At his desk atop a patchwork pile of glass and brutalist blocks, Dr. Lee Lucius fondles a book. A thing he read first in recovered .pdf. There are two known physical copies of the text. One, pristine in Lucius vault. The other, worn half back to wood pulp is in Lee’s hands right now.
These Children of Various Minds: the Looming Technological Singularity. The book is beat to shit, the front cover carefully taped on (several times). The back cover looks chewed, half gone. The tape there is wild, haphazard. Page numbers and chicken scratch and every re-read’s epiphanies are marked. There are half-stuck post-its and marginalia. Then there are the later re-reads and revisions over notes and coffee stains. Pages that fell out are carefully paperclipped and kept approximately 10 pages into the text’s body.
It’s a futurist manifesto, of a sort. A holy text from 1986. A sacred text (if only to one man). “Within ten years…”. It depicts the predicted procedure in terms of a robot taking a cheese grater to a brain, rendering the being tied to that flesh transcendent, immortal, a consciousness limitless–of light and electrical impulses ever lasting. In 1986 They were a decade away.
The only thing he and his have been able to reproduce is the end of the scene: the body seizes and dies. They wasted 4 subjects on methods directly drawn from the text. They were so close. We have got to be on the edge of something.
His ‘ai’ beeps. The bug, “The Thing Mk2”, the listening device is active. He taps his ear piece in time to live stream his opponent’s entrance to the Oval Office: “Madame president.”
“Sit. So who wants to tell me who shit the bed on giving me some heads up about John Wayne’s campaign announcement? Don’t speak up all at once.”
*
“You good back there?” Dolores yells over the engine and through the cab’s rear window.
“Yeah.” Meekly and lying. Dee angles the mirror down. Jonah is hugging his legs, laying on his side in the truck bed. Dee lights a smoke and drops the pack through the window.
“Thank you.” Ready for the lighter? “Yeah. Thank you again.”
Abbott’s head is on a swivel, watching for blacked-out SUVs. Dee doesn’t unclench until they reach their destination.
*
The pickup truck that smells like French fries ducks off the road in the wee hours. Into the garage of another co-op farm. “James called ahead.” Hugs for Dee. Handshakes for the other two.
Her two grown ass sons load supplies, camping gear, snacks and gas-cans of biodiesel into the bed-and-cab of another old truck that smells of French fried potatoes. “First things first, phones, tablets, anything wireless into the squawk box.” Jonah and Dolores each drop a smart phone in to the chaff-foil lined Faraday cage/bag. “These are gonna go North and live on a farm with your truck.”
“It’s that bad?” Whoever came after you shot a cop. And now the staties and a lot of deputies would like to talk to you. “Oh fuck oh fuck.” Easy, Bunker Baby. “Really?” Dee, I love you because you are a Bunker Baby. We’ve got people in Chicago, they’ll take you in until this get’s sorted. “But like I didn’t do anything.” We all know that, but we got like five cops in in this county-and-a-half. “Good” Yeah, most of the time, but you want to sit at the Sherriff’s station with a bunch of goons after you?
Abbott chimes in. “There were dozens” Jonah lifting gear into the truck: there were eight. “There were eight heavily armed goons.”
“Dee I love.” Judith appraises Abbott. “Dee, do I love this man?” No, but stop short of loathe for now. Judith, meet Abbott-aka-dad. “I do not see the resemblance.”
The old man holds out the palm of his hand. The glow. The glow grows until the hand is transparent. The hologram hovering in the palm of his hand dances flits takes the shape of shaky pen-sketch of a tardigrade, the ‘+’ sign, a little cartoon woman. When Judith looks up in awe, Abbott nods back toward Dee with a grin.
He closes his palm, crushes the little light picture back into his hand. “Chicago’s not the destination.” Really? “Peoria.” Are you shitting me? “I shit you not.” Raised brows and ‘Good luck’.
A whistle over the handheld radio from a friend on watch by the road. Then ‘click’ for the first, two ‘clicks’ the second blacked out SUV passes this farm co-op slowly, leisurely. Hunting.
Jonah: “You don’t need to put yourselves in danger.”
Judith, donning armor, grins. “I promise not to hurt anyone. This is not my first rodeo.” Rodeos have never really been a thing this part of the “The expression travels, dear. Ways north, we open the bag. We ditch the phones, and the truck. We hitch a ride home.”
*
“Nobody wants to tell their president, the leader of their party, how we got blindsided by that campaign announcement?”
Sydney Sanders won the office she holds and privilege of leaning on the Resolute Desk and glaring at the team sitting semi circle before her. She won by the largest margin of any American politician in history. She is the single person in the room fully aware how tenuous her, and her party’s, position actually is.
“Syd” The glare intensifies. “Madame President.” Raised eyebrow reprieve. “It’s a stunt! The guy has screamed holy hell about de-regulation for a decade. I think he’s willing to lose a presidential bid to push that agenda, to keep it on the table. It’s smoke.”
The bald senator across the circle nods agreement: “We’re feeding the country. We’re rebuilding. We’re not throwing your kids into a meat grinder. We’re growing again. People have free time. Little cash. You gonna vote for some cowboy that talks like your dad’s landlord? No. No way. It’s in the bag.”
She watches the men and women, the stuffed suits in front of her, self-congratulate at their accomplishment: flattering power, flattering her.
“We play a defensive campaign, he beats me worse than Reagan’s VEEP beat the baby man in the tank.” Silence. “Dukakis.” There is one “Oh yeah” nod of fake recognition.
Her Chief of Staff stares at his shoes, as he has the whole exchange. He knows he’s done.
“Here’s the deal. I’ve hired the ad agency that sold farm grown larva protein. Yum. To the American people. Successfully. And their little team of Bunker Babies raised on the sludge that comes out of those media centers is going to win the day.”
“There’s great art in those centers.”
“And there’s noise. Reality television and a disturbing number of hamburger ads and those holiday seasonal commercials where someone buys their spouse a luxury car ‘just cause’.”
“That’s not how life ever was for most…”
The President cuts him off with a gesture: “Ted. You know that. I know that. The kids, Bunker Babies who’ve seen everything, heard everything, read everything and have no context for what they’ve read and watched. They don’t know that.” Sanders takes a sip of her coffee, spills a little on the desk on purpose (precisely for that little squirm it gets out of Ted).
“So we attack his hero. Reagan.”
“That’s a bigger defeat. You are all dedicated public servants. You’re effective bureaucrats, and that’s not a slur, but it’s why none of you get any say in my campaign whatsoever. We go at him. Lee Lucius. Or we lose. Badly.” How?
“He’s a spectacle. A sideshow. And he doesn’t think anyone remembers that kind of politics. Draw straws. One of you is going to represent my administration in Houston next week, lay a wreath, give a speech my staff has approved.” Why? “We’re going to remind his audience what happened last time someone went full cowboy in the 21st Century.”
*
Lucius taps his ear piece. The feed cuts out. “Formidable woman. Project Cain seems to be our secret. She called me a spectacle. A sideshow. I like that.” Knife smile from the campaign manager sitting across from him. “Kim, I want a press release in honor of the anniversary of the “Battle of Houston.” You want our campaign to honor a man hanged for mutiny? “A press release commemorating the sacrifice of those brave airmen of the Texas ANG” There isn’t a Texas ANG. They’re all gone.
“Yes, but the Balloons were downed and Houston thrives.”
She considers. “And we have our friends on social media “just ask questions.” I love it. “Did we hang a hero?” How about we leave the phrasing to the ‘digital poets.’ “Did we judge too quickly? Too harshly?” That’s the tone.
*
If you could see you as I see you now, “Blue Marble” distant, you might realize how tenuous your position is. Take the history book photograph of Earth and set it as the first frame. Play. Advance. The cinematic impression of great speed. Kepler’s laws are just that, and the world spins the same as you’ve imagined it, growing quite large in the frame.
Closer and you see the problem (or sunlight occasionally glinting off it for a slice of a fragment of an instant). There’s a sickness. The diagnosis: Kessler’s syndrome. The cloud of debris, most of it metal fragments no bigger than a bolt, driving in circles in cloud formation at 17,000 MPH.
Eye, being ephemeral, can come and go as I please, but you are stuck on this planet. Locked in the cell you made when someone (doesn’t matter whom at this point) used an anti-satellite weapon. That’s a sanitary name for a missile that’s a space shotgun. It knocks all the little human achievements in orbits to pieces that shred the rest to pieces and so on and so forth.
Camera glides into atmosphere. Past a Barrage Balloon, gleaming, basking between clouds. Black solar panels and that hum from the Shulzies. Antennae and weapons, indistinguishable at this distance, bristle from the body and belly. Drones flit to and from the mothership, and that’s as close as I’m willing to get (even ephemeral). Dive again, far from the the mechanical beast. Down to the Mitten where the land is flat and over, west on a road that’s nothing like the crow flies.
Camera punches through one last lonely cloud, drifting lazy over the lower peninsula. A string-turn-thread of black-grey-black pavement becomes a trickle-road then river. Sooner than you’d think, an old truck that smells like French fried potatoes dominates the frame. In the bed, an enormous man lays on his back, limbs taking up all space not spoken for by supplies. He puffs a joint dwarfed by his hands. Let’s the wind of their passage take his smoke.
When Abbott found the treat, the substantial bag of weed included with the road snacks, he hand rolled several, immediately. “Dad, no. I don’t want that. And not in the cab.” Guess you gotta roll the window down. “I’d really prefer not to. And you’re going to hot box me.” She cranks the window down “At least blow it out your side, I’m fucking driving.” Bunker Baby, heh. “I smoke, just not when I’m driving several thousand pounds of vehicle. How am I the one telling this to you, father of mine?” Abbot fiddles with the radio.
The old Tardigrade finds a pirate station run by someone who loved their hippy grandma’s vinyl collection. In sing-along the three: Dolores, Abbott, and Jonah assert quite loudly that war is good for “absolutely nothing” again and again again. They sing about the “Rising Sun” as it starts to set.
Behind and above travelling roughly west and looking like a bird, when Jonah can see it, is some kind of drone. Like the car, it’s flying west. But it could be a bird. It’s a bird. The music is good, and the clouds are painted purple gold in that last-light that lingers, and Jonah dozes then sleeps.
The old truck growls and grumbles down a route that sidesteps Chicago–the road of destiny that ends in Peoria (or as close as they can get in a vehicle). Jonah dreams. He dreams of great heaps of fried potatoes.
*
Sam stands at the window, arms crossed . “Lana. It’s bad.” I know, dear. “What do I do here?” Processing…
He looks down, north toward the bay and the bridge. He can see re-claimed and re-built city. But at this height the movement and writhing of people, especially the public housing too close to his building for his taste. It looks too messy, and loud, and chaotic–in short, human. He yearns for the view from the top where the cars are toys and the people are ants. He wishes to look at the world from Lucius’ height like the map in a game–a God’s eye view.
“Lana.” Stand by, love. “What do we tell Lucius?” Nothing. Or you really will be banished. They’re professionals. We wait. They’ll find the 13th subject.
*
END DOLORES CHAPTER 4