"I've got them, honey! I think I've got them!"
Thirty-two year old Benjamin Ruff felt the steady thrum in his hands, coming from the long, black device aimed into the night sky like an inverted divining rod. The wind blowing through the open roofport of the speeding hovercraft pushed his black hair out of his large blue eyes, now wide with excitement. It was working!
His twenty-nine year old mate Bonita, piloting the sleek, silver vehicle, tried to keep her green eyes off of the rearview mirror; not wanting her own excitement to compromise their safety. They were not following any of the established flying lanes; instead taking a dangerous course over the open fields and through the woods outside the world capitol of Paragon, and their former home. Her once-long, flaming orange locks had been cut short and died black, stuffed under a cap, and their faces were blackened with a dark paste to keep the moonlight from reflecting off of them. They were doing something very, very dangerous. Their 'employers' didn't know it yet, but they were fugitives.
On the dash of the vehicle was a small transponder. It had been rigged by Ben to send out false directional signals back to the control center…but the device's range was small, and soon, the signal would no longer be received…and they'd be in big trouble. If Ben's experiment didn't work, very soon, they'd have to turn back and wait for another opportunity. One that would probably be too late. The 'them' that Ruff was referring to would have most likely burned up in the planet's atmosphere by then.
Next to Ben's feet, as he knelt on the rear seat of the standard passenger vehicle, this one with the minimal accoutrements of a government model, sat the recomposition chamber. It was a large rectangular box made of a thick, clear polymer, with the experimental particle converter in a smaller black box bolted on top. The converter was connected by a thin, flexible tube to the rear end of the device in Ruff's hands. Essentially, what Ruff was trying to do was be 'zapped.' Not by electricity in the form of lightning, but the principal was the same. He had learned that a particular organic compound, derived from some of the rare elements found in deep space in a scientific probe, and, he believed, remnants of the explosion that had created this planet eons ago, attracted charged atomic particles. Some of this compound, ground into fine dust and covering the far end of the wand, hopefully would attract the particles he was after. If this dangerous experiment did work, the atoms reclaimed from the low planetary orbit where Ruff had carefully tracked them since leaving Terrana twelve hours ago, would rematerialize in the chamber. This low trajectory was intentional, its intent to destroy any trace of what was sent when it fell back through the atmosphere.
In this case, the 'it' was Ben and Bonnie Ruff's triplet boys, destroyed by the ultra-secret beam and their atoms blasted into space on orders from the highest levels of their government. Their sons, executed for the highest crime possible in Terrana society: They were imperfect. Therefore, they were less than human.
The danger to Ben and Bonnie lay not in the experiment itself. Should they be caught, they would suffer the same fate as their children, who would be executed a second time if they were reclaimed, again in secret. Benjamin, one of the top researchers at Terrana Deep Space Institute, had been punished with his firing and imprisonment for keeping secret, for nearly four years, that he and his mate had produced such horrors. It was a crime to not immediately report to the government the birth of an imperfect child. These genetic abominations were quickly and quietly neutralized, and had been for centuries.
Blasting them into atoms and sending them into space to eventually burn up was a recent development. The government had decided that this was not only a clean, efficient means of disposal, but a necessary one. The long-established practice of neutralization by lethal injection, and disposal by burial, was causing the separate cemeteries created for these cast-offs to grow.
You couldn't even call them cemeteries, in that they were merely disposal grounds. Families were allowed to visit and mourn, since it was no crime to have produced an imperfect offspring. It was a naturally-occurring tragedy, one that was rare. The loss of the child, while painful, was deemed essential in preserving and protecting the purity of the breeding stock that had reached a state of perfection over millions of years of natural, and later on, artificial selection. Only the best had survived, and anything deviating from that could not be kept. Multiple births had always been seen as an aberration, a splitting of the psyche as well as the body, and something that must not be passed on genetically. Therefore, the policy; but in its wake, there was sadness. After all, Terranites did think of themselves as caring human beings. The cemeteries allowed small markers with the dates of birth, but not the dates of neutralization. Those dates were forever burned into the memories of the affected family members anyway, thusly, there was no need for public memorialization.
However, a careful observer in one of these disposal grounds would note, from the birth dates, that the numbers were increasing. If the aberrations were just that, and something that should eventually disappear in the process of evolution, the numbers should be shrinking. The burial grounds in some places around the planet were filling up. This was seen as a problem. The government, very aware of the increase in defective births, didn't need the people questioning why this was. They also saw no need in trying to figure out themselves why it was happening. It was just a problem that had to be dealt with. So, citing the need to preserve the open spaces for more valuable uses, the space-disposal idea was thought up and put into effect. The cemeteries were closed to new 'business'. There was no more public display and no more potential for discovering the 'problem' of increasing multiple births. Families could simply gaze into the heavens to mourn their departed offspring. It was a tidy way of getting rid of the issue.
What most Terranites didn't know was that the new means of neutralization was not by cremation, as they had been told it was, with the ashes sent into the atmosphere to burn, but the, essentially, vaporization of their loved ones. Why shock everyone with a new technology they didn't need to know about when sending cremains into space was a long-accepted practice. In fact, it was a desired one, available to only a certain few well-heeled citizens. To offer this to the families of those whose children had necessarily been sacrificed was seen as a noble gesture, publicly, and within the bureaucracy, a brilliant move, and it earned a nice promotion to the bureaucrat who had thought of it.
To actually witness such a jarring event as the instant rendering of a human being into nothingness was something the government didn't feel the populace could handle. It might only breed discontent, of which there was already too much.
There is always dissent in any society. There had always been dissenters in Terran society, a small number of those who considered themselves smarter than everyone else, who saw as a thing of evil the difficult decisions that had been made over the centuries to achieve the perfect human race. Most Terranites accepted the new policy – and all the old ones, too - and the change in disposal method, without question. But a small group of outcasts disagreed with both, but first and foremost, with the policy itself. That group was growing. Some had formed an organization that was totally foreign to the Terran way of thinking: They secretly, but openly, opposed their government. Secretly, in that they remained hidden as much as possible, living in safe houses that changed locations frequently. There were always government agents looking to infiltrate their group. Openly, in that they posted, in the dark of night in public places, their 'manifesto', if you will, speaking out against the law of the land. And even more dangerous to them, they offered to give, and did give, sanctuary to any 'imperfect' children, and the parents thereof, to prevent any more needless deaths.
For failure to obey the law, an average citizen would have been publicly executed as an example to everyone else, but Ben had friends in high places. His sudden disappearance would have to be explained, so execution was out of the question, in spite of the danger he presented to certain government officials. One in particular, who would have liked nothing better than to see Ruff disappear, along with his ill-conceived offspring. For Ben presented a danger to this man.
Ben knew something about him that few people did, but to order Ben's execution would ruffle feathers among the Senate and might cost him his job. That job was as the Primate, the official head of the world government. To the people, this man held great power, but the real power lay in the hands of the Senate. The information that Ben possessed was also known by the Senate, so that was not the problem. They were in total agreement with the Primate on the subject. But if this secret were to be made known to the general public, it might cause a ripple effect that could bring all of Terran society down and set it back thousands of years.
So certain members of the governing body felt it best to leave Ruff where he was. He seemed to have taken the impending loss of his children, and his punishment, in stride, and continued to serve the government well in his deep-space research. The man was a brilliant scientist, and if he continued to be of help in the exploration of deep space, he might yet earn his release. And that of his mate. But the offspring had had to go; there was no two ways about it.
Ben and Bonnie had been held together in a government compound that, to the outside world, was just another secret research facility, a mini-city whose residents didn't interact with the rest of Paragon's citizens. To make it known that it was, in fact, a prison, would be to admit that Terran society was less than perfect. As far as the general populace knew, Terrana had no prisons.
There was no real need for them. Poverty, the root cause of much criminal activity, had been eliminated millennia ago. War, famine, disease; all gone. There was one government, and peace and prosperity ruled the planet. There were, of course, occasional infractions. There were minor thefts, assaults and other misdemeanors. But not many, because, life on Terrana was good, and also, the punishment for these infractions was something to be avoided. The guilty were made to wear a standard uniform, pants and shirts for males and sleeveless dresses for females, with one distinguishing feature: A single, wide black stripe around the shirts and dresses. The only differences in the uniforms were that the colors matched the eye color of the offender. The black symbolized wrongdoing, and the wearing of this uniform branded the wearer an unfit member of society and brought with it the social stigma. Until your penance period was up, determined by the severity of your offense, you were shunned. If you had a government job, as just about everyone did, you lost it until your sentence had been served. You were given the most menial and demeaning of tasks, ones designed to humiliate. Once served, though, Terranites quickly forgave and forgot, and your life got back to normal. This means of punishing criminals was very effective. The government factory that produced the uniforms was a small one. But lately, it was taking on new workers. Production was up.
The only official crime on Terrana was in not reporting the occasional birth of less-than-perfect offspring, for which the sentence was death. Discussions had been held at the highest levels about punishing those charged with interfering with the enforcement of the law, ie; the dissenters, with capital crimes. So far, that had been left alone in favor of sticking with the standard 'treatment' for dissention seen as disruptive to society – basically, they fried your brain, which was about the same thing as being dead, anyway. You were taken away and never heard from again, working in obscurity on some government farm – but, you didn't care, being in Happy Land for the rest of your days. Thus, the need for safe houses and secrecy.
For the true criminals…both the parents and offspring were made to wear the black-striped uniforms until the moment of their execution. This death sentence was also very effective. Very few parents suffered this fate. The same wasn't true for the ever-growing number of offspring being born in twos and even threes. Terrana had achieved a state of perfection, and wanted nothing to change that. Allowing imperfect children to contaminate the breeding stock perfected by nearly five million years of evolution just could not be permitted.
But Ben Ruff wasn't going to sit back and do nothing. Spilling the beans on what he knew about the Primate was too dangerous. His life had been spared, in part, because of his silence, and to go public with it would bring instant denial and fast retribution. The only avenue open to him, in fact, the only thing he and Bonnie cared about, was getting their children back.
Protecting them was something they had been working on ever since the day the boys had been born, a little over five years before. Having instantly made up their minds not to give up their children, Ben and Bonnie had suddenly moved from the city, taking baby Arnold with them, to a place out in the country where no one knew them. Bonnie had dyed her hair black at that time and kept it that way - dark-haired parents, one with green eyes, dark-haired baby with green eyes. Adam and Avery had been kept, secretly, by Bonnie's retired parents until Ben and Bonnie could sell to their new neighbors, who owned small farmettes like theirs, that they were working toward adopting two infant boys of two different husband-and-wife teams of co-workers at the Paragon research facility, who had been killed in a horrific explosion.
For four-plus years, the boys had grown and played with the other country kids who never suspected that the three were brothers. The boys, of course, were told the truth as soon as they were old enough to understand, along with the importance of keeping the secret. It had worked until a government investigator, who had just happened to go into the small grocery market where the Ruff family shopped, overheard a conversation about the 'exceptional' Ruff kids. About how irrepressible and smart and talented they were, and that if you didn't know two of them were adopted, you'd swear they were blood. Intrigued, the investigator asked a few harmless questions, and heard more of the story of the 'research facility tragedy' and the wonderful thing the Ruffs had done taking in their co-workers kids. Suspicious, the man started poking around through records, and discovered that the double tragedy had indeed happened, but that the orphaned boys were actually doing quite well in separate homes thirty kilometers apart. And that is how Ben's careful plan had eventually unraveled.
Once the boys had been taken, they were doomed. But the fate of Ben and Bonnie was up in the air until wiser heads prevailed and they were spared. Ben used the resulting delay in the boys' deaths to plan this dangerous operation, and it had been finalized upon learning only weeks ago of the actual execution date.
If the rematerialization was a success, they would run straight for the safe house and go into hiding; protected by members of the small and secret underground movement. Scientists, engineers, educators, artisans and plain working folk, all united by a common thread: Each had lost children to their government, children they had loved, and to them, were everything but imperfect.
The fight to save future children would take place, but only when the time was right, when the group was strong enough and could muster enough proof of government atrocities to go public. The group's leaders had planned a raid to take over a government broadcast studio and air their grievances to the entire planet. Soon, Ben Ruff could make that announcement of what he knew about the Primate, an announcement that might sow the seeds of public discontent, and hopefully, change. But, soon, Ruff might be able to provide them with an even bigger piece of proof than they could have hoped for.
Or, to be precise, three of them.