Retroactive Retaliation

It was the year 2035 when it finally came down - I was 51 years old then. 

I had been talking about the regime's plans for so long that when it finally came to fruition, I felt almost…withdrawn.

As if a numbness had been slowly spreading through my body like a timed anesthetic, and somehow it brought me to a sense of bafflement I had never before experienced.

Was it that it actually happened, or that I had gone through so many motions and emotions that something inside of me just broke.

And yet, broken as it was - I still was.

But I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be or not. In some sense, maybe those who got out of things earlier had been saved from something.

I could never know - I wasn't one of them.

"If your wearable has a flashing blue light, move to the opposite side of the fence now." A soldier barked loudly. 

I glanced down at my digital arm-reader; something like a smartwatch but more likened to a house arrest monitor.

"Are you deaf? I said move to the opposite side of the fence if your wearable is flashing the blue light!" I swallowed, feeling my throat catch on my breath, and struggled to choke out a response,

"I am deaf, but at least I'm not a duncecap Fascist fucker." I murmured, moving toward the opposite side of the fence.

"What did she say?" The soldier barked, and I kept walking, choosing to push this man's memory as far from my mind as possible. 

"Why are they separating us into groups?" a woman, roughly my height, asked.

"I don't know. I suspect we are being moved."

"When did they detain you?" she asked me.

"Yesterday, after they made the announcement about the Procter Exchange." 

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"What's your ethnic background?" I asked in response.

"Biracial," she murmured.

"And your parents' statuses?" I asked.

"One was an American and the other an undocumented immigrant," she admitted.

"The Procter Exchange means we will be examined for our merit and genetic blueprint. If they find you aren't measurable by the Eugenics Department criteria, then you will be exchanged for a migrant who suits their requirements."

"Does that mean if we don't meet eligibility, then we'll be put in the penal camps?" another woman asked, approaching as she frowned.

"That seems to be what they do to most detainees," I stated.

"But we are Americans!"

"Not the right type anymore." The first woman said, "We're retroactively being undone and there's nothing we can do about it. I just hope the exchange sends me somewhere I can be freer than I ever was here."

"My grandfather was Native American." I mumbled, "But I guess native blood doesn't even matter."

"Where did the reservations members go?" The second woman asked.

"I heard that Mexico and Canada agreed to asylum, but you had to pay money I never had," the first woman said.

"The Procter Exchange doesn't give us many options - we get whatever they assign us, and the other country trades us over so their citizens can take the jobs and positions we once held. In turn, we work in labor camps like the gulag system for that country, and they get paid by the regime to store us." I stated.

"So, now the only people who get to be Americans are those who have European bloodlines descending from the Mayflower or any of the original 13 colonies. A person must have two whole American parents to be considered a citizen, and if they do not swear fealty to the administration and earn merit from their allegiance, then it can be repealed."

"How can they just pick and choose like that? How can they just sell us off and make us people with no country when we were born here?"

"They did it ten years ago. It only took this long to get this far because they had to weed us out, and now we're the last fragments. Hopefully, we die like those who have already gone before us, and in swift timing. Alligator Auschwitz has been waiting to gobble us up for a while."