The President’s Last Protester

The sky over District 9 was always gray now. Not from clouds, but from the haze of burnt air, ash of deleted history, and the slow decay of freedom. The “Era of Unity,” they called it—a slogan stamped onto every building, drone, and screen like a warning.

Tomas Rell hadn’t set out to be a symbol. He just wanted to hold a sign.

It read:
“Truth is not treason.”
Painted in shaky strokes on torn cardboard, it barely lasted five minutes before the Enforcers came.

They didn’t drag him away violently—that would be too obvious. They smiled, offered him water, and thanked him for his “civic engagement.” That was the new method: erase, not crush. Make dissent look like it never existed.

He woke up in a clean, white room underground, bound not by chains, but by soft cushions and too much silence.

Across from him sat Director Kael—sharp suit, soft voice, eyes like polished glass.

“You’re Tomas Rell. 28. Freelance coder. No criminal record. One aunt, deceased. No partner. Quiet social presence. You don’t even vote,” Kael said, scrolling through a transparent tablet. “So why stand in front of Parliament Hall with that sign?”

Tomas, voice dry, replied, “Because someone had to.”

Kael smiled. “Interesting answer. But unoriginal. You’re not the first to say it. You are, however, the last.”

The President had outlawed protest six years earlier—gently, surgically. No riots. Just re-education, quiet disappearances, and mass approval ratings that never dipped below 98%. That was the genius of it: not a dictatorship, but a preference. People preferred silence over danger.

“You’re being given an opportunity,” Kael said, folding his hands. “We don’t execute dissenters. We upgrade them. Give them new stories, new names. You could work in AI ethics. Or water reclamation. Or drone choreography. The future loves a repentant soul.”

Tomas stared. “You want me to lie.”

“No,” Kael replied, standing. “We want you to forget.”

Days blurred.

He was shown holograms of “historical unrest”—doctored footage of protests devolving into chaos, with captions like “Rage is Regressive” and “Only Traitors Need Shout.”
They let him watch his own digital funeral—an empty urn placed in a memorial square, mourners reciting state-approved farewells. His name was now marked as “Removed for Restoration.”

“You died,” Kael said, sipping tea. “Now we’re building something better in your place.”

But what they hadn’t predicted was the message.

Before the Enforcers came, Tomas had dropped his sign. Not by mistake, but deliberately. A small camera drone—a relic he hacked together from spare parts—had recorded the entire encounter. The footage uploaded automatically to a dead man’s server. From there, it leaked.

It spread like roots through old forums, underground networks, and darkfiber chatrooms. Someone dubbed the clip “The Last Protest.”
The sign—“Truth is not treason”—became a watermark on every pirate broadcast.

No movement, no leaders. Just questions.
Who was Tomas Rell?
Where did he go?
Why did a government afraid of one man silence the whole country?

Two weeks later, Kael returned with tighter eyes and a sharper tone.

“You’ve become inconvenient.”

Tomas smirked. “I thought I was dead.”

“Dead people don’t trend.” Kael threw a paper on the table—actual paper, rare now. It was a printed flyer: Tomas’s face, stylized and grainy, above the words “REMEMBER THE LAST.”

Kael paced. “You think this makes you a hero? You stood in a plaza for five minutes. You said nothing. You didn’t lead a revolution. You didn’t even bleed.”

“I didn’t have to,” Tomas said. “You did all that for me.”

They couldn’t kill him. That would prove too much.

So they kept him, studied him, reshaped him—trying to turn him into a fable. They offered him scripts: to record apologies, give fake interviews, confess allegiance. Each time he refused, the myth grew stronger.

In District 9, street artists tagged walls with his image.
In District 3, schoolchildren whispered his name like a ghost.
In the outer colonies, protesters wore blank masks with only the words: “I Might Be Tomas.”

Ten months later, Kael stood alone in the interrogation room.

Tomas wasn’t there. Not physically.

But his absence was louder than his presence had ever been. He had vanished—officially “reintegrated,” but no record existed of where. Some said he escaped. Some said he was living under another name. Others believed he had died and been buried beneath the President’s garden.

It didn’t matter.

Because across the nation, silence was no longer preferred. People were speaking again. Carefully at first. Then openly. Then together.

And it had all started with one man holding a sign.

“Truth is not treason.”