Dreams in the Tower Part 1 by Andrew Vrana Page A

for few moments before realizing she had been asleep. Eyelids parted fractionally, she saw the light of morning was still absent; the ethereal glow i lluminating the room came from the television on the far wall, which had woken back up when she had. It was still on ONN, the news network whose reluctance to report on the chaos downtown must have been what lulled her to sleep during her vigil. This wasn’t good. If I missed something…
    It was better not to think like that.
    Stretching and straightening her body, she tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. The small living room around her was unkempt and it bore the odor of too many sleepless nights. She had been neglecting cleanliness for a few weeks now; the thing for which she had been waiting for over a year, the impending event that had initiated the radical course of action in which she was now entrenched, was due to happen any day now.
    Video of a ragged crowd appeared on the TV screen, turning Dellia’s full attention to the news broadcast. Hundreds of men and women, young and old and every shade of human, were amassed at the base of a tower Dellia knew to be Silte Corporation’s headquarters. The mob, many of its members masked, was held at bay by metal barriers guarded on the opposite side by what appeared to be a private police riot squad. She was suddenly tense: some of the private cop organizations were known for their eagerness to kill. They had been the only upholders of justice for two decades now, and they could get away with just about anything if the right people were paid off.
    “TV: Volume twenty.” The device obliged, and the incoherent murmur of the report b ecame words.
    “—and appear to be armed with gas bombs and other non-lethal weapons,” the news reader said over a close up of one private cop’s black riot mask. The shot panned out to show the crowd once again. “For those of you who may just be joining us, the Anti-Corp movement took a violent turn shortly after midnight, and ONN is keeping you informed. This morning, pr otesters who began gathering in cities across the nation on August 5 th —yesterday—marched on Silte Corporation and many of its largest subsidiaries and affiliated businesses in America. Riots are being reported in major cities across the country; the footage you are seeing now comes from the Silte Corporation headquarters just north of the downtown area of Dallas. Silte has long been seen as the Anti-Corp movement’s primary target, being considered by many experts to be the most powerful corporate entity in history.”
    Tuning out the too-calm voice, Dellia stood and felt the blanket slide off her bare legs. She navigated the dirty clothes and food trash littering the floor and made her way to the single window in her company-provided apartment. Parting the blinds with one slender finger, she peered out at the early morning; the North Dallas street was tranquil and pristine, echoing nothing of what was going on ten minutes down the highway.
    Having always hated the tiny, dilapidated apartment she had been placed in without much of a choice, Dellia was now secretly thankful for being stuck out here on the northern outskirts, near the labs. She only hoped the mob didn’t decide to go after Silte’s medical research venture, OpenLife Biomedical, after the private cops chased them away from Silte headquarters. Surely they would find some other target. As a highly organized group they had to know that Silte Corp covertly owned (or secretly funded and thus operated) most of the businesses in the city. In fact, Dallas’s urban nucleus had more than doubled in the fourteen years since Silte’s tower went up, and that was thanks almost exclusively to Silte’s eagerness to offer lush office space in a brand new building in the city to whichever company wanted to become its next major acquisition. The more companies Silte bought out, the farther the urbanization spread.
    “We have new reports coming in…” the anchor