Mr. Carlisle's Secret

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Those were the words etched on the precinct door. I was one of the few left old enough to remember when it said “To protect and serve.” It’s been almost 50 years since they mandated the implant, and nothing has gone unseen since. No moment is hidden, no sight is sacred. In all the world, there was only one secret withheld by common people, and that secret belonged to an old man by the name of Jonathan Carlisle.

Every day, he would be spotted in little shops around town. Minding his own business, it would seem.

“Zoom in on section four. He’s holding the object again. Cam is blind. Do we have on-site confirmation?”

“Negative. No agents present. Informants only.”

“ID?”

“711-9989-A.”

“No good, object blinding eye-cams as well. Get agents on site. Pursue, but do not engage.”

“A-firm.”

Every day, we pursued him, and every day our agents, overly reliant on their blinded cameras, lost him in the crowds.

He never seemed like the dangerous type to me. He never hurt anyone, he never spoke anything but kind words to the shopkeeps, but even so he was a terrorist. Last of the non-implanted, in possession of something of unknown value and danger.

“He’s talking to someone. … Scratch that, no one around him. He’s speaking into the object. Where’s our agent?”

“En route, five minutes.”

Whether by skill or by providence, Carlisle always seemed to leave at the right moment. Sometimes he would be heard, just barely, speaking to whatever it was he held in his hands.

“Already?” he would say. “So soon? I never get to enjoy the breeze.” He would sigh and say, “Thank you. I’ll see you soon, Darling, but not today.”

There were theories in the department about what he was doing each day. Some thought he was talking on a radio, some thought he had some horrible, nuclear secret. Every time he went to a hardware store, the bets that he was making a bomb doubled. When the feds got involved, the theories grew wilder and wilder. “It’s alien tech,” they would say. “Stolen government intel.” “He’s working for the Russians.”

Eventually, the rumors spread, the feds got sick of chasing him and started asking the public for help. Mr. Carlisle became something of a celebrity. That’s how we found out that he had been using the old tunnel network beneath the city. They were centuries old, and no one had thought about them since the last nuclear winter. He had been there for years, right under our noses. We found hideaway after hideaway, food stashes, drawings, journals, maps, blueprints, love letters to a woman named Diane. Everything. With each passing hour, Mr. Carlisle became less of a secret, but what he held on to, his wondrous escape plan, his alien technology, his government secrets, whatever the gossip of the moment was, that confounded thing in his hands, only grew in value and curiosity.

“Agent 331-7 on site, I have eyes on subject.”

“A-firm. Hold fire. Do not let the subject spot you. We need to know what he’s carrying.”

“A-firm.”

Some sought to take it from him, doing everything in their power to rob him of it, but somehow, for every would-be thief, there was a friend of Mr. Carlisle’s, waiting to delay them long enough for him to make his escape. As the months passed, we found that Mr. Carlisle stopped showing up on the feeds. People had been closing their eyes when he was around, so we couldn’t see him through their implants.

“He’s talking to it.”

“Get close. We need to know who he’s communicating with.”

People started talking about privacy again. About wanting their own secrets. The feeds were inundated with talk the computers deemed high-risk, every moment of every day. I hadn’t seen anything like it since I was a kid.

“It’s some kind of locket. Silver color, heart-shaped. I can’t make out what’s inside.”

And that’s when it happened.

“Close enough, we have audio.”

That’s when Mr. Carlisle stopped running.

“I know they can hear us, Darling,” he said. “I’m tired, old. We’ve been apart for so long, I can hardly remember the last time we were together. I can’t keep hiding forever.”

The radio chatter was deafening.

“I think. …” He paused for a long and ragged breath. “I think it’s time I finally finish this.”

With a whisper, he said, “I’m coming to see you tonight, Darling,” before looking to the agent with his sad, weathered eyes and reaching for something inside his coat. The order was swift, and the execution instant. In hardly the blink of an eye, Mr. Carlisle was a corpse on the floor.

Within moments, hundreds of eyes were on the scene, with thousands of cameras. The whole world would know Mr. Carlisle’s secret.

The whole world was disappointed. There was no alien technology or grand nuclear weapon, no government secret or radio to the future. The heart-shaped locket was mere silver, and all it held was a photo of his wife, Diane, long since dead.

The agent searched the body for weapons but found only a book in Mr. Carlisle’s coat. A manifesto, and treatise, hundreds of pages in length on the meaning of freedom, the nature of privacy, what it means to be human, and his reasons for hiding away from a society that had long since forgotten such things.

The manifesto made its rounds on the Internet, racking up billions of views and millions of comments, some heartfelt, some disparaging. Protests were held. Riots were had. Arrests were made.

I wish I could say it changed things. I wish I could say that one old man’s dream made people realize what they had lost, but it didn’t. Within a month, the book was forgotten. Within a year, it was removed from the Internet and lost to time. Within two years, laws were passed preventing the publication of such things.

Whatever magic Mr. Carlisle’s secret held had died with him.