A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  I wanted to tell him that desire was not a distraction. Not something separate from the way we want freedom. I wanted to tell him that I had been to a place where anything was possible, and that the only thing more frightening than powerlessness was power.

  Instead, I made a move. Sid was super drunk and I was not much more sober, and the whole thing proceeded along predictable lines, the same for every straight boy who finds, to his great disappointment, that not even society’s strictest rules are stronger than his own desire for a blowjob—all What are you doing, bro? and then Come on, man, nah and then Fucking do it.

  When we got back from the other side, he pretended he was asleep. And then he was asleep. Probably in the morning would assume whatever horrors he had witnessed were all a dream.

  We lay together. Through cheap speakers, a long-dead man lamented his inability to resist the allure of dangerous sex. His high voice excused himself, blamed everything on it being Saturday night.

  The next day was our last in Albany. We hung cloners along the final central corridor. The day was hot. He didn’t hate me. I watched how he worked, how he seemed to take longer placing every piece on its post, inspecting the machinery more closely than he had before. He even let me hang a couple, which usually was a privilege he kept for himself.

  From atop the lampposts I could see into Albany’s cramped debris-strewn backyards, all the people smoking cigarettes or reading books or swinging on swing sets and imagining themselves invisible, and I thought about how much difference it made, how much more you could see when you’re standing in a different place.

  “Well, shit!” Sid said, driving from one block to the next. He held up his phone, which said ANNIE.

  I listened to his end of the conversation. “Hey!” “Yes!” “Is that cool?” “Awesome!” “I will.”

  “We should call it quits for the day,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of that sky.”

  The noon sky over Albany was brilliant uninterrupted blue. I said, “Yeah, definitely looks like storms coming.”

  I was happy for him. I hoped he’d get lucky.

  I wasn’t in love with him. I had thought I was, but that often happened with prolonged intense unrequited lust. I wondered what had snapped me out of it—blowing him, or the weirder bigger epiphany that was percolating, about the place of sex in a broader strategy of political resistance.

  Where had these words come from? They were Sid Words. Was it osmosis, so many hours sitting next to him while he used college expository-writing terms? I rarely understood him when he talked like that, but maybe eventually I’d started to make sense of it all. Or maybe I had contracted something from him. Just like he, presumably, contracted something from me.

  “Can’t work in the rain,” he said. “I’ll file a weather interruption.”

  This was new. Sid talked tough, but he never broke the rules.

  When he was gone, I debated going back to the underpass. Seeing what I could see. Who else I could fuck; what else I could change.

  Instead, I went back to our narrow boy-stinking room and masturbated, with my face buried in a pair of Sid’s socks. Nothing happened when I came. No explosions; no transdimensional leaps; no monsters. Whatever it was, it didn’t work when you were alone.

  Sid banged on the side of the truck, startling me out of a nap. A dream of dirty cities, happy people. Fallen statues.

  I joined him in the cab. Militiamen tramped past the truck. Their all-white outfits turned their pale skin several shades of pink. Sid smelled like smoke and strawberries.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything, but after a couple seconds he couldn’t keep his face from breaking into a grin.

  “Well, all right!” I said, clapping him on the back.

  He started up the truck. “Let’s get the hell out of this shitty town.”

  “But we still have eighty cloners to install,” I said. “What with the rain delay today…”

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  We drove. Exiting the city, we took 787. I wondered if Sid remembered that it had been shut down, before. Or if only I could remember the old reality.

  “Did anything weird happen? When you two…”

  “Weird? No,” he said, but he said it too fast, and he looked at me for a long time.

  “So you won’t see her again,” I said. “Annie.”

  “We’ll be in touch.” He turned up the radio, slowly and meaningfully. “Her boyfriend is a coding expert. I gave them one of the cloners. Reported it irreparably damaged and recycled.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  We rumbled on toward Schenectady. I read through the long line of cities ahead of us: Amsterdam, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, a half dozen more before we arrived at Niagara Falls. Planting the seeds of our own oppression, helplessly helping our enemies observe and entrap us, but spreading other seeds as well.

  SAM J. MILLER is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017 and was the winner of the Andre Norton Award. His latest novel, Blackfish City, was an Entertainment Weekly “Must Read” and was called “an action-packed science fiction thriller” and “surprisingly heartwarming” by The Washington Post. His stories have appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and Clarkesworld and in more than a dozen Year’s Best anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City and at samjmiller.com.

  ATTACHMENT DISORDER

  TANANARIVE DUE

  REPUBLIC OF SACRAMENTO

  Carrier Territories

  2062

  The news of death came in the snake of black smoke from the southeast. The horse ranch.

  Nayima knew what the smoke meant, so she didn’t jump on her bike to race fifteen miles through scrub brush and the remains of what had once been vineyards to inspect whatever was left of the ranch. She didn’t even wake Lottie, since Lottie was allowed to sleep late on Sundays. A deal was a deal, and rest would not come easily to any of them after today.

  Refusing to hurry, she gathered everything she wanted to keep and checked the contents of her backpack. Her old Glock and rounds, fully loaded. Extra shoes, protein capsules, water-purifiers, yellowing Rand McNally paper maps of Central California, cleansing wipes, and underwear. She shoved her hololens in her hoodie pocket and zipped it. Raul would see the smoke on his monitor soon, if he hadn’t already, and he would investigate. And then he would call with the bad news.

  Nayima waited for Raul’s call from the creaky rocking chair on her front porch, beside her wooden butter churn, presumably handcrafted forty or fifty years ago, but meant to look a hundred years older than its actual age. She guessed the churn, like the rocker, had been more of a prop for the previous owners, who no doubt had bought their butter packaged from the shell of a grocery store that had once done business a few miles down the road. But Lottie had arrived from the lab-coats in Sacramento with a taste for butter, so Nayima had learned how to make it for her.

  Beyond the porch was Nayima’s hoverbike, which she had uncovered. It rested beneath the house’s awning, gleaming in metallic black like the officious police vehicle it once had been. Her hoverbike and her Glock were Nayima’s world; the house was just where she slept.

  Nayima knew she should run with Lottie for Lottie’s sake, or at least try to, but even that certainty did not move her from her post on the porch, binoculars in one hand and her Glock in the other.

  If she heard engines, it was already too late. If she saw drones, it was too late.

  Let them come, then. She had met this moment so many times before: During the evacuation, when Gram was too sick from cancer to move, despite police orders. Hiding in a
bandoned buildings from the infected, who were enraged by the resistance of the well. Then, after the sick were long gone, hiding in bushes and abandoned cars and even an old mine, once, from the survivors hunting down Carriers. Each time, she had thought: Let them come.

  When the hololens shivered in her pocket, Nayima slipped it on the way Gram had worn her reading glasses, near the edge of her nose so she could also see her bike, the road, the thirsty brush, the graying, empty sky. The holoscreen glared on and flickered, appearing above her fence line. Raul looked a decade older since she’d seen him last weekend. His feed wasn’t flickering from this distance; he was standing in a haze of smoke. He was calling from the burning ranch Lizette and Dimitri had shared before Dimitri died, after a fall from a newly broken mare six months before.

  Someone might follow Raul now. Fool! The fire was probably a trap, singling out the weakest first, the oldest, the solitary, to draw out the rest. But was she any less foolish, waiting on her porch for them to come?

  Raul’s voice was smoke-roughened. “Lizette’s gone. All the horses burned. Dios mío.”

  Nayima felt sharp grief for the horses. Half a dozen beautiful creatures, gone. Senseless.

  Lizette and Dimitri had made the choice to live alone, just as she had. Their years in lab cages had taught them to cherish every choice, and to make the freest ones. Researchers had learned a generation ago that burning did not cure the plague; only the vaccine from antibodies in their veins did that. And the plague did not infect horses, which was why so many ran wild in the valley between Nayima’s house and Lizette’s ranch. Maybe to make up for lost human lives, Lizette and Dimitri had started collecting horses when they realized how many were dying for lack of food and water in the wild.

  No, the plague had not been their fault. But they had carried it.

  “This didn’t have to happen,” Raul said. He sounded enraged rather than sad, but she understood. Just last weekend, at the group dinner, he’d told her and Lizette they needed to move to the compound, at least until they all decided what to do next. Until we all decide, he’d said, as if everyone’s agreement were assured. Raul still hadn’t figured out that they would never all agree: Nayima would always dissent. Always. She would never move back to Sacramento, no matter how pretty the promises. Lizette would not have either.

  She hoped Lizette had the chance to kill herself before the fire did. They had talked about it, of course, when they’d met at the ranch for meals every other Tuesday, far from the compound the others foolishly called El Nuevo Mundo. Who would shoot whom. Where the poisons were. Nayima had once uttered her plan aloud, and even Lottie barely had flinched: I’ll shoot Lottie. Then I’ll shoot myself. How had Lizette managed with Dimitri gone?

  “I’ll come for you both now,” Raul said.

  “No. Go protect the others.”

  “Come quickly.” She knew he wanted to say ahora, an order. Instead, he trained his feed so she could see the blackened, smoking ruins of Lizette’s front porch, a wretched mirror of her own. Nayima closed her eyes. Lizette’s corpse lay inside, and Nayima had seen enough corpses.

  “Entiendo,” she assured him. “I’ll come.”

  “Quickly, Nayima.” The others had assigned Raul as their alpha because he was the only one with the health and youth for the job, but his bossiness burned her ears. Still, they were under attack, so she couldn’t let her temper flame over something as petty as sentence structure and tone of voice. “I had to call the marshals. They’ll be there too. Lo siento.”

  Of course he’d called the marshals.

  “Te quiero,” Raul said. His voice broke, a contagion.

  “Me too.”

  “You know you should have left before now, Nayima. Keep her safe.”

  “Fuck off. You know I will.”

  She blinked hard, held the dark for two seconds. Heard the connection snap away. When she opened her eyes again, Raul and the smoky ruins were gone, with only her bike in sight. They had even killed the horses. That wasn’t robbers, or vandals. The Cleaners had found them. And the marshals were waiting.

  Nayima had shaken off the habit of fear, but she was scared now. Scared and sixty-six, with bad knees and hips. And a failing brain, hacked by either age or her chips, or likely both. She was an old woman now, the same age Gram had been when she died. Lottie Powell Houston, she recited silently. Born December 9, died sixty-six years later, when the rest of the world met the plague. Gram, with her usual good planning, had gotten out just in time.

  “Who was that?” Lottie stuck her head out of the window, her dark hair’s ringlets tangled from sleep. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Raul,” Nayima said, adding as she saw Lottie’s face light up at her father’s name: “Cleaners got to the ranch. We have to go.” She pointed toward the smoke plume, watched Lottie’s eyes moon in shock. Lottie had called them Aunt Lizzy and Uncle Dimi. Gram would have softened her words with pumpkin or darling, but gentle words gagged Nayima. She hoped Lottie wouldn’t start crying.

  “Why are you just sitting there?” Lottie wailed. She was only eleven, but she was long grown. Lottie left the window, running back to grab the bag Nayima had packed for her, feet pounding across the floorboards. Good. That’s my girl, Nayima thought, but hated thinking it.

  Lottie wasn’t her girl. She never had been. And she certainly would not be after today.

  A movement in the eastern sky caught her eye, and Nayima’s finger tightened on the Glock’s trigger until she saw it was a hawk, bigger than a drone. Some drones were so small they looked like insects, but most were the size of smaller birds. Her heart was pulsing so hard that her veins prickled to her toes. Only a hawk.

  They would run. If the Cleaners were organized, they would have been here by now. Their plan, probably, was to follow Raul back to El Nuevo Mundo, where they could kill all twelve of them at once.

  “Hurry up!” Nayima said, rocking forward to gain her balance so she could stand.

  She and Lottie could make it to El Nuevo Mundo, undetected, before the Cleaners did. Maybe these assholes didn’t know where she lived yet, or they were saving her and Lottie for last. Or maybe the fire was only Sacramento’s ploy to try to scare them off their land. Maybe.

  On her feet, Nayima noticed she was frozen in place. The Glock seemed easier.

  She wasn’t afraid to die, but living scared the hell out of her. Especially with Lottie.

  You’ve got this, pumpkin, she heard Gram whisper behind her right ear. Her voice was so clear, Nayima nearly gasped.

  Then came the more familiar genderless voice behind her left ear, also inside her head. Nayima had named the chip’s voice Sonia: “Your blood pressure and heart rate are unusually high. Please report to HealthHost immediately to have your chip replaced for more-thorough care. You are”—a long pause, a different, deeper voice—“six months”—then Sonia’s voice again—“overdue for your chip replacement. This is in violation of Carrier Codes six through ten under the Articles of Reconciliation….”

  Nayima heard the tedious message several times a day. The threat in the word violation had worried her the first time, but not after six months. She used the music of Sonia’s dying singsong to move her feet one after the other across her dusty soil to the hoverbike.

  Gram’s voice, though, was newer. The first time she heard it, Nayima had dropped the bowl she was holding and ruined the dinner she’d fussed over for Lottie. She was almost sure the voice was triggered by her chip somehow. She was forgetting things more all the time, but going senile didn’t mean you heard voices. Could be a malfunction, or could be prodding for service, the way her gadgets used to get buggy when it was time to spend money for upgrades.

  Hell, no, she wouldn’t let them open her up again. She would take Lottie to live with Raul the way he’d always wanted her to, but she wasn’t going back to Sacramento. Never. No matter how many voic
es she heard, or whose.

  As Nayima prepared to swing her leg over her hoverbike’s saddle, she noticed the woman standing fifty yards from her, at the closed gate. The woman was wearing a short, pale-blue hospital gown, her silver hair in neat corn rows, her skin nearly blending with the soil. Nayima would know Gram anywhere. Dead or alive.

  “You may now be experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations,” Sonia said.

  “No shit,” Nayima said.

  Lottie bounded outside with her pack and her doll, meeting Nayima’s eyes with defiance. They had talked about this: no toys. Toys were a distraction and easily dropped for tracking.

  “Leave it,” Nayima said.

  “No. I tied a rope to her—see?” True enough, Lottie had tied twine thoroughly around the doll’s torso, knotted at several points, and after two feet the twine bound the doll to her own waist. She had wasted time tying herself to a doll.

  Nayima took one last gaze at the space where she had lived for nearly ten years, the government’s reparations after her long imprisonment. She felt nothing: She saw only drought-ravaged soil and cracked walls and flaking paint and dusty windows where she had so often sat sentry. But she felt a pang when she saw her black cat, Tango, watching from the window. If Tango had been a dog, she might have brought him too. She’d named her black cats Tango since she was a girl, as if the same cat had followed her to the end of the world.

  “Go leave the door open. Let the cat out,” Nayima said.

  “Why?”

  “We’re not coming back. Don’t waste time asking.”

  Lottie looked at her closely, as if to see if her face matched the sorrow of her words, and she was convinced enough to run to the porch without more questions. Lottie flung the door open and then ran toward the hoverbike to board behind Nayima, her eyes high on the smoky sky, cradling her doll like an infant. Tango bounded out of the house, finally free to rejoin his wild brothers. The house would be overtaken by cats. Nayima almost liked that idea.