A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  —

  William Shakespeare, not a man to pass up a good phrase when he saw one, repurposed John Lyly’s words as: “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues.” *pausing to google: CHAPMEN*

  * * *

  —

  People-watching is my favorite pastime these days. It doesn’t matter where. At a café, at a park, even waiting in line at the market. With the iLite, everyone in Esperanto is digitally similar. I try to guess their real ages, their races, even their genders. It’s challenging, but I keep trying. I know citizens can change their hair, their eye color, even the patterns of their clothing with the merest thought, but they all look like avatars to me, simulacra—visually pleasing but homogenized. They look like what elevator music would be if it showed up in human form, drank wine from a box, had a respectable day job and a digitally enhanced spouse at home with kids to match.

  “May I buy you another cup of coffee?” a young woman in a metallic-looking sari asks. “Or something stronger, perhaps?” She sits down across from me and follows my line of sight through the large café windows to the nearby subway station. The crowds of workers and day laborers look happy. The smiling children in matching uniforms walk to school. The streets are clean, too perfect, and the absence of armored police is comforting but also disquieting. That’s when I take stock of the purple sky in the distance, the colorful birds, the airplane overhead with its prismatic contrail, all of which distract from the ashen taste of soot in the air.

  I shrug. “Make yourself at home.”

  “I am. I do. That’s what we call this place, you know.” She motions to a waiter. “We call our city Home. Only outsiders call it Esperanto—like the language created after the First World War. It was thought that a shared tongue…”

  I stare at her as she searches for the words. She’s unique, despite her golden skin. Something is different. The way she carries herself.

  She notices me staring and smiles before continuing. “A shared tongue would prevent certain cultural misconceptions and lead to more…equanimous engagements.”

  “Um. Yeah, about that.” I watch the waiter refill my cup. “That didn’t turn out so well, did it? They built this place where everyone is born with a machine name, devoid of cultural connectivity. How’s that working out for you?”

  “I’m August Random.” She touches my arm in lieu of a handshake. “And it’s all I’ve known. Though, like everyone, I’ve had the chance to know something else, to experience the outside world. Once a year, the gates are open. Anyone can leave. But no one ever does. In fact, no one’s left Home in twenty years. Why do you think that is?”

  “Cult mentality? Monocultures are hard to escape. Just ask the Amish.”

  She furrows her brow.

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  She shakes her head. Her hair changes colors to match the changing patterns on her sari. I wonder how long it takes to not be startled by this.

  “You know I don’t belong here.” It’s more of a statement than a question.

  I watch as she sighs.

  “Neither do I. Not for much longer.”

  “And why is that?”

  She touches the button at her temple. Her appearance blurs into the form of my late mentor. Not a perfect doppelgänger—her skin is still marigold, her hair translucent—but the facial features are Alyce’s. My heart skips a beat and I start to tear up. I wonder what my digitally enhanced tears must look like. Sparkling diamonds? Rivulets of light? Or nothing—camouflaged like my scars?

  “I know who you are,” the woman says. “And I know what you’ve been through. You’ve been given a gift. And eventually you’ll take my place….”

  “A gift.” I almost laugh as I’m crying. “I can’t leave for a year.”

  Then she changes, Alyce becoming August once again. She wipes my tears with her fingers, and I feel happy to have a connection to a real person for the first time since waking up here. She holds my cheeks in her hands and looks at me the way a kindergarten teacher looks at a frightened child on the first day of school. “Why would you want to?”

  * * *

  —

  Then, in 1741, Benjamin Franklin came in from a thunderstorm, put down his kite, and wrote: “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion.” It was published in Poor Richard’s Almanack. (Spoiler alert: Poor Richard was Franklin.)

  * * *

  —

  When I wake up next to August, she looks like a Disney princess—not literally, but figuratively. Her lips rest in something adjacent to a smile, eyes closed, her face relaxed and content. She sleeps so soundly, so perfectly, I wonder if perhaps she’d eaten a poisoned apple. Even the iLite at her temple is dark. No faint glow to alert others that something else is playing upon her senses, a lullaby, a white-noise generator, or “London Calling,” by the Clash.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I whisper. “What are you doing with me?”

  Her long, pinned-up hair pulses and glows. The hues ripple as she breathes. She’s a Rorschach test, changing before my eyes, leaving me questioning my own thoughts, my own interpretation of who she is. A blockchain coder, she told me last night, by way of explanation. A third-generation resident of Home.

  I feel her draw a deep breath and slowly exhale. She pulls the covers over her bare shoulders and nestles back into me. I welcome her warmth.

  “You’re watching me again.” She smiles, eyes still closed. “Creeper.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  She pulls my arms around her. “How come?”

  I’d been asking myself that all night, honestly. We’d known each other for all of twelve hours. I was used to casual hookups using the latest pheromonal app (which I worked on in grad school, thank you very much), but this was something else. An exercise in failed separation. An ongoing research project in gender dynamics. A social coup for two. Besides, she was my one and only friend in this sterile paradise.

  Of course, that’s all a complicated, polysyllabic way of processing what’s really going on inside my head. I examine the tattoo on her neck, a bird that moves at my touch to nest between her shoulder blades. “I’m trying to figure out what you meant when you said I was going to replace you.”

  She frowns. Then she touches the iLite sensor at her temple, which chirps, lights up, and then goes dark again. She sighs wearily. “It’s because my parents gave birth to me despite their poor genetics. As a result, I’m going blind.”

  “Are you serious?” I hope she’s telling a joke. Then she chews her lip.

  As I hold her, I look through the window, see the waning moon, which I suspect isn’t really there. I know the morning will bring another glorious sunrise. The walls of my apartment, the artwork that hangs there, will change, sometimes by design and other times simply by my mood. I close my eyes and wonder what her world will be like. Total darkness? Or less than darkness? Nothingness.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve had Stargardt disease since I could walk. I’m lucky to have made it into my twenties. My doctor said I’d be functionally blind in my teens.”

  “And the iLite?” I ask, though I suspect I know the answer.

  “It won’t work anymore.” She turns and kisses me in the artificial moonlight. A fleeting gesture, like a smile at a funeral. “It’s a macular thing—I won’t have a working retina to receive light from the real world, let along anything digital.”

  “I’m…so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’ve had a magical life here. Truly. But they won’t let me stay. My pending departure created an opportunity for someone else. That person is you.”

  “Why me?” I know she’s touched my face, felt my scars, my mangled fingers, the real person that lurks beneath the veneer. I feel like a work of charity.

  “I
want you to be my eyes at the end,” she says. “I want to hold on to you as you tell me what you see. Because when I finally lose my sight, everyone at Home will go analog and regain their natural vision.”

  As I watch her speak, she’s calm, but her eyes turn blue like glacial ice, and the ripples of color in her hair crash like waves. I think about Dr. Harring, how she’d always said that people are either builders or wreckers. And even wreckers have a purpose.

  “I embedded a sub-program in the iLite blockchain. An Easter egg, for lack of a better term.” August smiles and when she blinks, her eyes change color each time. “When I go dark, everyone at Home will see the world as it is. If only for an hour.”

  “Is this your revenge?” I ask. “Surely there’s a less disturbing…”

  She touches my lips.

  “This is a parting gift to everyone I’ve ever known. My kiss goodbye.”

  * * *

  —

  After Franklin stopped publishing, the philosopher David Hume wrote: “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” Critics would later argue that Hume didn’t know himself very well.

  * * *

  —

  I knew today was the day August would finally lose her sight, because she didn’t bother getting out of bed. I served her breakfast, which she hardly touched. Instead, she stared at the ceiling, which, to me, looked like cumulus clouds gently passing overhead, interrupted by the occasional starling.

  But to her, I knew, it would be a darkening sky, with or without songbirds.

  I stood on the veranda, doors open, overlooking the crowded street and the noisy fountain where couples were tossing in coins. I watched the swirls of color in the reflecting pool where children pushed sailboats with long metal poles.

  “Do you want to know what I really look like?” I asked without looking back.

  She didn’t answer.

  The sky appeared warm and comforting, but I felt a chill breeze. The tendrils of reality encroaching on the sacred territory of beautiful illusion. Then I heard soft footsteps. Felt her arms around my waist, her breath on my neck.

  “It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “I have no point of reference to even compare.”

  “But they will.” I nod to the world outside. “It’s another perfect day. Are you sure you want to do this? What if someone…”

  “It’s already done. It’s happening now…I can feel it.”

  She squeezes me tighter and I’m transported from the paint-by-number dream I’d been living in to a place that’s almost monochromatic—cadaverous like the skin of a dying woman. The ornate buildings that were cybernetic canvases strewn with rich hues and intricate patterns now stand naked, façades of concrete and mortar, deckled with solar panels in need of cleaning. Everything looks utilitarian. The aesthetic extinguished. The trees, which were once covered with leaves that quaked and changed in the wind, now look skeletal. The brilliant technological sophistry has been replaced with rusting metal frames, the sunrise now a meager ribbon of light in a sky shaded with coal dust, as though an angry god had taken all the colors in the world and finger-painted them together. All that remains is a dismal miasma, feculent, like the brackish water at the bottom of a vase after the flowers have wilted and died.

  And the people—the stunned populace, the idyllic citizens, cloaked in their innocence and naïveté, are now a warren of bewildered animals.

  What have you done? What have we done?

  I hold my breath, having watched the destruction, the dismantling, of something so beautiful. I feel as pale and naked as the world. Ashamed of my complicity, filled with regret, I can almost hear my heartbeat in the silence.

  Then I hear whispers and chatter that becomes laughter and squeals of joy.

  As I look down, I see couples holding hands, staring in awe at each other’s skin, the sublime natural pigments of hair and eyes, the variations, the diversity. I watch as they examine each other with tenderness. They smile as though they’re tasting something sweet for the first time. They laugh at their clothing, or occasionally the lack thereof. Children dance and splash in and around the fountain and pool, despite the tumorous mass of darkness that passes for a sky.

  Mothers gush as they see their children as healthy, vibrant, substantial beings, freed from technology but still bright and illuminated by happiness.

  Fathers smile in amazement as they regard their offspring as reflections of themselves.

  And neighbors hug one another with knowing smiles of curious delight and contentment, as though they are all conscripts enjoying a technological cease-fire.

  I feel their celebration wash over me, then recede, as I notice my missing thumb, my mangled fingers, the stretched parts of my body where the skin had been removed and grafted onto my face and neck. I’m no longer Catalyst White. I’m what remains of the woman I used to be. I realize August is no longer holding me and I understand. I want to shrink, hide, disappear forever from this place. That’s when I notice them, a group of teenagers in the street below. They look up at me and I freeze. I wait for them to recoil in horror or disgust, or laugh, singling me out for all to see, but they smile and wave, then go on their way, marveling at what’s happened.

  In that moment, I think of the imitation sun that will return. The system will sort itself out and everyone will eventually subside into their perfect unreality. But they’ll remember. And it will change them for the rest of their lives. How could it not?

  Then I remember who caused this. Who made this possible.

  “You did it, August,” I gush, turning to congratulate her. I don’t care that she’s seen me as I am—who I am. “Maybe they’ll let you stay, if I leave….”

  But the room is empty.

  And Home is not the same.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, in 1878, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” She wrote that under the pseudonym of “The Duchess.”

  JAMIE FORD is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the Western surname Ford, thus confusing countless generations. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to win the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His second book, Songs of Willow Frost, was a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages. (He’s still holding out for Klingon, because that’s when you know you’ve made it.) His latest novel is Love and Other Consolation Prizes. When not writing or daydreaming, he can be found tweeting @jamieford and on Instagram @jamiefordofficial.

  ROME

  G. WILLOW WILSON

  They were five minutes into their ten-minute rest period when Fletcher checked his phone and discovered that the fire break on Rainier Avenue had been compromised.

  Anyone could have seen it coming: The contractor hired by the Southeast Seattle Neighborhood Association, which had taken charge of that slim stripe of land between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington, had sandbagged along Rainier until the whole avenue resembled the aftermath of a war, but had stopped, with martial precision, at the intersection with MLK and refused to go any farther. MLK was the limit of their purview. They had not been paid to advance beyond it, and the neighborhood directly northward, which was neither Mount Baker nor Little Saigon nor properly the Central District, could not collectively decide whose responsibility it was to hire another contractor, nor indeed how that might be accomplished. The firefighting efforts ceased at their ambiguous crossroads, which divided Central and South Seattle with a neat little X, and everyone northward, having absolved themselves, simply hoped that the conflagration in Seward Park would be contained before it reached them.

  Though the air throughout Seattle—which followed mandates dissimilar to those of hired c
ontractors—had been opaque for days, the Building Language Proficiency midterm went on as scheduled. This turn of events had taken Fletcher by surprise. With the air and the heat, the daily advisories, the towers of downtown muted by the dim red light that passed for August, he had assumed that the midterm would be postponed. No one could be expected to sit for a test in such circumstances. He had not taxed himself by studying. Surely the course administrators, invisible though they were behind their desks in Baltimore or Boston or wherever the Remote Learning Group was headquartered, would understand that this was a health hazard, a serious health hazard. Claire or Rahma had queried them about this very subject, via email, but yesterday the verdict had come down: The midterm must go on as scheduled. All community-college students taking the Building Language Proficiency unit that summer were to sit for the test on the same day. It wasn’t fair otherwise. Why should students at Mid-Seattle Community College have extra time to study, or be given the opportunity to cheat by communicating with those blameless scholars in Texas or Rhode Island or New York who had taken the test on time?

  Claire, who had adopted a chain-smoking habit when the fire broke out, had remarked to the rest of the class that no one in Texas was likely to be taking a midterm anytime soon, considering half of the state was still underwater from some hurricane or other.

  “Rather the opposite problem,” she had drawled, flourishing the lit end of her American Spirit. Smoking apparently made her funny. It was she who had christened their Remote Learning class “Not Remotely Learning” and supplied her own laughter every time she said it. Fletcher privately wondered why she was taking Building Language Proficiency to begin with, since her language seemed plenty proficient already; most of their classmates spoke Tagalog or Somali or Spanish at home and were taking summer classes in English at the behest of their academic advisers.

  Fletcher spoke English at home and everywhere else. He was taking Building Language Proficiency because he was quiet. Early in childhood, he had learned to sit at the very front of the classroom, but at the end of a row, on the periphery, where the teacher would note his presence but not his indifference. Boys who sat in the back row were called sullen, insubordinate; by sitting in the front, he could get away with quiet. They hadn’t caught his dyslexia until he was almost nine. He was nearly twelve before he could read independently. It had gotten better, but the quiet had stuck, as had a certain tendency to confuse subject and object.