The Enlightened Ones
I’ve been playing with this story for a while now. The setting was inspired by late night bike rides along Bank Street and noticing just how damn bright all the street lights are. Don’t get me wrong, visibility is good, especially for a cyclist! But it got me wondering what we might be missing out on when our nights become as bright—or brighter—than our days.
The plot took me longer, mostly because I wanted to focus on what resistance might look like in an Ottawa that is constantly lit and constantly surveilled, and then came the more complicated part: what would resistance look like that would really matter to me.
There are a million ways this story could have gone. I hope you like the route I chose!
There is the usual angry pulsing of fluorescents that featured in all her dreams since she arrived in the capital. Mel walks next to her. Bailey knows this by her sequence of wheezy breaths and the jangle of Mel playing with her keys.
The long walk home appears in flashes because Bailey has forgotten her sunglasses at the meeting. She pops her eyes up to catch where they’ve gotten to: the dilapidated strip mall with the burned out cars still sitting in the parking lot, construction fences on the left, a ditch of dirty water on the right. The fluorescent lights beam down on them, as if aliens are abducting the whole city. The light gives the sidewalk a pasty tinge.
They are almost home. There is the transitway bridge, unused for years, pieces of it sometimes falling on the road below. There is the telltale blinking of a camera hanging loosely from one of the streetlights, and the coolness that echoes from a small patch of forest somehow undeterred by the winter’s violent rain and humidity, like a cool towel on her forehead.
“They were so cool,” Bailey says, because she wants to keep what just happened in the present.
Officially, they are returning from a study session—these occurred multiple times a week for engineering students. Unofficially, there had been a blackout and Bailey, Mel and the others had met up with the new data centre union, a group of workers fed up with the current regime, with bad pay, and with the constant surveillance of citizens.
“Let’s talk about at the next study session okay?”
Mel has been jumpy for weeks, ever since the meeting was proposed. She walks quickly. She pulls her hood up with its privacy print of kaleidoscopic blues, reds and greens.
Bailey sighs, allowing herself a bit of drama because adrenaline still courses through her body and because they did it, they did something really important, without anyone finding out.
They start up the long hill towards their dormitory. This is when Bailey trips on an uneven crack in the pavement, so she’s more disoriented than she should be when Mel says
“What’s that?”
Mel’s voice is underwater. Her keys go silent. Bailey squints up to see a figure running towards them. The figure is wearing black and getting closer at an inhuman speed.
There is no shadow. Only bright white light.
Now she can hear the footfalls, faster, faster, racing down the hill towards them. She feels Mel’s hand on her arm, hears her asking Bailey to move aside.
“Hey!”
Bailey looks up again in time to see a pale face and eyes—she is so unused to seeing eyes without some sort of protection—of blue-green with nothing whatsoever behind them. They are the eyes of someone who could be going on a casual pre-daylight run.
Bailey is shoved against the fence so hard the wind is knocked out of her. She crumples to the ground, tries to get up, but her backpack—something—is stuck in the fencing.
She can’t see Mel, it’s too bright, her eyes shut instinctively. Or maybe this is the one part of that hellish night that shrinks from reality, because of what she sees next.
Mel on her hands and knees heaving, choking, gasping, blood in her hands, at her stomach.
“Run a block ahead,” she rasps, “say you something behind you. You don’t know me—”
Then Mel is wailing, in pain and fury so inhuman Bailey thinks at first it is the sound of an animal, a car, anything that is not her friend.
And then, as always, Bailey wakes to a bright, pounding silence.
Some amount of time passed. At no point was Bailey able to determine the size or precise layout of her holding cell. It was so bright she did not open her eyes unless a pair of sunglasses were nudged at her by Charles, her prison guard or Belinda, the forensic psychologist. Even then, she was usually too exhausted to orient herself to the room. It occurred to her that this was surely how puppies felt in their first weeks; utterly helpless. But unlike Bailey, they were not alone.
She knew there was a wall by her head but not the length of it nor the thickness. She knew this only because a few times she heard tapping by her right ear. Eventually the tapping would become discernible—Mel had taught everyone Morse code and they would tap it on their legs or arms to talk without the cameras noticing. In this way, Bailey learned that there had been three more stabbings since she’d been imprisoned. People were starting to notice. Rumours were spreading that Ottawa was no longer the safe haven they had been promised. The Minister for Internal Defense made a statement disputing the rumours, which only made them spread faster.
Bailey had very little to relay in return.
“I don’t know how long I’ve been here. They won’t tell me why I’m here.”
And so on.
So, when Belinda announced herself one morning—Bailey suspected she came in the mornings because Belinda always had a coffee mug with her—there was no expectation that anything would be different.
“How are you today Bailey?”
Bailey shrugged.
“You don’t have anything to tell me about your friend?”
“Not my friend. Just someone in my program.”
“Right. I always forget,” said Belinda. She sighed.
“Well Bailey, I’ve got some news. Just like you’ve said, we could not find any evidence that you and Melanie Peltier were anything other than casual acquaintances.”
“I told you that. Many times.”
Belinda crossed her legs. Today she was wearing a dark brown dress and black flats. Strands of hair were escaping a tight bun. She had a file on her lap and a silver pen in her right hand. She circled something on the paper.
“We needed to confirm, given the circumstances. The Department has concluded that you had nothing to do with Ms. Peltier’s death, nor was there any evidence, online or otherwise, that you took part of in any of her illicit activities.”
And now Belinda closed the file, looking almost disappointed.
The case is closed.”
“You found the person who stabbed her?”
Belinda cocked her head.
“Ms. Peltier died by suicide. There is no other explanation. The knife was from the communal kitchen in your dormitory building.”
To this, Bailey could only nod.
“You’ll be released this afternoon. The Department has sorted everything out.”
Belinda rose and knocked on the door.
Later, Charles entered with a change of clothes and left Bailey to take off and put on her clothes by touch and feel, hoping she hadn’t put anything on backwards. He then took her hand and guided her out of the room and out into the hall of other detention cells. The touch of someone else made Bailey jump, but as they walked down the hall she held on to his hand tightly, unable to see clearly in the dimmer light and aware that she hadn’t touched anyone else in a very long time.
Charles escorted her through a maze of hallways until they entered an atrium, divided by barred gate. Though her sight was still blurry she could tell that beyond the gate were doors to the outside. If Charles registered the way her hand squeezed his at this realization, he didn’t say anything. They stopped in front of a barred service window. A woman with an afro and stern eyes took Bailey’s name and then left briefly, before returning with a paper bag full of her things.
The bag ripped the moment it was handed over through the window. Charles helped Bailey gather her things and brought her over to a chair that sat along the gate. There wasn’t much to see. Her wallet, phone, a sweater, keys, though these were useless now. Along with the bag, the woman had given her a piece of paper with an address written on it along with a key. A new student accommodation had been made available to her, complete with roommates who’d had comprehensive background checks.
She stuffed the wallet and phone in her pockets.
“You dropped these,” said Charles.
He pulled from his pocket a pair of black plastic sunglasses, their lacquer peeling off on the arms.
She took them saying nothing, then turned and stood at the gate door, which in moments opened with an electronic whine.
Elgin street was thick with heat. Bailey immediately tore off her sweater and tied it around her waist. She hadn’t seen a clock at the police station, so could only guess that it was around midnight or one a.m. Restaurants were busy. Every bench in Minto park was occupied, each lit by their own florescent array, so anyone could clearly see their patrons eating at homemade sandwiches or take out salads. A couple of soldiers were loitering at the corner of Elgin and Gilmour, nursing iced lattes.
The evening was made brighter by the low clouds condensing above the city and the puddles of water that pooled along the edges of the road, reflecting the white lights above. It was clear that however long Bailey had been imprisoned, she had come out to a muggy and wet season. Compared to the dry and scorching winter that was her most recent memory of the outside world, this sodden version might have come as a relief. As Bailey walked down Elgin to Queen, she noted shocks of green moss expanding through sidewalk cracks; the no man’s land between sidewalk and road was now stuffed with unfamiliar tangles of weeds, where before there had only been hard barren sand and stone. Yet it was equally clear that the rain and heat were wreaking havoc on the city’s infrastructure. There was an inch of water on the tiled floors of the train station at Queen and O’Connor. The lights flickered. Though there were plenty of people at the platform—gas being too expensive now for most people, erratic heatwaves melting tires into asphalt—it was unclear when the train would come. They waited a long time. Long enough for Bailey to realize her own hunger and thirst, which stayed with her during the hour-long odyssey from downtown to the university’s campus. When she finally arrived at her dorm it was almost dawn.
Her new room had the usual white ceiling light and corner camera. The single bed was pushed into a corner, below the one window across from the door. There was a desk and chair. A few boxes sat in the middle of the room, half opened and swollen from the damp air. Bailey peered inside. Clothes, notebooks, her laptop.
She went back to the kitchen and downed a glass of water and then ate a granola bar from the cupboards.
She woke the next evening sometime after midnight and saw a note had been shoved under her door.
“DON’T EAT MY FOOD” was scrawled in sharpie over an invitation.
Engineering Study Party!
Exam Practice and Quizzes
April 10, 2052 12AM-4AM
19 Douglas Avenue
They hadn’t forgotten about her. Bailey smiled for the first time in almost five months and turned on her phone to find out what day it was and what else she’d missed.
As a child, Bailey fell asleep to the rumble of generators on their street. Later, when gas was being bought up by the government, the generators were replaced with black-market solar panels. Their neighbour Cal setup a charging station in his driveway so that anyone without panels could charge phones, watches or computers. This was when it was still tolerable to be outside in the early morning and late evenings. She played soccer in the road with the other kids while her parents chatted next to their charging devices.
No one ever explained why the blackouts happened, though people grumbled that the PM was going crazy, responding to wildfires in BC and Alberta by hoarding power for the government.
Her parents sighed and went to grab head lamps and candles from the cupboards. Then her father went to Maureen’s to make sure the elderly woman had her flashlight. They turned on the radio to see if there was news, but there almost never was. Once in a while there was windstorm that knocked over lines, or a tornado that forced the power company to shut down, but most times, when the dark came, it was without cause or warning. When Bailey started middle school, it was happening every day.
It was around this time that strangers would bang on their door and sometimes break in. Her parents designated a special room in the basement for Bailey to go when this happened—under the stairs, with a deadbolt and spiderwebs in all the ceiling corners. For a few months when it was really bad, Bailey would go there whenever the power went out, sit on the one chair that fit in the small space and shove her face into a pillow so no one could hear her crying. Only sometimes were there loud bangs or shouts upstairs, but it was enough to give her nightmares.
It was Bailey’s brother who gave her answers—always partial, because what did he know, really? But to Bailey, five years younger, Mason was wise and worldly. He had three part-time jobs—at the water treatment plant, the gas station and as an apprentice plumber—and worked with chatty adults who were happy to tell a seventeen-year-old kid how the world worked while praising the portraits he drew of them on slow shifts.
“Everyone knows the PM is crazy,” Mason told her one night after a shift at the gas station. He always smelled like the industrial cleaner they used to clean the floors. Bailey scrunched her nose and continued playing with her stuffed animals on the floor of their shared bedroom.
“He’s convinced everyone’s out to get him—they’re saying that’s why he’s announced a state of emergency. Ottawa’s like a war zone, lights everywhere, cameras going up, everyone’s under curfew except the rich because they keep giving him money to do all this shit.”
“Why is he so scared?”
“Well, think about it,” said Mason. “If you barely ever got power and your city got destroyed by floods and heat and tornadoes, and there were no jobs, no healthcare, wouldn’t you want to get the people who’re responsible?”
“But we already live like that,” said Bailey.
“Exactly,” said Mason. “He’s got a lot of enemies.”
Mason became fascinated by Ottawa. He whispered stories to her about checkpoints, data surveillance, house raids for questioning why the government was selling Crown land to the highest bidder, why it had gotten rid of labour laws, environmental laws, safety laws.
The PM was going to ban darkness next.
“That’s where evil breeds,” Mason chuckled. “Meanwhile, they say people are going blind, the lights are so bright.”
Bailey couldn’t imagine this. Light was the only thing that made her feel safe.
Two days after Mason turned eighteen, he went to a house party across town, some friend from the gas station he said. The power went out. When it came back on, everyone in the house was dead. Shot execution style in the back of the head.
The Department of Internal Defense put out a statement. The group was a rebel cell, planning to attack a nearby data centre, where the Department allegedly processed all video footage from the capital. Bailey knew that couldn’t be true, because both her parents worked at that data centre, and Mason would never risk hurting them. Surely, they’d got it wrong. But she would never find out. There was no further investigation. The bodies were taken into custody. The family held a small service and buried a photo of Mason in the hard, sandy dirt of their small backyard.
“You’ll go to university in Ottawa,” her mother said weeks later.
Bailey was smart, she continued, a future in engineering or computer science might offer relative comfort. Her parents were both software engineers. Mason had wanted to be an artist.
“It’s the safest place to be in the country,” she said.
Bailey was too filled with grief to argue. For four years she studied, staying up until the sun was piercing through their windows, let friendships die out and interests dwindle.
Things got worse. Power went out for days at a time. People were stealing electronics to strip and sell the small portions of copper, lithium and rare earth minerals inside. Bailey’s father was once followed out of a drug store and robbed at gun point for the batteries in his pants pocket.
“When I’m in Ottawa,” she would tell herself, “things will be better.”
She no longer believed all of Mason’s talk about the city. Sooner than expected, there she was.
The day of the study party Bailey woke up early. The horizon was still a light blue. Technically it was a holiday, but all that really meant was the lights downtown were turned on even stronger and there would be more than the usual drones patrolling the skies.
Her bags were still piled in the centre of the room like a pyre. She could hear pipes rattling behind the too-dry wall, and a gentle dripping. There would probably be mould back there in no time.
The last week had not been pleasant. She was apparently still registered in her classes, so she attended. It was impossible to focus. Her eyes still hadn’t quite adjusted from the cell lights. On two occasions her heart started beating against her ribs so hard, her thoughts like swirling dust clouds, that she simply left the class and went straight back to bed.
No one ever approached her, except to pass around an attendance sheet at the beginning of classes. Not her roommates, not any of her old friends. The places she and Mel and the others used to study—a picnic table by the riverbed, one particular nook in the library basement—were abandoned each time she went looking. It was possible her attendance at this engineering party would not be welcome. Probably Bailey would have stayed in bed had it not been for a text she received from an unknown number:
“Don’t forget to bring your A game! We start promptly at midnight. See you there!”
The new roommates were already in the kitchen eating from their carefully labeled boxes of cereal when Bailey emerged from her room. They didn’t look up even as she opened every cupboard, trying to remember which one had been designated hers. Mick, burly, wearing a loose white tank top was watching the news on his phone. Richard was staring into space as he ate. Bailey turned on the kettle and poured a packet of oatmeal into a white chipped bowl.
“Rumours of random stabbings across the city are unfounded. Despite the lies dissidents have been spreading, there has been no surveillance footage anywhere of a single stabbing occurring in Ottawa. This remains the safest city in the country.”
“If the Minister of Public Safety has to come out and say it every day, it doesn’t exactly build a lot of confidence.”
Bailey watched the water boiling.
“Mick, buddy, headphones?”
“Broken,” Mick shrugged. “You should be paying attention to this anyway, for sure Miller’s going to bring it up in class.”
“I can’t believe that guy hasn’t been taken in yet,” said Richard. “What are the cops even doing?”
She ate half her bowl and left the rest in the sink.
The party was on the other side of town from the university. Ottawa was not an easy place to get around at the best of temperatures. Luckily, a flood spring had its few advantages when it came to transportation. Clouds of mosquitoes and spitting rain greeted Bailey as she trotted over to the canal dock.
Water was pouring over the locks as she paid for the water taxi. When she first arrived in Ottawa, the canal had been completely dry. Trees were white corpses along both rivers. Bailey knew drought. It was familiar from back home. The pendulum swing from bone dry to tropical however, was disorienting. Her new friends tried to explain. The city got tornadoes, almost monsoons, but not every year. Each season was a new surprise. But each had its advantage. In a wet season, windstorms blew cameras right off their soldered fixtures and no one patrolled the streets. In the dry, they fritzed out in the violent heat and dissidents used tunnels that toured half the city. The engineers were especially proud of those. They’d built on the work of others, students and not, one all the way to the hospital, one to a hydroponics farm, a friend of the cause, a safe house.
The taxi ride was slow but pleasant. There were five others in the boat with her. Two were fellow electrical engineers, no doubt going to the party. Disha and Angel. People she’d spent hours with. Friends Mel had introduced her to. They didn’t greet her, so she stared out at the water, noting one or two kayakers probably on their way to a government sanctioned Easter gathering.
An hour went by. They reached the end of the line. Bailey watched Disha and Angel get out, followed them to the front door of Kevin’s house. They didn’t look back. A scream was building up in her chest.
She had been here once before. The house was three stories and falling apart. It was on the main street in one of Ottawa’s older and fancier neighbourhoods. Kevin was a gregarious computer engineering student, whose parents owned a surveillance company, were never in town and were also never harassed by patrolling soldiers.
Disha knocked on the door.
“Welcome to the study party,” said Kevin. “At the moment, we’ve got a dead zone on the second floor, in the living room. That’s where the rest of your cohort is.”
Disha nodded, then looked back at Bailey, smiling.
It felt like the coolest breeze.
They climbed up to the second floor, every step groaning in protest, and went to the living room, a wide-open space with a huge window on the back wall and three couches set around a large wooden coffee table. Her friends were all there. Monique, Adam, Callie and—
“Hey you made it!” said Lawrence.
Lawrence was a lanky Scotian whose family had moved to Ottawa as flood refugees. He gave Bailey a long-armed hug as Disha and Angel threw themselves onto a couch.
“Been too long Bails,” he said.
She squeezed him back so hard he laughed.
“It’s okay. There’ll be more time for that soon.”
The others greeted her with brief hellos and small talk. No one mentioned Bailey’s five-month absence. Then they began quizzing each other on load flow analysis and hydrogen power storage.
About an hour into studying, Kevin came upstairs.
“We’re ready with the power surge. You all know your routes?”
Bailey looked up to see nods across the group.
“What’s happening?”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Angel. “Just follow along.”
“Okay,” said Kevin. “You’ll probably have half an hour. Is that enough time?”
“It’ll have to be,” said Lawrence.
Kevin gave a quick nod and then went back downstairs.
“Up you get,” said Angel, pulling Bailey onto her feet.
They rumbled downstairs and Disha led them through the kitchen to a back door that opened onto a small yard.
“Is everything okay?” said Bailey. Panic was nibbling at her insides, wondering if there was a raid planned. She just got out. Would they release her a second time?
“Everything is great,” said Disha. She put her head on Bailey’s shoulder, and Bailey grabbed her hand, tears forming in her eyes.
Then the lights went out. The fluorescent hum, the background for all their days, disappeared.
“Follow me,” said Disha. She opened the door they all started to run.
At first, all Bailey felt was confusion tangled with fear. Where were they going? How could she possibly follow in the pitch black? Her eyes adjusted faster than she expected. And then there was Disha’s outline, and she was running hard, so Bailey had to run to keep up.
And now the fear started to fade, replaced with a familiar thrill in her stomach, calves, her lungs, as she ran. You never saw anyone running in Ottawa when the lights were on. Running implied escaping. It suggested guilt. But in the dark now, Bailey felt like a shooting star, her legs pumping as hard as they could. She dodged potholes in the road and construction pilons, a dance of senses and attention that made her laugh out loud. The darkness enveloped her, protected her. She could laugh or shout or run and no one would see her, because she would be gone, disappeared in a matter of moments.
The knots in her shoulders loosened. Disha was still running ahead, was taking them down a long winding road with few houses along it. It took a moment for Bailey to realize where they were going. Suddenly it is hard to breathe.
They came to a roundabout and Disha turned to the right. The air around was lighter, thinned of humidity. The wealthiest part of the city, a place Bailey had been before.
In fact, they’d spent months searching for it, after hearing rumours that there was still a greenspace that wasn’t fenced off with barbed wire, deemed too dangerous because of falling trees and random sinkholes. When they finally found it, there were still lights everywhere, a couple of cameras. But that wasn’t a problem tonight.
The lump of darkened forms that were her friends turned and dove into the forest. There was an oak—right near the centre of this forest, Bailey knew, its branches grew wide, some almost horizontal, like an octopus suspended upside down. Somehow, it withstood the heat of daylight and the rush of floods.
Someone took her hand. At the base of the oak was an indent between two thick roots. The grass was soft with dew. Now the group paused, and all seven of them huddled into the hollow together. The leaves were still struggling to emerge, opening sky to the group below. Somehow, from this place, it was possible to see a few stars.
Bailey was sat down and immediately enveloped in the warm arms and necks of her friends. They all sat around her in the grass and held her close. You’re safe here, they whispered, it’s okay. The close contact was almost too much to bear. Bailey started to weep, the tears hesitant at first, then insistent, uncontrollable.
Her friends soothed her. Some of them were crying too.
“It’s okay,” muttered Lawrence, “we know how much it hurts.”
Bailey let herself mourn Mel openly now. The one who had first brought her here, to this magical, somehow quiet and dark place, and invited her to join the cause.
“It’s nothing special. Nothing, you know, really radical,” explained Mel to Bailey in her first semester. It was, in Bailey’s opinion, a total lie.
“It’s just nice to be together.”
Bailey, who had feared the dark her whole childhood, could only laugh. Because, she realized, in the last two years, she’d missed it too. More than just missing it though, she longed to be unobserved, for moments that were entirely her own and no one else’s. And even back home, those moments were few and far between, living with her parents, being watched and monitored to ensure her success, her grades, her safety.
Then Mel had taken Bailey’s hand and squeezed it. They spent the next hour sharing everything about themselves and Bailey learned for the first time what a real friend was: Someone who knew what you offered them was a privilege, not a right. The friends who held her now knew this too. She told them everything she could remember, every horrid detail of Mel’s last moments, of her own confinement, and no one asked for more.
“It’s happened before,” said Angel.
They shared stories in whispers, of those who came before them, dead in the road, under mysterious circumstances, never any witnesses.
Eventually, the group started to shift and dissolve.
“Time’s up,” whispered Disha.
Bailey felt like a stone. Maybe she could just sit here forever, and Mel would somehow come back. Lawrence and Monique helped her up and as they did so Bailey grabbed at the grass and picked up an acorn. They began to run back, a new way, with Disha leading. It was easier to see now. The sun was already embracing the sky with the gentlest tinge of light. They got back to the house just as the power clicked back on.
For the next hour the group studied in silence. Every now and then someone would reach out and touch Bailey’s shoulder or bring her into a quick hug. She knew the next day someone would be leaving food at her door, and for a few days after. She’d heard of them doing this before. The clandestine ways they were able to care for each other were never enough, but it was better than nothing.
“The data centre union reported three more stabbings last week,” said Disha. “They’re pretty sure it’s coordinated. They’re asking if we’d be willing to help with some kind of safety group to help walk people home.”
Now that she’d opened the floodgates, Bailey was raw and tired, her eyes puffy and sore, as if Mel had died minutes ago and the grief was fresh.
She was alive though. She was here.
“I think we should,” she said. “We have connections with the design students, they can help with the privacy jackets. I can ask some guys back home what they use for neighbourhood watch.”
“I’ll talk to some family too,” said Lawrence. “Some of those workers don’t have secure housing. Do you think Kevin would know of any good safe houses?”
“Probably,” said Adam. “Otherwise my parents might be able to house a few for a bit.”
“It’ll just be until the latest data breach blows over,” said Monique. “That’s what Jared thought. They’re working on some kind of distraction with the gas people.”
Disha nodded.
“Okay. I’ll let them know. In the meantime, we still need to lie low. Mel was a long-time target, we know that. But they’re just waiting for the smallest reason to come after us. So no on-camera contact, keep your feelings to yourself. We’ll get through this and then get back to work.”
They gathered their things and one by one left the house, wishing Kevin a nonchalant goodbye. Bailey left last. There was no one else waiting for the canal taxi when she got there. The dorm was empty when she got back.
It didn’t matter. Bailey was not alone. She would see everyone again soon. She was safe. She was held.