The Golden Age Express hummed to life, the floor rumbling. She'd get used to it in a few hours. It was an old gas-powered train, the last one of its kind running the lines. It was kept for its history. It had been used to transport the great heads of state of times past. Great old Authority generals and leaders. For better or for worse—almost exclusively worse—they had lead the Authority.
The only good thing the Authority did was regulate crime.
If you broke the law, you were put in prison.
The court system wasn't great, and a lot of favors were granted for monetary exchanges. This is to be expected even in the best societies. Here, it was rampant.
The Authority controlled a vast swath of land—about fifteen hundred miles from west to east. One thousand miles south to north. Roughly.
They'd expanded over time.
Akhenaten had started it all, with the Strong Men of old.
Small resistances, rebellions, whatever you wanted to call them, sprang up now and then. They never succeeded, not even when the Akhenaten Authority was at its weakest. Which was why Kora knew that Felicity wouldn't succeed. The reach and power of the Authority were too great. The Authority was invasive and oppressive.
They didn't care about a citizen's personal freedom. They existed for the people, is what they said. Akhenaten, the founder, had started the government by denying the freedom of the individual, by exclaiming that without government control, all would go to hell.
Kora agreed with this. Societies needed government to control certain aspects. Like crime. Certain aspects of commerce. A government is very helpful in creating laws and punishing lawbreakers.
The problem with the Authority was they decided that people needed one hundred percent regulation. They needed the government to assist them in all facets of life. In healthcare, education, in paying for their properties, in subsidies, in grants, in religion, in thought, in speech, in sickness and in health, until death did them part.
They required, practically, a marriage commitment from the people.
They seized so much control that the individual became powerless. Taxes were raised to exorbitant amounts to sustain the government control. The money dried up in most regions, and many districts were devastated.
The people couldn't fight back well because the Authority had made it against the law to acquire firearms. They went to great lengths to keep firearms out of the hands of the people. Rendered the people defenseless. And told them how to think, how to speak, how to live.
Tax the people into oblivion—best way to control them, to demolish them, to leave them hopeless, to drive them into poverty. People, incredibly hard workers, could barely afford anything extra with their money because it all went to the government so the government could in turn provide them "with free access" to things. In the first fifty years of the Authority's rule, people actually believed it. Nobody believed it now.
But now it was too late.
There was too much devastation.
Kora closed the door to her private cabin. The Resistance had spared no expense for her ticket, which was nice. She was unsure where they derived their resources. It would be interesting to learn more. Ultimately, Kora didn't care about the Resistance or the Authority. She was just trying to make it, to survive. This fight wasn't her fight. Her fight was for her, to make some money, and to get away from all of this.
It was hard to escape the Authority, but there were ways. She'd never been outside the realm of the Authority, but she would leave one day, get far, far away, and never return. There were better lands. Free lands, that she'd heard about. Lands where taxes were low, and you could think however you wanted, and live however you wanted.
That's ALL she wanted.