A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “I don’t have any money, I’m sorry,” Matthew said, but Molly waved it off.

  “You don’t need any. I just wanted to give you something to take with you.”

  Phoebe came up just then and saw at a glance what was going on. “Hey, Mom. Hi, I’m Phoebe.”

  “This is Matthew,” Molly said. “I wanted to give him a book to take with him.”

  “They didn’t exactly let us have books,” Matthew said. “There was a small library, but library use was a privilege, and you needed more than ‘good behavior.’ For that kind of privilege, you would need to…” He glanced at Phoebe, because whatever he’d been about to say wasn’t suitable for a child’s ears. “They did let us read the Bible, and I practically memorized some parts of it.”

  Molly and Phoebe looked at each other, while Matthew fidgeted, and then Phoebe said, “Father Brown mysteries.”

  “Are you sure?” Molly said.

  Phoebe nodded. She ran, fast as a deer, and came back with a tiny paperback of G. K. Chesterton, which would fit in the pockets of the donated corduroys. “I used to love this book,” she told Matthew. “It’s about God, and religion, but it’s really just a great bunch of detective stories, where the key always turns out to be making sense of people.”

  Matthew kept thanking Molly and Phoebe in a kind of guttural undertone, like a compulsive cough, until they waved it off. When they got to the California storefront, they kept Matthew out of sight until they were sure the coast was clear, then they hustled him out and showed him the clearest path that followed the main road but stayed under cover. He waved once as he sprinted across the blunt strip of gravel parking lot, but other than that, he didn’t look back.

  * * *

  —

  The president of California wished the president of America a “good spring solstice” instead of “happy Easter,” and the president of America called a news conference to discuss this unforgivable insult. America’s secretary of morality, Wallace Dawson, called California’s gay attorney general an offensive term. California moved some troops up to the border and performed some “routine exercises,” so close that Molly could hear the cackle of guns shooting blanks all night. (She hoped they were blanks.) America sent some fighter craft and UAVs along the border, sundering the air. California’s swarms of water-divining robots had managed to tap the huge deposits located deep inside the rocky mantle, but both America and California claimed that this water was located under their respective territories.

  Molly’s Gidget kept flaring up with “news” that was laced with propaganda, as if the people in charge on both sides were trying to get everyone fired up. The American media kept running stories about a pregnant woman in New Sacramento who lost her baby because her supposedly deactivated birth-control implant had a buggy firmware update, plus graphic stories about urban gang violence, drugs, prostitution, and so on. California’s media outlets, meanwhile, worked overtime to remind people about the teenage rape victims in America who were locked up and straitjacketed, to make sure they gave birth, and the peaceful protestors who were gassed and beaten by police.

  Almost every day lately, Americans came in looking for a couple books that Molly didn’t have. Molly had decided to go ahead and stock Why We Stand, a book-length manifesto about individualism and Christian values, which stopped just short of accusing Californians of bestiality and cannibalism. But Why We Stand was unavailable, because they’d gone back for another print run. Meanwhile, though, Molly outright refused to sell Our People, a book that included offensive caricatures of the black and brown people who mostly clustered in the dense cities out west, like New Sacramento, plus “scientific” theories about their relative intelligence.

  People kept coming in and asking for Our People, and at this point Molly was pretty sure they knew she didn’t have it and they were just trying to make a point.

  “It’s just, some folks feel as though you think you’re better than the rest of us,” said Norma Verlaine, whose blond, loudmouthed daughter, Samantha, was part of Phoebe’s friend group. “The way you try to play both sides against the middle, perching here in your fancy chair, deciding what’s fit to read and what’s not fit to read. You’re literally sitting in judgment over us.”

  “I’m not judging anyone,” Molly said. “Norma, I live here, too. I go to Holy Fire every Sunday, same as you. I’m not judging.”

  “You say that. But then you refuse to sell Our People.”

  “Yes, because that book is racist.”

  Norma turned to Reggie Watts, who had two kids in Phoebe’s little gang: Tobias and Suz. “Did you hear that, Reggie? She called me a racist.”

  “I didn’t call you anything. I was talking about a book.”

  “Can’t separate books from people,” said Reggie, who worked at the big power plant thirty miles east. He furrowed his huge brow and stooped a little as he spoke. “And you can’t separate people from the places they come from.”

  “Time may come, you have to choose a country once and for all,” Norma said. Then she and Reggie walked out while the glow of righteousness still clung.

  Molly felt something chewing all the way through her. Like the cartoon “bookworm” chewing through a book, from when Molly was a child. There was a worm drilling a neat round hole in Molly, rendering some portion of her illegible.

  * * *

  —

  Molly was just going through some sales slips—because ever since that dustup with Sander and Teri, she was paranoid about American sales not getting recorded in the computer—when the earthquake began. A few books fell on the floor as the ground shuddered, but most of the books were packed too tight to dislodge right away. The grinding, screeching sound from the vibrations underground made Molly’s ears throb. When she could get her balance back, she looked at her Gidget, and at first she saw no information. Then there was a news alert: California had laid claim to the water deposits, deep underground, and was proceeding to extract them as quickly as possible. America was calling this an act of war.

  Phoebe was out with her friends as usual. Molly sent a message on her Gidget and then went outside to yell Phoebe’s name into the wind. The crushing sound underground kept going, but either Molly had gotten used to it or it was moving away from here.

  “Phoebe?”

  Molly walked the two-lane roads, glancing every couple minutes at her Gidget to see if Phoebe had replied yet. She told herself that she wouldn’t freak out if she could find her daughter before the sun went down, and then the sun did go down and she had to invent a new deadline for panic.

  Something huge and powerful opened its mouth and roared nearby, and Molly swayed on her feet. The hot breath of a large carnivore blew against her face while her ears filled with sound. She realized after a moment that three Stalker-class aircraft had flown very low overhead, in stealth mode, so you could hear and feel—but not see—them.

  “Phoebe?” Molly called out, as she reached the end of the long main street, with the one grocery store and the diner. “Phoebe, are you out here?” The street led to a big field of corn on one side and to the diversion road leading to the freeway on the other. The corn rustled from the after-shakes of the flyover. Out on the road, Molly heard wheels tearing at loose dirt and tiny rocks and saw the slash of headlights in motion.

  “Mom!” Phoebe came running down the hill from the tiny forest area, followed by Jon Brinkfort, Zadie Kagwa, and a few other kids. “Thank god you’re okay.”

  Molly started to say that Phoebe should get everyone inside the bookstore, because the reading room was the closest thing to a bomb shelter for miles.

  But a new round of flashes and earsplitting noises erupted, and then Molly looked past the edge of town and saw a phalanx of shadows, three times as tall as the tallest building, moving forward.

  Molly had never seen a mecha before, but she recognized these metal giants,
with the bulky actuators on their legs and rocket launchers on their arms. They looked like a crude caricature of bodybuilders, pumped up inside their titanium alloy casings. The two viewports on their heads, along with the slash of red paint, gave them the appearance of scowling down at all the people underfoot. Covered with armaments all over their absurdly huge bodies, they were heading into town on their way to the border.

  “Everybody into the bookstore!” Phoebe yelled. Zadie Kagwa was messaging her father on some fancy tablet, and other kids were trying to contact their parents, too, but then everyone hustled inside the First and Last Page.

  * * *

  —

  People came looking for their kids, or for a place to shelter from the fighting. Some people had been browsing in the store when the hostilities broke out, or had been driving nearby. Molly let everyone in, until the American mechas were actually engaging a squadron of California centurions, which were almost identical to the other metal giants, except that their onboard systems were connected to the Anoth Complex. Both sides fired their rocket launchers, releasing bright-orange trails that turned everything the same shade of amber. Molly watched as an American mecha lunged forward with its huge metal fist and connected with the side of a centurion, sending shards of metal spraying out like the dandelion seeds on Zadie’s tattoo.

  Then Molly got inside and sealed up the reading room, with a satisfying clunk. “I paid my contractor extra,” she told all the people who crouched inside. “These walls are like a bank vault. This is the safest place for you all to be.” There was a toilet just outside the solid metal door and down the hall, with a somewhat higher risk of getting blown up while you peed.

  Alongside Molly and Phoebe, there were a dozen people stuck in the reading room. There were Zadie and her father, Jay; Norma Verlaine and her daughter, Samantha; Reggie Watts and his two kids; Jon Brinkfort; Sander, the engineer who’d come looking for Souls on the Land; Teri, the woman who actually owned Souls on the Land; Marcy, a twelve-year-old kid from California, and Marcy’s mother, Petrice.

  They all sat in this two-meter-by-three-meter room, with two couches that could hold five people between them, plus bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Every time someone started to relax, there was another quake, and the sounds grew louder and more ferocious. Nobody could get a signal on any of their devices or implants, either because of the reinforced walls or because someone was actively jamming communications. The room jerked back and forth, and the books quivered but did not fall out of their nests.

  Molly looked over at Jay Kagwa, sitting with his arm around his daughter, and had a sudden flash of remembering a time, several years ago, when Phoebe had campaigned for Molly to go out on a date with Jay. Phoebe and Zadie were already friends, though neither of them was interested in romance yet, and Phoebe had decided that the stout, well-built architect would be a good match for her mother. Partly based on the wry smiles the two of them always exchanged when they compared notes about being single parents of rambunctious daughters. Plus both Molly and Phoebe were American citizens, and it wouldn’t hurt to have dual citizenship. But Molly never had time for romance. And now, of course, Zadie was still giving sidelong glances to Phoebe, who had never chosen between Zadie and Jon, and probably never would.

  Jay had finished hugging his daughter and also yelling at her for getting herself stuck in the middle of all this, and all the other parents including Molly had had a good scowl at their own kids, as well. “I wish we were safe at home,” Jay Kagwa told his daughter in a whisper, “instead of being trapped here with these people.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘these people’?” Norma Verlaine demanded from the other end of the room.

  Another tremor, more raucous noise.

  “Leave it, Norma,” said Reggie. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “No, I want to know,” Norma said. “What makes us ‘these people’ when we’re just trying to live our lives and raise our kids? And meanwhile, your country decided that everything from abortion to unnatural sexual relationships, to cutting open people’s brains and shoving in a bunch of nanotech garbage, was A-OK. So I think the real question is, Why do I have to put up with people like you?”

  “I’ve seen firsthand what your country does to people like me,” Jay Kagwa said in a quiet voice.

  “As if Californians aren’t stealing children from America, at a rapidly increasing rate, to turn into sex slaves or prostitutes. I have to keep one eye on my Samantha here all the time.”

  “Mom,” Samantha said, and that one syllable meant everything from Please stop embarrassing me in front of my friends to You can’t protect me forever.

  “We’re not stealing children,” said Sander. “That was a ridiculous made-up story.”

  “You steal everything. You’re stealing our water right now,” said Teri. “You don’t believe that anything is sacred, so it’s all up for grabs as far as you’re concerned.”

  “We’re not the ones who put half a million people into labor camps,” said Petrice, a quiet green-haired older woman who mostly bought books about gardening and Italian history.

  “Oh no, not at all, California just turns millions of people into cybernetic slaves of the Anoth Complex,” said Reggie. “That’s much more humane.”

  “Hey, everybody calm down,” Molly said.

  “Says the woman who tries to serve two masters,” Norma said, rounding on Molly and poking a finger at her.

  The other six adults in the room kept shouting at each other until the tiny reading room seemed almost as loud as the battle outside. The room shook, the children huddled together, and the adults just raised their voices to be heard over the nearly constant percussion. Everybody knew the dispute was purely about water rights, but months of terrifying stories had trained them to think of it instead as a righteous war over sacred principles. Our children, our freedom. Everyone shrieked at each other, and Molly fell into the corner near a stack of theology, covering her ears and looking across the room at Phoebe, who was crouched with Jon and Zadie. Phoebe’s nostrils flared and she stiffened as if she were about to run a long sprint, but all of her attention was focused on comforting her two friends. Molly felt flushed with a sharper version of her old fear that she’d been a Bad Mother.

  Then Phoebe stood up and yelled, “EVERYBODY STOP!”

  Everybody stopped yelling. Some shining miracle. They all turned to look at Phoebe, who was holding hands with both Jon and Zadie. Even with the racket outside, this room suddenly felt eerily, almost ceremonially, quiet.

  “You should be ashamed,” Phoebe said. “We’re all scared and tired and hungry, and we’re probably stuck here all night, and you’re all acting like babies. This is not a place for yelling. It’s a bookstore. It’s a place for quiet browsing and reading, and if you can’t be quiet, you’re going to have to leave. I don’t care what you think you know about each other. You can darn well be polite, because…because…” Phoebe turned to Zadie and Jon, and then gazed at her mom. “Because we’re about to start the first meeting of our book club.”

  Book club? Everybody looked at each other in confusion, like they’d skipped a track.

  Molly stood up and clapped her hands. “That’s right. Book-club meeting in ten minutes. Attendance is mandatory.”

  * * *

  —

  The noise from outside wasn’t just louder than ever but more bifurcated. One channel of noise came from directly underneath their feet, as if some desperate struggle for control over the water reserves was happening deep under the Earth’s crust, between teams of robots or tunneling war machines, and the very notion of solid ground seemed obsolete. And then over their heads, a struggle between aircraft, or metal titans, or perhaps a sky full of whirring autonomous craft, slinging fire back and forth until the sky turned red. Trapped inside this room, with no information other than words on brittle spines, every
body found themselves inventing horrors out of every stray noise.

  Molly and Phoebe huddled in the corner, trying to figure out a book that everyone in the room would be familiar enough with but that they could have a real conversation about. Molly had actually hosted a few book clubs at the store over the years, and at least a few of the people now sheltering in the reading room had attended, but she couldn’t remember what any of those clubs had read. Molly kept pushing for this one literary coming-of-age book that had made a splash around the time of the Sundering, or maybe some good old Jane Austen, but Phoebe vetoed both of those ideas.

  “We need to distract them”—Phoebe jerked her thumb at the mass of people in the reading room behind them—“not bore them to death.”

  In the end, the first and maybe only book selection of the Great International Book Club had to be Million in One, a fantasy adventure about a teenage boy named Norman who rescues a million souls that an evil wizard has trapped in a globe and accidentally absorbs them into his own body. So Norman has a million souls in one body, and they give him magical powers but he can also feel all of their unfinished business, their longing to be free. And Norman has to fight the wizard, who wants all those souls back, plus Norman’s. This book was supposed to be for teenagers, but Molly knew for a fact that every single adult had read it, as well, on both sides of the border.

  “Well, of course the premise suffers from huge inconsistencies,” Sander complained. “It’s established early on that souls can be stored and transferred, and yet Norman can’t simply unload his extra souls into the nearest vessel.”

  “They explained that in book two.” Zadie only rolled her eyes a little. “The souls are locked inside Norman. Plus the wizard would get them if he put them anywhere else.”