Pandorama

[Brackie]

Aditi Sharma had already gone through what was expected of her when she woke up however long ago it was, in the village, on an island, in the middle of an unknown ocean. She was expected to die for some nefarious unknown purpose that many could guess at but nobody would understand. She got her bearings, she checked her bag, she found her weapon, she contemplated what she could do with that weapon, and she followed that up with finding the nearest camera and speaking to her family.

She apologized to Jay for their distance, and talked about how she'd always admired him and wish they could have been closer. None of that was true.

She spoke to her parents, telling them of how she wished she'd done things differently so she didn't have to end up where she was. None of that was true, either.

She had a one-person conversation with Brahmi, talking about all the things she'd wished she'd learned and not forgotten from her, everything about where she'd come from and where she could go. Once again, it was not true.

In fact, if Aditi Sharma had taken an entirely uneventful trip back to Chattanooga, she probably would have spoken even less to Jay afterwards, gone to more parties the moment she arrived at Duke and the bustling social scene contained within, and probably forgotten everything but the most basic of Tamil phrases by the time she was out of her twenties. She had no grand revelation on the trip about the importance of familial tradition and how much it meant to her while she was away for the week; nothing had convinced her to course correct where she was going in her life, and where she was supposed to go until Garcia's head was blown open in front of them. The fact that she was currently being held captive and expected to be killed on camera for her country's citizens to watch on the deep dark web, was as random a factor that led to where she was as if the bus had been struck by lightning and turned into a flying elephant, bucking her into a ravine in the process. Short of refusing to go on a trip that was socially expected to go on, especially for someone of Aditi's standing, there was nothing Aditi could have done to change the fact she was on Survival of the Fittest.

But that was why she was apologizing to her family - it wasn't for her, it was for them. For Jay, Brahmi, Mom, and Dad, she needed to apologize and make them feel a certain way. Not guilty, certainly not distraught, but sad and correct. One thing she truly would have felt bad for was making them feel like they had failed as family, even if they probably had considering she was only a few months away from relegating them to the monthly phone call while she made new lifelong friends with future world leaders and flirted mindlessly with the correct upperclassmen for amusement. She said it to make them feel better, and that was all she could do for them now.

Which is also why it was absolutely crazy that she was even considering implementing a way to escape this island - if she lived, she'd be expected to talk to Jay all the time, metaphorically kowtow to her conservative parents, and take time out of her extremely busy schedule in order to get back in touch with her true heritage and appease Ba and her gentle nagging.

But Aditi couldn't help it - at least within the confines of school, there was freedom. The freedom on this island, although the laws of American society no longer applied, was an illusion because the rules of the game held a boot to the neck, and there was nothing Aditi hated more than being held under control like that. Whenever she idly looked up the terrorism that had plagued America since she was a young girl, she was inundated with obscure thinkpieces talking about how the children whose lives were taken represented what happened when humans were given absolute freedom, alongside some banal comparisons to Lord of the Flies, only they were most certainly not. In real life, you were given the right to exist, even if you chose to be poor and in poverty in the process, but here there were so many rules in place they clawed the skin of your neck raw. You needed to make sure someone died every day, you couldn't go to certain places, you couldn't touch certain things, and the rules kept on being added every year, and that was no 'absolute freedom' in any sense of the phrase.

So Aditi felt it was her job, her sworn duty, to find every possible unspoken transgression she could make and break them over her good knee to the point that, if any future class was kidnapped, the only way forward was being almost literally handheld along the way by the people who put them there, rendering the whole thing utterly pointless. At some point she began to tell herself, if she pushed the boundaries, just kept pushing but never breaking the edge of the box, she would figure a way out and she could save people, including herself. If she went forward with the assumption that there was a chance she couldn't become a doctor, the least she could do was attempt something just as grand in the process, and if she survived she wouldn't have to settle for Duke - the Ivy League would await, with no barriers for the girl who survived a global terrorist organization except her own ambition.

The reality, however, was this: in much the same way that her father's patients did not expect to become spontaneously cured of their illness, Aditi did not truly expect to make it off of this island alive. But, as she finished up her message to Ba in Tamil before shouldering her bag, tucking her gun under her cardigan with what seemed to be the safety on, and taking a long, silent look at her knee brace, then heading off, she knew there was a small, minuscule part of her that really hoped it would happen, even if only by miracle. She could not rest on it, or she would die delusional.

But much like the random happenstance that saw her taken into this situation in the first place, it could happen.

It really could.

It had to.

((Aditi Sharma continued in Antisocial Darwinism))