A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  The walking stick trembled in Nayima’s unsteady hand.

  “You are losing consciousness,” Sonia said.

  “No, no,” Nayima said, then—

  When she woke, the silence startled her. The gunshots were fresh in her mind, but no birds were flapping in the leaves, no creatures scurrying for safety. The gunshots were long gone. Panicked, she checked the men she’d killed. Neither had moved. She did not look at their faces. The dead man’s hololens chimed so loudly beneath him that it must be set to URGENT. That was what had made her stir: a chime. Someone was calling. But no one had come yet.

  “You have had a fainting episode. Please lie still and call for medical assistance.”

  Nayima’s right side ached, especially her neck. But she ignored the shooting pain as she braced with her walking stick and pushed against a tree, and the trunk’s firm weight helped her stand. Dizziness came and subsided.

  If not for Gram waving to her from the rows of almond trees behind her, Nayima might have lost her way back to Lottie.

  * * *

  —

  Lottie let out a gasp when bushes shuddered at Nayima’s arrival, but her face quickly brightened. She leaped out to wrap her arms around Nayima, nearly pulling her off-balance.

  “I heard gunshots!” Lottie said, tearful. “I wanted to call Papa, but I was afraid to.”

  Nayima knew the rest: Lottie had thought, for that instant, she might be alone. Lottie was still shaking against her, so Nayima held her more tightly.

  “I’m here,” Nayima said. “Mama’s here.”

  “Those men…?”

  “They’re gone now.”

  Nayima hoped she would never forget the look on Lottie’s face then, relief and adoration, the purest moment between them. But she had no time to savor it.

  “Pumpkin, I have to give you a choice,” Nayima said. “I was planning on asking you later, but you need to decide now.”

  Lottie watched her with Gram’s eyes, the slant of Mama’s nose—waiting.

  “If we ride on to El Nuevo Mundo to meet Raul, there will be marshals there too—to protect us.” She practically spat out the word protect. Probably her biggest lie yet.

  “Protect us from men like those up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll guard us at El Nuevo Mundo?”

  “The government wants us to move to a special place built for us.”

  All joy left Lottie’s eyes. “Go back?” Lottie had been only four when she’d been sent to Nayima, but that was old enough to remember what it was like to live in a cage, even if hers had Plexiglas instead of bars.

  “Right now, you and me, we’re free,” Nayima said. “A little bit free, anyway. We both have trackers in our heads. Sacramento can find us. But if we stay in the Carrier Territories, we can find somewhere else to live. Fend for ourselves. Until they come for us. That’s the difference. Either we’ll go to them or they’ll come to us. But I don’t know when. And even before the marshals come, more men like the ones who burned the ranch might come. Or like those up there I just left.”

  Lottie was mulling it over with renewed tears. She didn’t like the choices. “Will Papa stay with us?”

  Nayima shook her head. “You know your papa. He’ll go to Sacramento with the others. That’s what he’ll want for you too. He’ll think it’s safer there. Especially after today.”

  “No he wouldn’t. He’d want to be with—”

  “You know your papa,” Nayima said again, and Lottie did, so she was silent. “Now, there’s something else….”

  Lottie waited, agonized.

  “I have a faulty health chip,” Nayima said. “I’m having hallucinations—seeing people who aren’t there. Hearing voices.”

  Nayima expected greater alarm from Lottie, saw none. “Like who?”

  “Like…Gram.”

  “My great-gramma?” My great-gramma. Lottie had claimed her. She knew Gram from Nayima’s stories. Lottie had been so proud when she’d finally been given a name instead of a specimen number. “Do you see her right now?”

  Nayima scanned the area toward El Nuevo Mundo. No sign of Gram. Then she looked the other way—the way they’d come—and found Gram sitting against the trunk of a tree about twenty-five yards away, still in her nurse’s uniform. Waiting.

  “Yes,” Nayima said. She pointed. “There. Under the tree?”

  Lottie craned her neck to follow Nayima’s pointing finger. “I don’t see her.”

  “I’m the only one who sees her. My chip is scrambling my brain. It’s like a trick to get me to go to a doctor. To let them go back inside my head. And I’m old, Lottie. My body is slow. I don’t know how well I can protect you.”

  Lottie shivered and took Nayima’s hand like a parent would. “Does she scare you?”

  “No.” Maybe the Gram hallucination was a window to her subconscious. Maybe that was how Gram had helped her find the men. “She shows me things I already know, deep down.”

  Lottie scrunched her face in the sun, considering the weight of everything she’d heard.

  “Mama…” Lottie said finally. “I don’t wanna go with the marshals.”

  “You heart rate is accelerating,” Sonia said. As if Nayima didn’t already know.

  “Me neither, Lottie.”

  “You killed the bad people.”

  “Not all of them. More might come for us.”

  “But the marshals might catch them?”

  “Yes,” Nayima said. “I’ll call Raul as soon as we finish talking, so they might.”

  In the distance, Gram stood up and wiped dust from what she used to call her derriere. She walked to the middle of the deer trail, watching them. Still waiting.

  “I wanna go home,” Lottie said, certain. “Papa will come stay with us.”

  Raul would be livid. He might try to take Lottie by force. But Raul would be the least of their problems if they went back to their house.

  “Are you sure?” Nayima said. “We won’t be safe there.”

  “I just wanna be with you.”

  How had Mama done it? How had she packed that suitcase and sat Nayima down on the bed with that cigarette hanging from her mouth to tell her she was leaving? More than sixty years later, Nayima would never understand it. Nayima couldn’t leave Lottie, even if it meant they might die together.

  Nayima stared down the path between the groves at Gram, expecting to see her wave, some gesture to show her opinion, but she was only standing with her arms at her sides, staring on. Then Gram turned away.

  Walking back toward home.

  TANANARIVE DUE is an author, screenwriter, and educator who is a leading voice in black speculative fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Year’s Best anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. She is the former distinguished visiting lecturer at Spelman College (2012–2014) and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author/co-author of twelve novels and a civil-rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. Her first short-story collection, Ghost Summer, published in 2015, won a British Fantasy Award. Due frequently collaborates with her husband, Steven Barnes, including on their YA zombie novels Devil’s Wake and Domino Falls. They met at a speculative-fiction conference at Clark Atlanta University in 1997. She lives in Southern California with Barnes and their son, Jason. Her writing blog is at tananarivedue.wordpress.com, her website is at tananarivedue.com, and you can follow her on Twitter @TananariveDue.

  BY HI
S BOOTSTRAPS

  ASHOK K. BANKER

  The president was watching a recording of his favorite morning news show when the visitor appeared in his bedroom.

  The visitor materialized behind the couch with a soft sound and the faint odor of ripe Apus mango. The president was eating a McDonald’s burger and was oblivious to her presence.

  For some time, they watched the news together, the visitor unnoticed. Three talking heads were onscreen, debating the new Immigration Act. One head called it “mass deportation” and suggested that if we were going to throw immigrants out of the country, then why not start with the descendants of the Mayflower. The other two heads began talking over her angrily; one called her a snowflake. The president laughed, displaying a mouthful of partially masticated processed beef.

  “I remember this one,” said the visitor. “She asks him ever so sweetly that if she’s a snowflake, how come he’s the one having a meltdown! It ends with him losing his shit.”

  A half-chewed mouthful of food sprayed out of the president’s mouth, and he dropped the remains of his burger as he stabbed the emergency button. His half-consumed can of Diet Coke tipped over and dribbled a dark stain on the Lincoln Bedroom carpet. His bathrobe fluttered, threatening to splay open.

  “How did you,” he began, followed by a violent fit of coughing, “get in here?” His eyes scanned the stranger’s hands, searching for the dreaded means of assassination.

  The visitor showed her empty palms. “No guns. They’re illegal. Hell of a task but we finally got rid of them all.” The president’s eyes flitted over her body, her unusual clothes, as he backed away. “No bombs, blades, or any other weapons. I’m not here to harm you, Mr. President.”

  The president was edging toward the door of the bedroom just as it flew open and Secret Service agents flooded in. “POTUS intact,” one said into his subvocal mic. “Extracting.”

  The president yelled, “Shoot her!”

  The agents had already fanned out to block off the visitor from the president, moving him toward the door as they ordered the visitor to lie facedown on the ground with her hands on the back of her head. The visitor smiled but remained standing.

  “What are you waiting for? Shoot!” the president said as he was herded out the door.

  The president heard soft sounds and smelled the whiff of some foreign fruit—he’d never eaten a ripe Apus mango, grown organically in the rich Deccan soil of western India, which was his loss—as the agents surrounding him…changed. Not a man to pay close attention to sensory phenomena, he failed to see the air around them ripple slightly, the way a person’s reflection might waver when seen moving across a distorted mirror.

  To him, it was as if one moment they were hulking Secret Service agents in dark suits, and the next instant they were people of color in traditional clothing and hairdos. A white man in a suit became a Havasupai in leggings, a loose long-sleeved shirt, and sandals made of yucca fiber, with a headband holding back his long hair. Another white man in a suit was replaced by a Karankawa Indian of non-binary gender, dressed in clothes that the president couldn’t have identified if his life depended on it. A third agent remained African American but her features altered subtly, becoming noticeably more Congolese Bantu as the traces of Caucasian genes were leached out of her DNA. Similar transformations rippled through all the agents present.

  More significant to the present situation than their astonishingly altered appearances and wardrobes was the disappearance of their weapons. All guns and Tasers had vanished.

  “Greetings,” said an agent who had been spraying spittle at the visitor a second ago. She was now a dark-skinned Bantu woman several inches taller than the Germanic white male she had replaced. She wore large hoop earrings in her ears and a wooden piercing in her septum. “Welcome to the White House.”

  The visitor nodded and spoke quietly to the lady as the president tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  “Mr. President?” asked an elderly woman in jeans and a PEACE ROCKS T-shirt. “Would you like to receive your valued guest in the Golden Tea Room?”

  The president issued a sound not dissimilar to the yelp of a Chihuahua in distress. “Who are you people?”

  “Tlatoani,” said a cheerful Toltec Nahuatl woman. “We are your people. If you do not wish the Golden Tea Room, pray suggest an alternative space in your fine tlahtohcācalli.”

  The president backed away from all of them, making gurgling, terrified noises. When they came toward him with outstretched arms and looks of concern, speaking their own mellifluous dialects, he yelped again, turned tail, and ran.

  The visitor held up her hands as she came through the gaily attired group. “Leave it to me,” she said. “He’s shook up, is all. I’ll calm him down.” She paused. “Or not,” she chuckled as she walked away.

  She caught up with the president in the Yellow Oval Room. It was still called that, was still painted yellow, but that was the only resemblance to its earlier form. The American Impressionistic paintings of Mary Cassatt had been replaced by bright indigenous frescoes depicting images and scenes invoking the themes of intellect and determination interspersed with a few select portraits.

  The president was staring at one such portrait with bewilderment. He was still in his loosely belted bathrobe and looked like he’d aged a decade in the last few minutes. He turned and flinched at the sight of the visitor, who smiled and held out her open palms again to show she came in peace.

  “Excuse me, excuse me!” the president interjected. “I don’t understand this. Who is this Indian and why is his picture in the Yellow Oval Room!”

  “That’s Chief Opechancanough of the Powhatan Tribe, during his second term in office.”

  The president’s eyes bulged. “He was president?”

  The visitor smiled. “I suppose it would surprise you even more to learn that you are only the tenth white male Caucasian president of the United States, out of nearly fifty presidents so far. The majority have been Americans, or what you now call Native Americans. The rest have been immigrants from almost every corner of the globe, many not U.S. citizens at all.”

  The president stumbled to the window and ripped open the curtains. Bright sunlight struck him in the face, accentuating his pallor. He squinted his bulging eyes, scanning frantically.

  “Where are they?”

  “Who, Mr. President?”

  “The cameras, lights, technicians? The fake news media taking things to a new level! Whoever did this’ll never work in this country again—believe me!”

  The visitor didn’t answer. She had anticipated these reactions and knew it was best to simply wait them out.

  Giving up on the window, the president turned to the landline telephone on the desk and snatched it up. His fingers still bore the evidence of his lunch, and he left smeared ketchup and mustard on the restored antique.

  “Who is this?” He listened, bushy eyebrows knitting and knotting like albino caterpillars in a mating dance. He slammed the phone down on the cradle, hammered it a few more times for good measure, then picked up a remote control and switched on the flatscreen.

  The TV was set to the same news channel the president had been watching earlier; the same show. Except that now the anchors in the studio were different, the set was different, and the news crawl showed a very different world.

  The president moaned and changed the channel. Then changed it again, and yet again. Finally he threw the remote in frustration at the screen. It missed and knocked over an urn on a high shelf, spilling someone’s ashes over the priceless carpet.

  “What is going on here?” he yelled, and proceeded to throw the presidential equivalent of a temper tantrum combined with a panic attack. He ended up on the carpet before the couch, almost entirely under the vintage coffee table. Seeing the visitor approach slowly, smiling, he yipped, realizing that no one was coming to
rescue him.

  “My protection detail is a disgrace!” he cried plaintively.

  The visitor said in her calmest voice: “Nobody means you any harm, Mr. President. You are safer now than you or any United States president has ever been in history. Apart from that one unfortunate incident in the nineteenth century, there has never been an attempt to assassinate any of your predecessors. Besides, there are no guns anymore. They don’t exist. They never existed. The technology itself was eliminated.”

  The president’s chest was heaving, his face red and splotchy. Snot, spittle, and tears combined in a shiny moistening formulation. Finally he regained some measure of control and asked for a drink.

  She brought him a glass of cold water.

  He grimaced at the sight. “I only drink Diet Coke,” he grumbled, but drank it down thirstily.

  Still on the carpet, he tried to put the glass on the coffee table above him, missed, and sent it toppling and rolling under the couch.

  “Talk,” he said in a seething tone. “What do you want?”

  “Me, Mr. President? This isn’t about me. I already have everything I want. I don’t believe in utopias, but this is about as close to it as I believe humanity has ever gotten. This is about you.”

  “Me?” he asked, red-rimmed eyes squinting suspiciously.

  “You’re clearly upset and disoriented. I’m here to help you through this transition.”

  “You’re not making sense!” he barked up at her. “Start talking sense or I’ll have you, have you…” He trailed off, looking bewildered. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said at last in a shaky voice.

  “It’s Project Bootstrap,” she replied.

  He reacted. “What do you know about—wait a minute—how do you know about that?”

  “I’m running it,” she said. “I’m in charge of the project, Mr. President. Remember?”