Reverend Carter nodded in satisfaction. I was going to say something, but then I decided not to. Should those fools get their way, if they thought I was too controversial for history class. Another score for Carter, but I became more and more indifferent as time went on.
»If that’s all, I’ll leave now,« I said, reaching for my walking cane and trying to get up.
»Yeah, we’re working out the new timetables meanwhile,« Wilson said.
Should Reverend Carter go ahead and tell his idea of the years during the Crusade against the Machines. Eventually, the legends would completely eclipse the real events. When I would be dead one day, who would then still remember what it was really like in those years of collapse, hunger, epidemics and perpetual struggle – struggle not so much against the machines, but humans against humans?
Detroit, Michigan, 2053
We hadn’t heard about the Crusade for months. It finally seemed to have been over. But our lives still didn’t get better. Instead, the situation in Washington, D. C. became more and more difficult. There was not enough food. People were starving. And cholera had broken out. People were dying everywhere. People were dying faster than you could bury them. Large gatherings of people were dangerous because of the epidemics. And there was no food in the cities. People fled to the countryside in the hope of finding better conditions there than in the capital, even if they didn’t know what it really looked like there.
There had been mutinies among the NAU troops under the command of Neil O’Neil and the other members of the Security High Commission. There were simply not enough food rations to feed al the men. Gangs of radical Kaczynski followers had raided several NAU depots. Increasingly large parts of the territory were thus slipping out of the control of the former National Guard.
I was still working as bodyguard and assistant to O’Neil, which at least gave me some comfort. At least I didn’t have to worry not having a meal at the end of the day.
The situation around the capital, including Maryland, had become so difficult that O’Neil had decided it would be better to return to Detroit, where he had a house and knew many people. After all, it was his former constituency. We managed to get a small convoy organized, in which we traveled to Michigan. O’Neil had requested that he could take the android Anabelle with him, allegedly to have her dismantled and analyzed in a factory in Detroit to develop better defense techniques against robots and androids. When we finally reached Detroit, Anabelle was switched on again and worked as his secretary ever since. No one here knew that she was an android, not a human.
In Detroit the mayor there appointed O’Neil to the city council. Only three of the original members of the city council were still alive. The others had died during the bombing of the Municipal Center during the riots. Since regular elections were no longer feasible, it was the mayor himself who simply appointed the six new council members. Since O’Neil’s house had been vandalized and looted, he was given another apartment. There was enough living space. The situation in Detroit was not much different than in Washington. There was no working infrastructure, no running water, no electricity, no traffic on the roads. Even here in the former Motor City all cars had been destroyed because they were controlled by computers and were full of electronics. There were countless diseases, especially the plague, which spread rapidly because of the rats in the garbage piles on the streets. But just like in D. C. people had fled the city to the countryside, where they hoped to find better living conditions. The upper floors of the city’s skyscrapers were virtually all abandoned. Since the elevators stopped working, it was too difficult to get all the way up to the upper floors on the stairs. Nevertheless O’Neil, Anabelle and I lived in one of the higher floors of one of those buildings, more precisely on the ninth floor. The floors above us were deserted. It was really very tiresome to climb up and down all those stairs.
*
We had been living in Detroit for almost two years now, while Neil O’Neil regularly attended city council meetings. The mayor and the city council commanded the so-called Detroit Fire And Security Department, which filled in for the former Detroit Police Department that had been dissolved, since it had been mostly robots. The Fire and Security Department consisted mostly of former firefighters. DFD’s sphere of influence was, however, essentially limited to the city center in the vicinity of the Municipal Center and the area along the banks of the Detroit River. The men wore the dark purple uniforms of the former Detroit Fire Department with some new insignia. As O’Neil’s personal security guard I had been formally promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in the DFD. But I didn’t get more than a metal badge from this job. The DFD didn’t pay me a salary.
The National Guard had been disbanded by Canadian Primary Reserve troops under the mandate of the NAU only a few months after martial law was declared in the United States. The real reason was probably that Canada was not particularly happy about the militarization near its borders. And since the NAU saw President Gordon’s militaristic policy as a violation of its statutes, the border area had been put back under civilian administration with the approval of the Governor of Michigan.
It was about eight o’clock on a Friday evening when O’Neil came back to our apartment with two other members of the city council. I told Anabelle that she’d better stay in her little room so as not to arouse suspicion. There was always the danger that she would be recognized as an android if she got too close to other people.
She nodded in resignation. »I have already learned my place in your human society.« I wanted to answer something, but then decided not to start another one of those pointless discussions with her. Then I joined the Old Man.
O’Neil asked his two visitors to sit with him in the living room. A couple of candlesticks and several oil lamps illuminated the room. One of O’Neil’s guests was a certain Senator Collins, a corpulent man in his fifties. The other one was Senator Walker, a slim woman about ten years younger, but with already gray hair.
»What would you like to drink?« O’Neil asked his guests.
»Double whiskey, please,« Collins answered.
»I’ll have a sherry, please, if you have one,« said Mrs. Walker.
»Mr. Dexter, would you be so kind? And bring me a whiskey too,« O’Neil turned to me. I was surprised. Normally O’Neil only drank whiskey very rarely, but this time it was probably because of Collins.
I went to the house bar and poured the drinks. It had been two years since I had been shot, but my leg wasn’t the same anymore. I just couldn’t move the knee like before. That’s why I was always a bit limp when I walked. While standing at the house bar, I poured myself a double scotch as well. I brought the glasses on a small tray to O’Neil and his guests.
»So, here we can talk openly,« O’Neil opened the conversation. »I think we can all agree that the city can’t be saved. And that goes for all big cities. Megacities of this kind are a relic from the time of the techno-industrial society. If humanity wants to survive, we must develop a new form of communities, one that is sustainable in the long run.«
»So you mean there’s no hope of rebuilding Detroit?« said Mrs. Walker.
»No, this would be an unrealistic goal« O’Neil replied, »and I actually expected you would agree with me.«
Collins supported him. »Mr. O’Neil is quite right. If we stay here, we’re gonna die. The water here is contaminated with germs. The rats and the plague are everywhere. The sewage system and the water supply of the entire city have broken down, and there’s no way to fix them, no machinery, no electricity, no ethanol. Detroit is doomed. And those who stay here will die along with the city. What are people supposed to eat here? The city does not produce food. How long will people go on digging through garbage for food over and over again? We need to take as many people with us as possible and find a new place to survive.«
»We can’t count on the help of the city council in this,« Walker said bitterly. »They don’t want to give up the city.«
»I don’t understand
why they’re so blind,« Collins got upset. »How long do they think the DFD can protect them from the looters? People are starving. They’re like savages. They’d kill for a half-empty tin can. And there are hundreds of thousands of them, living all over the ruins of this city. With just over two thousand firefighters, how are we gonna guarantee any sort of law and order? It’s hopeless!«
»And who are we taking with us?« asked Walker, who didn’t seem quite convinced by the plan of the other two.
»Anyone willing to go with us,« O’Neil said.
»And where shall we go?« Walker wanted to know. »Metro Detroit is a huge megalopolis. We’ll have to move pretty far to find a new home.«
»I’ve been thinking about that, too,« O’Neil said. »Dexter, why don’t you go get the map that’s on my desk?«
Apparently this was now my new job for O’Neil: carrying papers around. All right, I went into the room he used as his study and looked for the map. I’d brought a candlestick so I could see in the dark. It was quite a change from just flipping a light switch and having the room lit up bright as day, even when it was night. The artificial world of the industrial society, where day and night made little difference and machines were running around the clock, had collapsed. Night really meant darkness. And even the light from the three candles of my chandelier didn’t help much. It took me a while to find the map O’Neil was talking about. I wondered where he had picked up this old museum piece. Nobody had used paper maps for decades. We had navigation systems and satellite based 3-D animations of the geographical landscape of every place on Earth. It was extremely complicated to represent the three-dimensional topography of a terrain in two dimensions. Furthermore there was that unwieldy format of a map. It wasn’t just a piece of paper, but a gigantic printout of over three feet in length, covered with cryptic symbols. It was hard to imagine that in the future we would have to resort to such primitive tools again. But since paper could not be zoomed in, a map had to have a fixed scale, which resulted in the unwieldy size. At least this helped me to identify the map more easily among the other papers on the desk. I took it and returned to the others.
»Ah yes, that’s it,« O’Neil said, and spread the paper across the low table in the living room, where he and the other two were sitting. »Look here!« He pointed to a marked area on the map. Apparently he had no trouble with the ancient symbols on the paper. »There is not a lot of built-up land here in Macomb County. It’s practically all farmland. Very close to Ray Township would be an ideal place for a new settlement. There’s forest, there’s land we can farm, there’s water, and very few people live there.«
»But they won’t be very happy there, when suddenly an exodus from Metro Detroit arrives and wants to take away their land,« Mrs. Walker said.
»The people there have food,« O’Neil said. »I think they’re having a lot of trouble protecting themselves from the gangs that are looting them right now. They will welcome anyone coming to help them to defend their property.«
»But not to take away their property,« Collins obected. »We can’t just confiscate their land.«
»The former state of law and order has collapsed,« O’Neil reminded him. »That goes for land ownership as well. No man owns more than he can defend with his own means. And the means of the few people living there are very limited. It would surprise me if anyone still lived there at all and they hadn’t been robbed and driven from their land by plundering hordes... or worse.«
Mrs. Walker nodded. »This means that we will mainly need people from the DFD to defend our new settlement. And for that we’ll need the support of the city council, which we won’t get.«
»The DFD is nothing more than the former fire brigade, which now forms a militia to protect the city council and the city center,« O’Neil said. »We will have to form our own vigilante group. Even the DFD is essentially nothing but an improvised vigilante group.«
»We’ll need craftsmen, people who know about farming...« Walker said thoughtfully.
O’Neil nodded. »That will be our task now. We have to recruit the right people, people who are able to work, who are willing to build a new future with us. Without machines and computers, but with the core values of our civilization.«
»That raises a different question,« Collins interjected. »What core values of civilization? What laws are we to live by? How much technology do we allow? Do we allow generators, vehicles, simple machines? Where do we draw the line? Or do we follow the teachings of Kaczynski and ban all forms of technology?«
»The followers of Kaczynski are fanatics,« O’Neil said decisively. »If they had their way, we would have to go back to the stone age.«
»But they have more and more followers,« Walker said, »especially among those who have nothing left to lose. I think it’s their desperation that drives them, and envy of what little some of us still possess. They have turned their desperation and hopelessness into a kind of religion, a destructive religion that wants to destroy everything until there is nothing left.«
O’Neil slammed his fist on the table. »That’s why it’s so important that we set an example, that we make a fresh start. We must create a new civilization, not a new technocracy, but a civilization worthy of humanity. And we should follow the ideas set out by Samuel Butler. We should set a limit to the extent that technology will be allowed.«
»What limit do you suggest?« asked Collins and took a sip of his drink.
»Until before the Industrial Age,« Mrs. Walker suggested before O’Neil could reply.
O’Neil shook his head slowly. »Then some radicals would ban the mechanical loom, in the style of Ned Ludd. I think that’s going too far. I think we should draw the line in the nineteenth century. This would at least allow us to build steam engines, railroads and use anesthetics during surgeries. Only twentieth and twenty-first century inventions should be banned. The nineteenth century was in many ways a climax of human civilization, including in terms of philosophy. It brought rationalism and the abandonment of religious superstition, a development that unfortunately reverted in the twentieth century. And it was the twentieth century that brought genocides, world wars and weapons of mass destruction. By contrast, as early as the nineteenth century, humanity already had a basic understanding of the laws of nature, which only developed for a few more years. Quantum physics and the theory of relativity, which still form the basis of our understanding of the world today, were developed in the first years of the twentieth century, building on the knowledge of the nineteenth century. The entire scientific development thereafter, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revolved practically only around the elaboration of these theories. In order to understand the fundamentals of our scientific worldview, we do not need more technology than was available in the nineteenth century. Therefore, I think this is a reasonable and logical limit.«
»I must agree with Mr. O’Neil,« Collins said.
Mrs. Walker also raised no objection. Instead, she said, »Mr. O’Neil, I must say I admire your visionary foresight. You’re a man who knows what needs to be done. I would like you to be the mayor of our new settlement.«
O’Neil smiled. It was incredible. I wondered how he always managed to emerge on top, over and over again, from U. S. senator to NAU security commissioner to Detroit City council member to mayor of our new town. No matter how chaotic the situation became, in the end he always ended up as one of the bigwigs. If there were people who were destined to be natural leaders from birth, he seemed to be one of them.
»This would be a great honor for me, which I don’t know whether I really deserve it,« he said in feigned modesty.
»Yes, I think there is no better man than you for the job,« Collins agreed. »At least for the interim period, until it is possible to hold orderly, democratic elections.« I also had no doubt that O’Neil would succeed in being confirmed in office after the elections, either through real popularity or through some corrupt rigging.
»By the way, what name would you suggest for
our new settlement?« Collins asked him.
O’Neil thought for a minute. Then he replied, »What we will create is a new beginning on the ruins of our old civilization. Detroit is dead. But we will create a new Detroit. That’s why we’re going to call our town New Detroit.«
Chapter 13
New Detroit, 2111
New Detroit, that became the name of the new settlement. And Neil O’Neil became its mayor. Anabelle came with us, and she lived in O’Neil’s house for the next two years. We had taken an illegal ethanol generator, which she used to charge her batteries. But eventually, the device failed. It had to be the poor quality of ethanol we had available, I assumed. Anyway, I was unable to get the generator working again. And so we had to watch Anabelle finally use up her last bit of energy and then freeze. It was quite a sad sight, because we had gotten used to her by now. I promised to find a new generator somewhere to reactivate her, but it was in vain. Electric generators were considered by many as forbidden technology and had been destroyed. I found only fragments in the rubble and I did not have enough knowledge to assemble a new one from them. Well, Anabelle is still safely stored away in my house. I was sure that one day I would wake her up again, if I ever managed to find a generator or suitable spare parts for the old one. Androids don’t die like we do. Of course, they can die for good and be irreparably damaged, so that it would become impossible to fix them. But Anabelle was only asleep, a long, perpetual sleep.
At first I wanted to become a member of the new militia, but because of my handicap in my left leg I was not really suited for it. So I stayed in O’Neil’s service, and when he finally retired from politics for reasons of age and started to build the school instead, I became a teacher there. I still had some knowledge of mathematics and science from my own school days. Everything else I learned from O’Neil. It was amazing what the Old Man knew. I had underestimated him all those years. Neil O’Neil was a polymath. What I passed on to my students today, I had learned almost everything from him.
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