ability to expand this technology to be available to all citizens.”

 Marlene wasn’t particularly interested in the Committee’s predictions regarding this year’s gift, but she greatly enjoyed when they showed interviews with people who spoke about the ways that Gifting Day had changed their life.  One reporter traveled to Africa, and interviewed people who still remembered the days of malaria and AIDS.  The Africans spoke passionately about their family members and friends who they had watched die terribly gruesome and painful deaths at the hands of disease.  “But not anymore!” they would triumphantly declare, as they held out their forearm and showed the small metallic implant that they all bore which had vanquished infectious disease from their continent. 

 That was Marlene’s favorite Gifting Day, eight years ago when the Gift was opened and revealed a small metallic tube with no instructions.  Most gifts were easy to figure out, but that year was different.  Seeds were easy to identify, and most technology was as simple as turning it on and seeing what happened.  But this metallic tube stumped the country.  It had frustrated many viewers who felt unsatisfied with all the hype leading up to Gifting Day and the subsequent lack of an ah-ha!! moment.  But Marlene loved it.  A real-life mystery excited her to no end, just like the mystery novels that she curled up to read on her tan couch every night.  To think of the most brilliant mind in the country being stumped by such a small metallic tube was exciting and terrifying.  She spent the next weeks completely engrossed in the national drama.  Experts were brought in from foreign countries to consult, and endless tests were run on the curious object.  They succeeded in replicating it after about a month; but they still had no clue what it was. 

The Medical Chair made a public request to the nation, requesting volunteers to try the device. He warned the nation that it was a risky decision to volunteer, stating that they had plenty of well-formed ideas about what the device did, but they weren’t sure so there were no guarantees about the safety.  Anything could happen when we try to implant this device, he warned them, including harm.  Marlene was running out of her apartment on her way to the nearest district office before the Medical Chair’s sentence was finished.  She looked insane, running down the street with curlers still in her hair and slippers still on her feet, frantically banging on the district office’s door and yelling that she wanted to volunteer.

 Marlene had dreamt of changing the world since she was a little girl.  When she was 5, she wanted to be an astronaut.  When she played “Gifting Day” with her little friends, she always insisted on being the lead astronaut, the one who had the privilege of leaving the spaceship once it landed on the Moon and retrieving the Gift.  She created a replica of the box that the Gift was always left in, and would hide it in her parent’s basement.  She would spend hours looking for it, despite knowing where it lay, insisting that she needed to practice finding the box.  “I can’t go all the way to the Moon, and then not find it!! The lead astronaut always finds the Gift,” she would explain to her exacerbated friends who quickly tired of the game.

 As she grew older, she decided that she would like to be the Medical Chair instead of the lead astronaut.  She spent a whole weekend in the public library once, making a long list of every disease that she could find any information on.  The list ran on for pages, but she never tired of the tedious task.  She brought it into school on Monday, put it on her teacher’s desk, and proudly declared, “I’m going to get Gifts for all of those, then there won’t be a list anymore.” 

 Marlene didn’t go to aerospace school, or medical school.  Instead she got pregnant and had Julianne when she was 17 years old.  So she lived vicariously through the television, following the exciting lives of the heroes who changed the world every Gifting Day.  So the day that the Medical Chair asked for volunteers for the implant seemed like a glorious second chance to become a part of history.  At the district office, they took her name, drew some blood, and promised to call her as soon as possible to tell her if she had been selected.

 They did call.  Two anxious days after she had first signed up, they calmly thanked her for her enthusiasm, but unfortunately they weren’t taking any pregnant volunteers.  Nine months later, Sophie was born.  The experts and their fleet of volunteers figured out how to use the implant to fight infectious diseases of all sorts within a year; while Marlene sat at home with her new baby, feeling like she had missed out on another adventure.

 “Mom!!” Julianne called out from the couch, to Marlene in the kitchen, “It’s going to start soon! You’re going to miss it!”    Marlene carefully handed the oversized bowl of popcorn that she had prepared to little Sophie, who swayed as she walked under its awkward bulk.  They settled into the couch, so close together that all of their thighs were touching, with the bowl of popcorn balanced between them.  Marlene’s arms were stretched around her two girls’ shoulders, mostly because there wasn’t room for her arms at her sides, but it made it easy to play with their dark hair which she loved to do.

 As their old TV flickered to life and the Gifting Day broadcast began; Marlene gasped, knowing immediately that something had gone terribly terribly wrong.

Chapter Two

As the bomb went off in the Gifting Day Arena, Dr. Andrea Brown dove underneath her seat to avoid the shrapnel that was flying through the air.  She instinctively covered her head and neck with her arms, and hugged the arena floor as tightly as she could.  She saw out of the corner of her eye that Dr. William Jones, her mentor and the current Medical Chair, did not have the same quick instinct.  Reaching up to grab his arm, she yanked him down on the ground and pulled his body close to hers.

 Her mind raced with the events of the last few minutes.  The Committee Head had just taken the stage, and was standing next to the Gift.  He was just beginning his speech when the arena suddenly exploded with smoke, flames and debris flying through the air.  Andrea had been bent over in her chair when the bomb went off, fiddling with the strap on her heels and trying to find a way to prevent it from digging into the skin on the back of her ankle.  It was probably the fact that she was already hunched over which allowed her to get onto the floor so quickly, and thereby avoid injury.   The explosion seemed to come from the Gift itself, radiating outward and consuming the first few rows of seats in every direction with deadly force.

 “William!”  Andrea shouted over the deafening ringing in her ears.  She shook the elderly man next to her, hoping to rouse him into some state where he could explain what was going on.   “William!  What the hell is going on?!  What was that?!”  she shouted again.   He didn’t respond, and for the first time, Andrea became suddenly aware of the redness that was seeping through the back of his shirt.  She turned his body toward herself, and saw his fixed pupils staring into nothing while the dark red puddle formed under his body.

 Andrea immediately stood up, without checking if the shrapnel had subsided, and began dragging Dr. Jones toward the nearest exit.  His bulk was far beyond what Andrea was used to carrying, but the shear panic rushing through her body prevented her from noticing.  She saw an exit sign at the back of the arena, and made a beeline for it.  Ignoring the gory landscape of the other guests who lay at her feet, she stampeded over the messy terrain pulling Dr. Jones behind her.  If she had been paying attention anything other than her dying mentor, she would have noticed all the other poor souls who desperately needed medical care and followed her profile across the room with longing eyes.

 Dr. Andrea Brown was very well known throughout the nation, so it wasn’t a surprise that she would be easily identified even amongst the panic and chaos.  She had been the Junior Medical Chair for 4 years now.  Unfortunately, during that time, there hadn’t been any medically-related gifts, so her job had been entirely public relations. She and Dr. William Jones were booked almost year round for lecture tours where they explained the past medical gifts and how much they had helped humanity.  For most audiences, it was an easy sell.  Who could argue with curing AIDS and malaria?  Or quicker healing of wounds? Or new medicines that destroyed previously incurable cancers?  

 There was the Resistance, though, which constantly plagued their lecture tours.  The Resistance was a religiously-motivated activist movement that fought against the Gifts as an unnatural force on humanity.  The ranged from mildly involved members who spoke out against Gifiting Day when interviewed, to the fanatically devoted who let their children starve and die during the drought in order to avoid feeding them plants from the Gifted seeds.  They carried out campaigns against the placement of the infection-repelling implants that saved Africa, and attempted in vain to establish a well-funded research division to compete with the Gifts as an alternative source of innovation.  Andrea could see where they were coming from with a lot of their propaganda, and she was especially fond of the idea of having a human-based research lab that could come up with alternatives to the gifts.  But they lost her support the moment they let anyone die of hunger when food was abundant.

 The Resistance would send protesters to all of the lectures that she and Dr. Jones gave, but they were generally peaceful protests just trying to raise awareness.  Sometimes they played on the suspicions of the public with messages like, “Don’t trust who you don’t know” or “Why are They hiding?  Show yourself, Gifters”.  The suspicions played on an old fear from many years ago when the Gifts first started.  Many people rejected them, thinking they must be some sort of trap from an alien race that would eventually harm us.  But over the years, the fears subsided and the public began to cherish the Gifts.  Whoever left the annual gifts on the moon became an endearing and comforting big brother, who always knew what our humble planet needed and was eager to provide for us.  The fear and suspicion that characterized the Resistance’s platform was seen as antiquated and outdated by the majority of the public.

 Other times they approached protests with a different tactic, playing on Biblical themes of apocalypse.  Especially with any implantable medical device, they would begin crying about the Mark of the Beast, and damning anyone who accepted that abomination into their body.  Though not particularly religious, Andrea could relate to where they were coming from in terms of keeping the human body, well, human; but once again they lost her support when they violently intervened in the implantations in Africa.  Some of the more radical members had attempted small bombings of warehouses storing the implantable devices, and in one instance a bomb had caused 15 fatalities all of whom were children waiting implantation.

 Andrea knew the Resistance members well from their frequent appearances at outside her lectures.  She even had casual small talk with some of them enough times to start really getting to know them.  For that reason, she immediately registered the cause of the explosion as she glimpsed a young leader in the Resistance named Christopher Grange slipping out a side door of the arena with an unmistakable smile of accomplishment on his face.

 

Chapter Three

Christopher Grange was thirteen the first time he built a bomb.  It was an unintentional bomb, if such a thing is possible.  He was trying desperately to build a rocket for his high school science fair, but it resulted in a blazing ball of fire that singed his eyebrows off.  Like so many of his high school friends, he dreamt of being an engineer for the Gifting Program, and helping to design and maintain the annual rocket that was used to retrieve the Gifts from the moon.  The science fair project was his first attempt at engineering something to fly.  After multiple failed attempts in his own backyard, he was convinced that he had designed a successful prototype and invited all his friends over for the final unveiling.  In front of everyone whose opinions he cherished, he lit the fuse on his rocket.  Seconds before the rocket should have lifted off, Christopher was smacked in the head by his religiously fervent mother who had snuck up on him while he was engrossed in watching his fuse burn.

 “I told you not to build another one of those damned things!  We will have nothing to do with rockets, or Gifts, or anything else related to those alien-devils!” she barked at him.  As if timed to reinforce her harsh reprimand, his rocket exploded into a million pieces.  A flaming piece of metal shot directly at him, leaving a scar on his cheek that constantly reminded him of his failed engineering attempt and the forbidden fruit of anything related to the Gifts.

 If you asked him, Christopher would tell you that he joined the Resistance because he believed in humanity.  He could talk for days about the unlimited potential of humanity, our native innovation and resourcefulness, and how the Gifts were a crutch that we used which only held us back from discovering our own power.   But the strong religious culture of his family probably dictated more of his ideals that he liked to admit.  He had been hungry as a child because his parents wouldn’t buy gifted seeds.  It’s hard to go against parents who believe in something so strongly that they would let their family go hungry to keep their morals.

 Christopher was approached with the idea for the Gifting Day bomb by another Resistance leader, who had been plotting for a dramatic move like this for years.  Christopher’s bomb making skills had improved since his mishaps as a teenager, and now he was the go-to guy for stunts like this.   The idea for the Gifting Day attack started as a small bomb, to send a warning message that they had the ability to bypass their security and they truly were a force to be reckoned with.  But as the plan grew, so did the hypothetical bomb.  Soon it was a bomb big enough to cause structural damage and injure the central members of the Committee.  Then the goal became destruction of the Gift itself, and fatality of the key members.  Christopher whole-heartedly signed onto whatever plans they gave him for the bomb, unquestioningly increasing its explosive power.

 In the aftermath of the explosion, he was sickened by the site of the mangled and destroyed bodies around the room.  He was equally sickened by the unscathed Gift box, which must sat tauntingly untouched on the podium merely a few feet from where the bomb had detonated.  It must have been more strongly reinforced than their calculation had predicted.   He started to move toward the Gift, planning to take it from the arena for ensured destruction.  However, as he worked his way over the rubble toward the podium, a bleeding hand reached up and grabbed his pants causing him to trip and fall into the mass of bodies beneath his feet.  Now surrounded by the dead and dying, his drive to destroy the Gift abandoned him as a new drive to escape these horrors filled his mind.  He scrabble to his feet and bolted for the nearest door.  

 He was greeted at the exit of the arena by a plethora of security guards, who must’ve already been aware of his identity and crime because they had him on the ground and in handcuffs within a matter of seconds.  He mockingly greeted his captors with a perfunctory, “Happy Gifting Day, Officers,” which was reciprocated with an extra kick to his crotch.

Chapter Four