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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: In an alternate future, the laws are created by an unseen Them, rulers who rule in secrecy. Olympia Hoffman, Pia to her friends, strains against the yoke of Their rules, until she is given a chance to see what life is like without Them.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Future Crimes, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, 1999
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2003

9 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [83 KB], eReader (PDB) [33 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [20 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [18 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [68 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [91 KB], hiebook (KML) [75 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [46 KB], iSilo (PDB) [17 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [21 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [49 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [31 KB]
Words: 6041
Reading time: 17-24 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

In order to more completely answer the dichotomy of her present and her future, Pia took a trip into her past. Borrowing from Peter, promising herself that she would repay Paul later, she ordered the archival tape of her grandmother's memories.

When the tape arrived, she delighted her understudy by taking two days of her allotted personal time off from the Company's musical production of Hamlet. Headset in place, she entered her grandmother's archival experience and toured her life, her world, her stomping grounds, starting in East Berlin, as it was called then, in the early sixties.

She was eight years old, standing with her bicycle at the Brandenburger Turm. This was her weekly pilgrimage to the Wall which rose menacingly between her and her best friend, Daniel, who had escaped to the East the year before. "Danny," she called out. "Are you there." His voice rose thinly into the crisp Autumn day. "I'm here, Rachel. I'll come and see you next week. We have a pass to come through." "Mutti says bring coffee," she called out. "Next week, then."

She wheeled the bike down the boulevard, away from the monument, playing their game, hers and Danny's. Looking for litter was a foolish game at best, and one they could never win, but they'd always played it anyway. Sometimes they found a small branch that had detached itself from one of the Linden trees that lined the boulevard; the occasional stray leaf. That was it. Nothing else ever disturbed the street's antisepsis. Not even one small piece of debris....

Briefly, Pia removed the headphones. She had expected to feel discomfort in the mind of someone she'd never known, in a time and country she'd seen only in old movies. Instead, she felt more comfortable than she did in her own skin. It was a puzzlement, she thought, quoting the King of Siam. Her mother and grandmother had parted ways long before she was born. Her mother fitted perfectly into the late nineties. Judgmentalism was the order of the day, a perfect environment for her. But not for Pia who had never quite managed to fit the mold, and apparently not for her grandmother.

She replaced the headset and fast-forwarded it.

She was nineteen, sitting in a theater, watching her friend Tanya play Anna in The King and I. "I want to play Anna, too, one day," she told the Herr Direktor of Tanya's Company later, when her friend introduced her to him. "You're not the type," he said. "You will be Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, perhaps, but not Anna. Never Anna." She buried the dream deep down in her soul. Every once in a while she disinterred it and looked at it, letting it grow, deciding that she not only wanted to play Anna, she wanted to do so in the grand ballroom of the Schloss Charlottenburg, the castle across the street from the Reichstag. The fact that the castle was in West Berlin only added to the grandiose quality of her fantasy. No one she knew had ever danced in the West, let alone at the Schloss. She'd only heard about the castle and the ballroom from people who'd seen it in the days when the old people were given passes once a year to cross the border.