Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against by Howey Hugh

Author:Howey, Hugh [Howey, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Politics, Fantasy
Amazon: B07JFYZY8Q
Goodreads: 42415779
Publisher: Broad Reach Publishing
Published: 2018-10-19T07:00:00+00:00

PENNY RECOGNIZED THE building as soon as she arrived. She squinted through the acid rain shield over her head at the brick building, recently refinished with new solar paint.

This had been the location of one of Sybl’s most iconic paintings. And the reason why the government burned da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Rain drizzled over her faceplate as Penny stared up at the building. It was different now—not just the solar paint, but also a new balcony had been installed, changing the shape of the wall. But Penny knew where the dozens of stenciled people had been painted. Her eyes moved across the building. Sybl had painted men and women, children, even a few dogs and a cat, all boldly looking over the avenue, many times larger than life. And each face, from the tallest man to the smallest puppy, had a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa smile smeared over their lips.

This was the painting that had moved Sybl from a nuisance to a political dissident. While her other graffiti had been considered rude, even shocking, it was the series of Mona Lisa smiles, tacked across empty-eyed children, that struck the truest chord.

Penny turned slowly on her heel. The wide avenue stretched a full kilometer without breaking, perfectly framing the Capitol building. Sybl had known this when she scaled the wall. She purposefully painted the crowd to stare down the Capitol, to smile meekly.

Complacently.

The art school hadn’t been closed yet when Sybl had painted the Mona Lisa smiles. Penny had had a professor whose critique showed how much she actually liked the rogue artist. “See the way they look to our government and smile, each smile exactly duplicated like the last, no other expression? Sybl is pointing out how willing we are to see what the government is doing and make no protest at all!”

The professor was fired a week later. Or, at least, she was gone.

The Mona Lisa smile had been catchy—instantly recognizable, not just because of the fame of the old original, but because those twitched-up, closed-lip expressions so perfectly encapsulated silence. “The Mona Lisa knows something; can’t you see?” Penny’s professor had said when her students hadn’t appreciated Sybl’s art. “But her mouth is closed. We know what’s happening. And yet we’re silent, too.”

The professor’s replacement had moved quickly to digital art studies.

The wall was now bland, all traces of Sybl’s graffiti gone. There—where a little girl holding a red balloon, her face disproportionately eerie with the Mona Lisa smile—exactly where that little girl had been, there was now a small bump in the solar paint.

A scanner droid.

Penny was being watched. Everyone was being watched.

Penny turned to the stairs, heading inside.

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