ADSactly Contest - SteemShort #5 - Post 3: Request for the Last Part of the Story

adsactly (80)in #steemshorts • 7 years ago (edited)

UPDATE: The author for the last part of SteemShort #5 has been chosen (2018-Apr-04)

There were 5 valid summaries submitted to the jury.

And the jury chose the summary submitted by @uc-phoenix.

Congratulations, @uc-phoenix

Here is the summary:

The mutiny would start with a handwritten note. The note would be left somewhere for a guard to easily find. Dominique knew this was bound to cause panic among the guards. They would try to quickly herd the prisoners back to their cells. This act would be resisted and quickly escalate into a riot. In the midst of the chaos, Dominique and his men would quietly sneak into the kitchen that would be left open by one of the kitchen staffs who is actually a NUVO agent undercover and has been in on the plan from the start. From the kitchen, they would pass through a series of hurdles that would soon see them at the prison gate but their plans on the verge of success would go awry. Someone had given them up. They were caught in the prison yard and were being rounded up when a chopper full of armed personnel appears suddenly to rescue them. Leading the rescue team is no one else but Claude. She’s actually the leader of an undercover special ops unit in NUVO disguising as a dancer. After a brief skirmish, Dominique soon finds himself alongside his wife flying away into the sunset.

SteemShort #5 - Post 3: Request for the Last Part of the Story

SteemShorts are short stories written collaboratively by three different authors and illustrated by an artist/photographer.
The process to create a SteemShort is described in this post, slightly modified bin this post. The rules to select the authors and illustrators have been modified in this post.

The first two parts have been written by @diebitch and @currysonlyson. They can be found below.

This is the request for the middle part of the fifth SteemShort.

Authors that want to write this last part should send 0.001 STEEM or SBD to the @steemshorts account, with their proposed summary in a memo starting with the character '#'.

This summary must be between 100 to 200 words. Any proposed summary that is shorter than 100 words or longer than 200 words will not be considered.

It is important that the memo starts with the character '#': that makes this memo readable only by the author and the @steemshorts account.

Example of the beginning of a valid memo:

# It was a dark and stormy night ...

Note that it is recommended to send the oo.oo1 SBD/STEEM with the memo from steemit.com using a web browser, as we have seen several cases of "Invalid memo" when it was sent using an app such as eSteem.

There can be only one proposed summary per author. The proposed summaries must be received in less than 72 hours after thist post.

After sending their summary, authors should tell in a comment that they have sent their summary, so that they can received confirmation that their summary is valid and they can be easily contacted if they are the chosen author.

After 3 days, all the valid summaries will be communicated anonymously to the 3 members of the SteemShorts jury, and they will decide which author will be chosen.

The chosen author will then be instructed how to submit their full constribution. The full contribution need to be between 500 and 1,500 words.
Once the full contribution of the chosen author will be received, another post with this full contribution will request proposals for an illustration for the story.

All authors need to agree for a "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike" (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode).

No title for the short story should be suggested. When the full text of the full story will be known, the three different authors will propose a title.

So, writers, send your summary proposals with 0.001 STEEM or SBD to the @steemshorts account.

Here is the first two parts of the story written by @diebitch and @currysonlyson:

In cell block number 1022, a mutiny was brewing. The people that had been chained to the block had had enough. Dominique Moreaux started the domino effect. He wanted to see Claude, his partner. They had gotten married on that fateful day when Dominique had been tried for crimes against the blockchain regime. It is hard for a revolutionary to love someone and also love a cause. His cause was the dissolution of the dictatorship that tracked everything and put it on a public ledger-blockchain. The powerful people in the world had resisted it but they found a way to use the system to their advantage.

Dominique remembered the start. It began with bitcoin, whose tumultuous journey had gone from hope to despair. As banks started shutting down and FIAT lost power, the rich were out on the streets. Politicians were exposed, and the world finally seemed to be on the verge of getting it's act together.

However, power can never truly be decentralized. It is the flaw in humanity and not technology.

Nobody could have imagined that the miners and the technology could be controlled to make a dystopian society. A society that lived in fear. Your indiscretions, messages, internet history, everything was on the public ledger. It was a dictatorship at its worst.

Dominique had been part of a blockchain, NUVO. In their own small ways, they resisted the dictatorship. They were a blockchain that did not use technology in the traditional sense. They used mechanical pulses to create a complex system of codes, similar to Morse code. Even he didn't know their full secret. True decentralization also meant not keeping all your eggs in one basket.

As they gained headway people started getting suspicious. Sometimes the greatest things happen at the wrong moment. He met her. Claude Martinet danced into the hearts of the jaded elite. She was a revolutionary. An emerald-eyed brunette with a joyous smile. The kind of girl who wouldn’t look twice at a bespectacled redhead who liked to hide in the crowd.

One of Dom’s nodes for information was near the theatre where Claude worked. He would go to see her to forget the intensity that his cause demanded for ten minutes. For that was all he allowed himself.

She’d walked up to him and pressed a handwritten note into his hand. Anything that was written by hand, that could not be recorded, was banned.

Meet me at the Bar, 5 Maple Street.

That was all that was written on the note. There were no names. This sheer act of rebellion thrilled him no end. He got someone to cover his shift and went there.

She approached, they didn’t say anything to each other. She took his hand and guided him to a room behind the kitchen.

“NUVO?” she said just one word.

He was suddenly on alert, wondering if the enemy had got to him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” He said coldly.

She took a deep breath.

She showed him the penny that all NUVO carried. It was a remnant of physical currency. A reminder.

“You know the policy, we can’t talk about it. Sometimes it gets very lonely in our world. The pledge of staying single and not trusting a single soul is difficult. I noticed you. For every ten minutes, you were there,” She said in a rush.

Dominique did not know how to reply. Yet, as if compromising to his conscience, he curtly said, “Yes.”

She understood.
They knew they couldn’t have much. Couldn't be a family but for that moment they weren’t alone.

From then on, they always met in that small and gloomy room. Talking for hours. Somehow, everything seemed more tolerable.

Still, their chain had a weak link. The communication had a pattern. It was difficult but not uncrackable.

Dominique knew they were coming for him, it was on the public ledger. Thankfully, they didn’t know about Claude.

Dom and Claude met in the same dinghy room where Claude’s friend performed a small ceremony. It was their rebellion against everything. The system that dictated to them and the resistance that wouldn’t let them be together.

He hesitated as if to ask what she did for NUVO. What would a dancer contribute to the blockchain?

In the posture of an accomplished Zen master in meditation, Dominique Moreaux sat on the prison bed in cell 1022, his eyes closed and his concentration unbroken. A speck of red light—the only source of illumination in the room—oscillated all around his body. He could not tell where the light came from, only that it skipped here and there like an elusive dream, torturing him. It had driven him crazy at first, during his first weeks in the penitentiary. However, he had gotten used to it. He had tolerated it, then he welcomed it and then he used it. He allowed his mind to follow the skipping lights. He used it as a means to explore his memory, to go back.

He was thinking of the plan, examining all the details in his head, running the simulations. Everything was in place, but it had to be perfect. Everything depended on it; everything depended on him. The movement, the Brotherhood and most importantly Claude, the love of his heart.

With the aid of the skipping lights, acting as an illuminator in his mind, Dominique could see Claude. He could see her as vividly as if he was with her. Her sweet dimples and her emerald eyes. He could feel her dark hair brushing his face as it does when she turns while he holds her hand.

His mind went back, as it did so often, to the day they got married. The same day he got arrested. Early that morning he had stopped by at the theatre where Claude worked. He hid in the shadows and saw her laughing with some weird looking people. He thought she looked so at peace, so at one with her environment even though he knew they both hated it with a passion so grave. It was while he stood there, watching her smile, that he knew he had to do it.

“Marry you?” Claude had asked when they met at the bar on Maple Street, smiling. “Oh, you filthy dreamer. You know that can’t ever happen. Our lives –”

“Are Ours. If we’re ever going to fight for and earn this freedom, we have to start believing we have it. We have to live our lives for us!”

Claude had only laughed. Oh, that laugh. That breathtaking laugh, full of so much innocence. Watching her laugh, Dominique could only wonder what she did for NUVO. Of course, he couldn’t possibly ask. Some things must remain a secret—sadly.

“It's not just the regime Dominique. What about NUVO? What if they find out—”

“I’m tired, Claude. I’m tired of hiding—let’s just—”

He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her that he had been compromised. That they had found him out and were already coming for him. That he only needed something tangible to hold on to when they take him in. That the cause wasn’t enough anymore. That he needed more.

“I need you, Claude,” he exclaimed.

His voice had a tremulous hint to it, and Claude could tell.

“What the hell?” She said finally. “Let’s do it!”

He scooped her up in his arms. Her hair flew over his face and he carried her into the dingy room. A couple of her innocuous normal looking friends gathered. One of them said he was a prophet and it was all arranged. Just after the prophet said, You may kiss the bride, and they both leaned in for the kiss, they felt it—at the same time!

With NUVO you’re taught to be alert. To sense the Blockchain Regime Officers from miles away. So even before twelve hefty BRO's stormed into the room, Dominique and Claude had felt it. As the officers stepped in spraying automatics, Dominique and Claude exited through the back door.

Once they got outside Dominique signalled for a chopper. All top level NUVO agents had that prerogative. However, the nearest landing deck was on top of a building six blocks away. With the BRO's hot on their heels they ran as ferociously as they could, like preys eluding predators in the jungles of Africa. They arrived just in time.

Claude got in the chopper first, and after she had taken her seat Dominique gave the signal to the driver—he was to fly off without him. Claude could not tell what was going on at first. It was only after the chopper was in mid air that she pieced it together. She screamed his name loudly from the Chopper, considering whether to jump or not. Dominique stood still on the spot, tears proliferating on his face. He had to do it. He was already a marked man and there was no hope for him. Maybe there was hope for Claude yet. He couldn’t risk running with her.

Dominique Moreaux altered his Zen position to wipe off the tear on his face. The red light in cell 1022 skipped on his eyes and he opened them. It was time. The prison buzzer rang endlessly. Dinner was about to be served. The mutiny was about to begin. It was time.