by Zaslow Crane
The Ancients had organized.
They had a voice now.
They were going to be heard!
“Shit!” This was what I said under my breath in my open-air workshop as the viddies played from news/orgs, after I heard the latest “demands” from the Ancients: Earlybird Dinners were too boring. They wanted better dinners that they could eat at 4:30 and then still hit the sack at 9.
This was received with consternation from many restaurants who already felt their choices were not only varied but designed to nourish an older, more sedentary population.
This was met with derision and anger. Oldsters who had dined in Canton and Montenegro were not satisfied with deep fried tofu or some anonymous fish! They wanted sophisticated choices of meals…from Denny’s et al, and at a reasonable price, dammit!
Ancients hired ancient lobbyists, and PR agencies that were geared toward getting the “old is better” message out. In mere months, it seemed that there were myriad organizations dedicated to the betterment of the Ancients.
Very soon thereafter, there were organizations that saw to the food, entertainment, mobility, health, education and virtually everything else, of the older American. And this was not taking place in America only…oh no. This took place worldwide.
Understandably, there were pushbacks.
We younger Americans organized – after a fashion. We were so balkanized and busy that getting 20 or 30 people to commit to anything was a major accomplishment.
We were all so busy that “don’t bother me, now” had become a common greeting: “Hi. Don’t Bother Me, Now. I’ll Call You Later.”
In addition, we had our careers; whereas, the oldsters had almost unlimited time and we discovered – almost unlimited patience to organize.
When they tried to reform health care, we responded. The Ancients were rude and awful to anyone young, assuming that we were part of the problem without even asking.
It didn’t take long for a sort of grass roots response to coalesce: Now, we were rude and discourteous to any old person we could find. I read of some people my age who went well out of their way to find an Ancient to verbally abuse.
I’m not surprised. All my friends were pretty angry. And after the adulation of a mere eighteen months earlier, most of them had turned that anger on me.
What could I do?
I’m an inventor. I don’t determine public policy. I’m sure as hell not a sociologist!
Then as an organized protest…Though, I’m still not completely certain what this particular protest was aimed at; The oldsters gathered together in the skies and in, L.A. and NY…
And, they blocked out the sun.
Everyone on the ground went nuts! There were death threats and lots of gunshots into the sky but extremely few slugs actually connected with anything floating above our heads.
The Ancients “camped out” up there for days, refusing to even acknowledge any protests or inquiries from the ground.
In a surprisingly short time, other skyrafts, as the Vid/media decided to call them; other radical groups decided to band together in new skyrafts over New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Tampa, and nearly every other sizable city in the US and progressively, in Canada, and Europe and Asia.
On a side note, Russia had scrambled their air force and under threat of attack had forced the Russian Ancients back to the ground. Demands had become the daily news ritual. They seemed to emerge from some place or another with the full cooperation and coordination of a large organized and radical populace.
They floated above us and demanded we accommodate them. I heard that some Ancients had divebombed people waiting to get into a dance club in Venice and in L.A., throwing full “adult pampers” at the peeps standing in lines!
How did they even “fill” the diapers when the bed took care of everything for them!?
My comlink burned up; there were so many anxious or angry people trying to get through to me.
I received a courtesy call from from my provider. However, when the CSR found out who I was, she became decidedly discourteous.
It was awful.
I couldn’t go home. There were angry Young People camped out there, ready to impale me on hastily sharpened 2x4s.
It was scary. I don’t want to make this sound as though I made a split-second decision…I was persona non grata with nearly all my friends and as time went on, I became more and more aware of the iniquities I was witnessing. I was at a loss as to what to do.
Then, then Oldsters blocked out the sun, again, with their massed beds. In New York, Copenhagen, Houston, Paris, Chicago, San Francisco…
Soon after that…I made up my mind…. I had all the command controls. Hell, I’d invented the damn things that had let them fly over us and make their points.
Since I’d engineered the beds, it wasn’t difficult to hack into them.
When at sunrise, they assembled to stave off the light of day yet again to protest in New York, I hit the engage button.
lll There really wasn’t an accurate count at this writing of the number of beds that fell from the skies that day.
Let’s just say that the rest of the Ancients saw their place in the general scheme of things with a much clearer and un-muddied eye.
Then, I got a flickertape parade.
Down Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Cool, huh?
My name is Mike. Suddenly I’m a popular guy again. And, I guess…I just did one more thing to make your life better.
BY ZASLOW CRANE
My name is Richard Hartford; “Father Rick” to my parishioners, (who, I’m sorry to say, I get to see less and less these days) and “Examiner Hartford” to Cardinal Sanchez, head of the L.A. Diocese, and, to The Pope, for whom I ultimately work. My parish is in San Pedro, an L.A. suburb, but my real territory is…the World.
In recent years it seemed to me, and my team, that everyday
there was more and more evidence of something bad; something very bad coming. Oh, humanity wasn’t any better or worse than usual…In truth, privately, I despaired of making any big difference so long as I, a priest, was forced to “work retail,” that is, one at a time salvations or even one at a time sending someone off in the right direction after detecting them “going toward the darkness.”
Even though scriptures tell us that the Second Coming will probably also end this earth, and it is a pretty place with a race of ingenious and creative individuals, I still yearn for a Savior; someone who can work “wholesale” and make a huge difference to multitudes all at once.
It makes so much sense. Consequently, I sometimes feel so insignificant.
But I digress, and though it is relevant, the state of Mankind per se is not what I’m referring to. Oh, it is part and parcel of the problem, but only a part.
I turned 40 last month, and it seems that, in my lifetime, each year as I’ve aged a bit more, that there were just a few more disasters, wars, famines than the previous one. In the last few years it is as though whatever cycle there is, has sped up; and sped up considerably. “Examiner Hartford?”
I felt invaded. It was as if someone had snuck up on me in the dark to scare me. I was deep in thought at my desk, but anyone calling on this line had to be important. I steeled myself.
I didn’t need to access the holocontrols to guess who was calling. The voice was distinctive and truth be told, I was expecting Cardinal Sanchez to call, demanding an update.
I tapped my leftmost incisor against the lower number 22 tooth and activated the vidfone connection in the corner of my eye. I could see him as easily as if he were seated at a chair in front of my antique Ikea desk.
“End of Days” was a phrase that had been bandied about by one news media outlet after another when the media splintered in the mid-teens. Instead of the shock of one major outlet calling you out, you died the “Death Of The Thousand Cuts” from the ancient Chinese culture. One after another as each of these tiny but not insignificant newsorgs attacked, awaiting a chance for a cou
p; to use an antiquated term: “a scoop.”
Consequently, the idea, any idea, once it “caught” never truly went away. I expect that that was on his Excellency’s mind today. After all, he’s been privy to all my data since last week. It was time.
“Yes, Excellency. I’m here ready to speak with you.” The connection solidified.
“Call me Raul, Rick. It’s just us. No need for so much
formality.”
Crap. Informal Raul. Whenever he does that….
“I wanted to touch base with you regarding your, ah…team’s
findings. I can infer all I want from the data, but data after all… are just data. I need conclusions.” No beating around the bush…How’s your day been going? Had any interesting confessions lately? Donations still on a downward trend? Nope. Right to the crux as if he were paying by the hour and wanted to shave off a quarter-hour here, and quarter-hour there…Oh well…
“Okay…Hi, Raul. How’s the wife and kids?” That was a joke I could easily get away with when speaking to my contemporaries. After all the ugliness was apologized for and punished, and even though the Church still hung doggedly onto celibacy, it was nonetheless, a New Day for Mother Church, and any younger priest might have laughed, or at least found humor in the jest.
Sanchez however, was twice my age. He remembered well that bad time for the Church, and I concede that my attempt at humor was probably ill conceived. I could tell if only by the chill in his voice:
“Rick, I’ve had my people scan the numbers. They’d had their people run them numerous times through existing databases and algorithms in an attempt to predict a trend. Yet, nothing I have, nothing my team has produced, is conclusive. Every way we crunch these…damned numbers, there is a factoring that exists outside the paradigm we’re trying to create; to discern.”
“And because of that, you can’t use them to try to predict what will happen next.” I hoped that I didn’t sound insolent. I felt for the guy. I really did.
“Uhhh. Yes. That’s it.”
“Yeah. The numbers won’t cooperate for us either. Global warming continues unhampered by our efforts. Even though the Midwest is a dustbowl again, and food production is down, “way down,” as it is in all the old major food/prod regions across the world, other areas have stepped into the void and kept us fed. And, even though storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes are more common than ever, and more people die from them than ever before, still the birthrate climbs.”
“Yes…”
“So no direct inference can be drawn from point A to point B.” “Yes. You’re telling me things I already know. I pay you to….”
“With all due respect, Excellency, you do not pay me.” I snapped at him, perhaps a bit too hard, but that’s all…“water over the bridge” now.
“You supervise me. I am, and have been for five years, in direct Papal employ. I would like to remind you that my exploits just prior to and just after becoming a priest have brought me into their sphere of influence. So, please, with respect, do not try to bully me. We’re on the same team. We’re working as hard as we can, trying to discern God’s Will.”
As much of a jerk as he can be, his plate is far bigger and fuller than mine, and I might guess that I might come off as an obstinate so-and-so sometimes to those beneath me as I press for some inference or insight that is not quite ready to be teased from the mélange of datastrings.
In 1999 we hit 6 billion. No problem. Things were “fine.” By 2011, we here on Earth were seven billion people and we were still…“alright.”
In 2019, there existed eight billion people. Things were a tad shaky, but overall we were still “okay.” New Year’s Day, 2025 saw nine billion people and little things began to go wrong but no one put it all together until…We amassed: Ten Billion people. That was two years ago. 2029
Years ago, things started to go bad in earnest: Wars, Floods, Droughts, Famines, all that Biblical stuff-everything you read about in school when you were young, but in spades. Other things; more disturbing things had begun to happen. It started slowly at first, but in the last 6 or 7 years, things had really picked up speed.
Most troubling was an ever increasing number of newborns being delivered who seemed to be autistic, only semi-sentient, or worse: completely non-responsive mentally, but fully alive. One of my associates had mentioned in passing that perhaps God had only a finite number of souls with which to work, and maybe we’d hit our ceiling.
In public, I’d had waved that thought off, as being ridiculous in saying that by its very definition, an omnipotent being can’t have constraints. However, in private that one little innocent comment nagged at me incessantly. What if this was the warning I’d been looking for?
The chill that thought brings revisits my mind and body far more often than I’d like to admit. Los Angeles is all about a kind of overflow of people. Everywhere I go, there are crowds. I often wonder what it might be like to wander in a pristine forest for a week or more enjoying the complete, utter solitude.
That, of course, is a complete fantasy, though one I hold dear. I live in the L.A. Metro area; and a fantasy because I could never afford that much time, that much solitude with so much still to do. I’m convinced that something momentous is happening, or about to occur.
I am a singular entity aware and ready; ready to react when God speaks. Since most days He doesn’t, on my “off hours,” I live a fairly pedestrian life.
Evenings are spent watching entertainment packages calculated to appeal to the current tastes, whatever that may be this week.
Tastes change as quickly as a startled gecko changes direction.
I watch with only half a mind most evenings, understanding that recreation is important as a way to approach the problem, refreshed and ready for new challenges. Yet I still feel the dread in my very soul; dread that something is coming; coming for me and every man, woman, and child on this floating orb. Coming to end us.
It is a feeling that I cannot shake, even though I’ve paltry data to support any such supposition.
Yet there is enough other data to substantiate and obscure almost any supposition. I can’t perceive what is really going on in the background. And in truth, if it is God’s direct Will, why would I even suppose I could comprehend?
For instance, last night, I dreamt I was on a raft, made of logs tied together. I had a feeling that this was a sort of important message; that perhaps my sub-conscious was trying to tell me something…Or perhaps God was.Anyway, the water was salty, and so I inferred that I was on an ocean, not a lake. It was fairly dark, so I could not see much and had to rely on other senses. The waves caused me to hold on desperately as the water threatened repeatedly to tear my little raft asunder. The thrashing continued until the lashings holding the logs together began to jangle and rattle ominously against one another. The tiny craft tossed and bucked as if it were a live animal trying to throw me from its back, I held on even though the logs in smashing together from the motion of the waves often smashed my fingers as well.
An albatross flew close by, low and slow in the dimness and seemed to eye me carefully. His black orb of an eye transfixed me and I felt as though I was witnessing something horrible without realizing it. A feeling of dread suffused my mind, body and soul, as feelings often can feel overwhelming in a dream.
I don’t know why it disturbed me so, but soon afterwards, the first log escaped the confines of the rope harness. After that, it was only a matter of minutes until the entire raft began to break apart completely.
Thankfully, I awoke then, though panting and sweating.
I turned to viddies to waste a bit of time and distract myself before attempting sleep again. It took quite some time for my pulse to quiet sufficiently to settle back down on my ergonomic sleep rack.
Since early ’26, I have been paying attention when I’d decided then that something unmistakably was amiss.Also, I’ve always been a devout man even before accepting the priesthood, but I also have been a scientist, and
a statistician. I adore God, but I also adore empirical and unimpeachable data. This is why, I suppose I came to the attention of the Papal Offices.
God is in all things, but it seems to me, He is most present in pragmatic facts. God is the syzygy of Truth, Love, and Knowledge.
I was approached to discretely look into things. End Of Days things.
I was to keep my direct superior the Cardinal apprised; but the most salient details, if any should be discovered, were to be transmitted to the Papal Offices themselves and no where else, for the immediate future.
It was this for reason that Cardinal Sanchez and I had a testy relationship. I’m certain that he had his sources in the Vatican, and knew full well that I could not give the same level of detail to him as I transmitted to the Holy Father. It must have rankled mightily.
Again, I forgive him…for being a dick.
“ Evenings are for recreation. A changing of gears is important if one is to arise refreshed and ready to effectively deal with the conundrums that the Almighty has placed before us.”
I recall the gracious Cardinal intoning this often, after evening prayers before I left his employ and joined the Vatican’s. And yet, despite how I might feel about the inestimable Cardinal, I feel that he is not wrong.
Evenings, I watch the viddies, usually with some of my peers. We enjoy various parts of the older shows; the newer ones seeming to hold little relevance, though I am at a loss as to explain exactly why. The newer the show or entertainment, the less likely I seem to find it entertaining. Perhaps the simple answer is that I am an “old soul,” though in light of my position in the Church, that answer seems a bit…facil.
“Examiner Hartfield, have you made any progress plowing through all the data?”
He paused.
“C’mon, Rick, I have fourteen newsorgs crawling up and down my back for a relevant quote.”
End of Days stories. Will they never die; will they ever just dry up and blow away?
“Excellency, there does seem to be some sort of a pattern, but so far it is too subtle for us to discern where it will take us.”
“Then tell me your thoughts at least. I’ll take it as background. Not for publication.”