Lie Smith

” House?”, confused, burrowed frown, creases around the eyes, the woman stands, suffering the barrage of questioning spewing out of the man in front of her.
“…..house…car…”, two words she most certainly knew. House, she knew from years before, her mother speaking to two strange men dressed in clothing of a type she had never seen. One had used the word frequently, pointing at the structure that had seen her born, and grow, peeking up through the afternoon sun, a baseball cap resting on her head. She had been near inseparable from that hat for quite some time, to her mother’s mild enjoyment. Mildly only because she had to wash the hat so frequently, but enjoyed because it fit so well on the little girl’s head, and she obviously love to wear it.
But she was not paying attention to the man in front of her. Rude, she thought, and arrogant. The man, visibly upset about, well; such a small amount of damage to the plaster of his front wall; or perhaps it was because her car, which had caused the damage, was still technically partially inside his house.
Not very much later, flashing lights festooned the careful plaster in front of her, a car approaching from the rear, the police, most likely. Must have been the lights, tipped me off, she thought, realizing she was still slightly shocked from the crash, still a bit light-headed. She turned to face the police, two men stepping out from the least likely police car she had ever seen. Fiberglass body, color closely resembling baby blue, polyester seats, with a corner chewed out of the drivers’ right shoulder. The rear two seats had recently been enclosed by a two inch thick, clear cube, accessible through the right rear door, with neither a door nor holes for air to be seen. The light was certainly attention-getting, actually a strip of LEDs, bunched tightly at the center of orb, hovering in a magnetic field above a raised dimple on the car’s roof.
Two policemen emerged. On the left, the taller of the two and current driver, ambles out of the vehicle, arching his back as if it were stiff, then straightening his jacket, eyeing them as they both stand calmly by the scene of the accident. Stepping over pieces of the simple wooden fence, strewn across the front yard by the impact, and over the remains of what appeared to have been this yard’s solitary bush, he approached.
The shorter and somewhat more round policeman, having found his way around to the driver’s side, waits by the open door, right arm at his hip, left arm resting on the top of the door.
All this she takes in, while looking at the house again, to verify that the damage is not all that great. Not that great, but certainly a good bit more in the eyes of her counterpart, standing in his bathrobe, barefoot, on the stoop of his opened front door. It seemed he had retreated there, while she had been focused on the police. He appeared to be smoking, although she could not tell what.
“… …, … papiersk … … ….,” the policeman said to her. She could barely make out anything, no sense to the words he spoke. Maybe that meant papers? She did not know. Identification she had, on her person, and knew that when she showed them to him, he could react in a few different ways.
Happy, if he knew how her country had helped this small nation return to communism after the rigors and inequities of the former system, indeed she had seen firsthand the return of her country (dangerously large, for a confederated city-state, at close to twenty-five thousand), through the final, unbearable stages of capitalism, to the rebirth of the socialist ideal in their current model. It was a new model, but with so many countries turning their backs on the ravenous and unsustainable forms of capitalism that festered at the end of this twenty-second century, the new, pod-society method seemed to work, for some reason, but only to a certain size. As long as systems of accountability stay in place, the public and the private good seemed to be able to coexist, both of varying importance to the individual. Some people just did not fit it, but were prone to find their way out, to a different system, perhaps back to the capitalists, or the lugs.
Should the policeman be one who resented her country, growing up during the wars, during the rebellion, forced to witness the slaughter and cruelty through young eyes, with a constant flood of images and information broadcast on the clothes, walls and birds around him. (Birds, pigeons preferably due to the nature of pigment in their feathers, sprayed with a light coat of photo-pigmentation and injected with certain nano-transmitters, can broadcast loving images, short-film ads, right on their bodies. When large groups of them start, and fly up as one, the nano-transmitters all got together and created some almost disturbing images).
He was not. This man was seemingly indifferent to her inability to communicate, to her cries of alarm as he grabbed her arm and began moving her back toward the Plexiglas compartment that took up the rear of the vehicle.
At the door, he pauses, and turns back to the house, where the barefooted man stands, smoking from a small cylinder, blue-tinged smoke drifting up into the morning sunlight, smoke lingering in a solitary puff against an otherwise clear sky. Turning back, he says a few words to the cube, shoving her toward the hole forming in the clear wall, resolving itself into a square. As he shoves her head down to clear the roof of the car, she notices that the clear material is thicker around the defined edges of the square doorway, and smells of warm plastic. Once inside, the square loses its shape like a cube of bubblegum microwaved, strands forming rapidly together to form a solid mass once more.
Having ridden in taxis before, she is unfazed. The guard however, hovers a moment, looking harder at the surface, just to see if it is really all the way closed. He must be new, or they must not have had this level of detainment systems for the majority of his young life.

She had arrived by vacuum-train, shooting through its tunnel at mach 5, and had spent two days in quarantine. On the evening of the second day, after the random tissue sampling and final chemical bath, she had become grumpy, but cheered up when she remembered why she had come.