The Speech Writer Pt. 2

Pearl was chosen to be a speech writer for the queen's brodcasts. This was an honourable job, but nobody from her class was jealous of Pearl. This was because all of the lies that came out of the queen's mouth would be written by her hand. Messges that were composed to dull uprisings and restlessness were composed by her. Sure, the queen was a tyrant but Pearl was the irn fist that controlled the people. 

At 17 Pearl was shadowing the previous Speech writer, at 18 she wrote some speeches under the guidence of her mentor and at 19 she wrote her first speech. This speech was different than all of the ones before, because this one she wrote without the rules of her predecessor. It was also different because it was recognized as the queen's greatest speech in 40 years. Some short time after that, her mentor died. Pearl often imagined that the last thing he saw was one of the queen's assasins overtop of him, plunging a knife into his eye. 

Today Pearl's job was to gather intel on the situation in SS,L-1. There was a flu going around and the speech was supposed to be about staying safe while supply trucks full of medicine were coming. There had been a few outbreaks on Mars, but from the detailed outline that Pearl was given, she suspected something else was going on.

After gathering information about the flu outbreak, Pearl got to typing making sure to put the secret word at the beginning. Today's was easy, because it was sector, so she started it off with Sector Science and Lab 1, for the sector with the outbreak. Over Pearl's 2 1/2 years of being the speech writer she had written almost 200 speeches. Out of those 200 speeches, the most recent ones, there were 10 encoded with the beginning of a message. On Mars there isn't much communication between the sectors, so Pearl though of a way to create one, using the queen herself. There was someone in the palace who was her friend and she had secret ways of spreading the word privately. Their plan was to overthrow the queen using these means of communication. They didn't really have a plan yet, but Pearl knew that they would soon. 

There was something weird about the message to SS,L-1. From the sounds of it, it was a tough disease to beat, and from the way she was supposed to word it, one with high fatality. How could this disease have gotten into SS,L-1? Pearl had wondered. It was supposedly one of the most sanitary sectors out of them all. One of least prone for a virus, especially one of this magnitude. Pearl was often confused by the queen's speech requests but all of them had been more vague than the others. It just didn't make sense. As Pearl continued to type, the pieces started fitting together more clearly than they had before. The virus never had entered SS,L-1, Pearl realized, it was created there by scientists, and it was not a virus at all.