by Drew Magary
“Do you wear this all the time?”
“Not when the Skins play, my friend. Not when the Skins play.”
The doors opened and we walked out into the main chapel, which looked like the giant study of some very rich man’s house. Books lined the walls on all sides, stacked to the rafters. Dozens of library ladders were placed on a rolling track around the stacks, with many congregants using them for makeshift seating. Stained-glass windows depicted various historical events: Ben Franklin flying a kite with a key attached in a thunderstorm, D-day in Normandy, Neil Armstrong on the moon, Graham Otto with his fruit flies, etc. A handful of folding chairs were placed at the front of the room for the perma-elderly and handicapped. Everyone else stood. It was like a giant cocktail party. Everyone was busy talking to everyone else, and the din rose to the ceiling and bounced harshly back down. People came en masse to introduce themselves to me, but I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. I just smiled and shouted out my personal details as best I could.
I saw Derron make his way through the crowd, shaking hands and giving babies raspberries on their tummies before finally making his way to a small stage. All I could see was the sheen off his bare scalp. I could make out part of a band sitting behind the reverend. He raised his hand, and the band began playing. They played “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The Joe Cocker arrangement. Half the crowd danced, while the others just kept shouting over the party. I was passed a stapled printout listing the day’s readings and songs. I flipped through it to make an educated guess about how long the service would last. The song finished ; then Derron raised his hand once more and began speaking to the now morgue-quiet room.
“Good morning,” he said.
The entire congregation replied in unison. “Good morning!”
“I was going to speak to you today about my usual boring stuff, like being good to your fellow man and knowing your COM history book inside and out. But instead I want to talk to you about . . . flying.”
The crowd tittered.
“I was looking into flights to go see my granddaughter in Nevada this fall. I don’t know why I looked, given that I already knew I couldn’t afford the ticket. But I looked anyway, just for sport. The total round-trip ticket—not including baggage fees, of course—was $12,230.”
The crowd let out a proper gasp at the figure.
“Now, I knew I couldn’t pay for that ticket unless I were the sort to be rather loose with church collection. So I was despondent, because I knew I’d have to make that endless drive in the plug-in. Then I saw something that made me even more despondent. It was an article—I’m sure you saw it as well—about the plane that crashed earlier this week. This airplane was a long-awaited prototype. The first battery-powered electric passenger jet: the VoltAir 717. And it crashed on its maiden voyage, killing two people: the pilot, named Wyatt Embry, and the company CEO, named Sir David Paul Furniss. Now the article said that one year earlier Furniss’s beta version of the prototype had successfully lifted off the ground and remained airborne for fifteen minutes. But the new version was said to be able to fly on electric power for a full hour, good enough for a short regional commute. So Furniss assembled a press conference and declared the VA717 ‘ready for takeoff.’ He even had a nickname picked out for the plane: the Crimson Wasp, which is very catchy. And the plane had all kinds of fancy features inside—interior designed by Layla DiGiorno, panoramic Lucite windows, showers, and a buffet restaurant in the main cabin. The whole shebang. So this was a big deal. And what happened was this: Embry and Furniss climbed into the plane and taxied down the runway in front of a grandstand containing what was said to be more than three hundred family members, company employees, and spectators. Next—let me just read from the article: ‘Witnesses report that the plane lifted off the ground and began sinking back to the ground shortly afterward, crashing into a nearby orchard.’ Now, this is tragic on a number of levels. Obviously, two men died and their loved ones have been left bereft. And our hopes for a more ecofriendly and cheaper form of air travel, one that would presumably one day make the trip to see my granddaughter more affordable, were delivered a big setback. I think, despite our quibbles with the flying process, most of us would give anything to be able to fly regularly again. Do we all agree?”
Everyone nodded.
“So I was sad, because I hate to see progress derailed. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought there was a lesson to be learned in all this. A wonderful lesson. Here we have two men, Furniss and Embry, who gave their lives to an idea that would, in turn, better the lives of each and every one of us in the postmortal world. They gave everything for the chance to help us. Why? Money? Well, sure. The desire to be known as aviation pioneers? Of course. Ambition plays a role. But that ambition is a gift—something inherent in man that drives him to help society and technology evolve in ways that are always better than what came before. Don’t you see how amazing this is? This is a blessing all of us have. So even though this news is tragic, I am uplifted. They interviewed a man named Juan Ozuma, VoltAir’s vice president. And this is what Ozuma said in the wake of the crash: ‘I assure you that we remain determined to see the mission of this company through.’ Is his company going to give up because these two men died? No! They’re going to keep going. They’re going to fight in the face of tragedy to realize the dream of electric air travel. And you know what? I bet they’ll succeed. Maybe not now. Definitely not now. But somewhere down the line, someone will figure it out. Because someone always does. History proves this time and time again. Discoveries are made. Walls are torn down.”
I listened intently, and everything Derron said seemed rational. But then I saw his scalp crinkle, the tops of his eyebrows bobbing up and down over the head of the blond fellow standing in front of me, and the sermon took a turn.
“This is divinity, people. This is what we talk about when we talk about the collective—this massive, unstoppable life force that is the progress of man. This is the blessing we have bestowed upon the earth. Other congregations may tiptoe around this idea, but I do not. We are the gods of this world. Make no mistake. An ant—a little, tiny ant walking on the ground—that ant looks up at you or me, and what does he see? A titan. A higher power he cannot even begin to comprehend. One that has absolute control over his destiny. We are fate. And the death of these two wonderful, innovative men does not change that a lick. When you go home today, I want you to think about your ambition and the awesome power you have over this earth and the creatures that reside upon it. For they are yours. I want you to—”
Just then, a heckler began shouting from somewhere in the crowd. I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear him screaming at Derron from the center of the chapel floor. “You are a fucking abomination!” he said. “You are a fucking abomination, Reverend Carl Derron! This whole fucking church is going to crash and burn soon, and I will see to it! RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”
The entire crowd gasped, and I found myself in the midst of a struggle as panicked churchgoers fled for the exits. Through the escaping bodies, I saw a team of men holding down the heckler, and just the quickest glint of metal somewhere in the heap. A knife, a gun, a cane—I don’t know. All I saw was the shine. I quickly turned and headed for the doors, as security officers in riot gear stormed through. Derron’s voice reassured the crowd that the heckler had been subdued. I felt no such reassurance and quickly left the Church of Man, mind closed shut.
While waiting to leave the garage, I pinged David to tell him about the service. I described the creepy way Derron had concluded his preaching and what the presumed assassin had done. He said I’d simply picked the wrong church. He implored me to seek out a different congregation and try again. I promised nothing.
DATE MODIFIED:
6/14/2059, 12:03 A.M.
“We’re going to take what we need to survive—and then maybe we’ll take a little more”
This is transcribed from Joe Mascis’s CBSNN report yesterday on RMUs:
Mascis: Petr Dmitrov has served in the Russian army for nearly two decades. During his time in service, he has participated in Russian invasions of Georgia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and parts of northern Mongolia. In addition, he claims to have participated in secret, small-scale invasions of Finland, Romania, and eastern Poland—invasions the Russian government refuses to acknowledge. It has been an era of relatively unchecked military expansion for Russia, thanks in large part to the firm grip that President Boris Solovyev has on his army of over 140 million soldiers. But that grip may be starting to loosen. And soldiers like Dmitrov are the reason why.
Mascis (narrating): We found Dmitrov and his entire army unit here, in an undisclosed town near Dubrovnik in Croatia. They were not sent here by the Russian government. They were supposed to be stationed outside of Odessa. Instead, three months ago Dmitrov, who is the leader of this unit, decided to bring them here in act of collective desertion.
Dmitrov: Our last mission, before we decided to defect, was to infiltrate a small Romanian border town, the name of which escapes me at the moment. I think I’ve managed to forget it out of sheer will.
Mascis: What were your orders?
Dmitrov (sighing): We had gotten to the point where we didn’t need to receive explicit orders to know what we were supposed to do. They simply named the next target and we went.
Mascis: What were the unspoken instructions?
Dmitrov: Scout the town, ascertain resources in it that would be of value to the cause, and then devise a plan for resource collection.
Mascis: You call it “resource collection.” But really it was pillaging, right?
Dmitrov: That’s exactly right.
Mascis: What resources were you asked to collect?
Dmitrov: Food, fuel, water, and men. And not necessarily in that order of priority. Most of the towns we scouted were located on bodies of water: lakes, rivers, creeks. Wherever there was freshwater.
Mascis: You said “men” on your list of things that needed to be collected. Kidnapping?
Dmitrov: That’s correct. Women were also on the list, but for far more temporary use.
Mascis: What happened to the men that were kidnapped?
Dmitrov: They were sent to the farms.
Mascis (narrating): “Farms,” which could accurately be described as slave-labor camps. The Russian army is the fastest-growing military entity on earth, and a steady supply of labor is needed to produce food and clothing for every ageless soldier, so the army can continue to pillage, to kidnap more men to make more food and clothes in the farms, to help sustain an even larger army. As the army has grown, so have the farms.
Mascis: Did you enjoy your work?
Dmitrov: No. I didn’t. But I knew that I had very little choice in the matter. I come from a family that had nothing. Anything we made often had to be turned over to the town mafiya or to the police. Really, they’re the same thing. It’s just a matter of dress. There was a policeman who came to our house one day and took my grandmother. She was sitting at the kitchen table, making bread, and he wouldn’t even let her wash the flour off her hands. He just grabbed her, and poof! she was gone. I never saw her again. And I knew, after my grief had settled, that I could not suffer the same fate as her. I knew I had to be on the side that had all the power. So when I got the conscription notice, there was no hesitation.
When you’ve served in the army for as long as I have, it becomes clear that you are not really serving your country, but that you are serving the very small group of men who control that country. You serve at their pleasure. I knew that to survive I had to do whatever they said, but some of the things they asked of us . . . We were forced to go to some very, very dark places.
Mascis: Killing the elderly?
Dmitrov: Yes. Anyone who was too old or too sick to be of use, particularly if he or she had gotten the cure, was considered a drag on the nation’s future. At first we were ordered to shoot them.
Mascis: Did you personally shoot them?
Dmitrov: Some of them, yes.
Mascis: Why?
Dmitrov: Because I would have been shot if I had disobeyed.
Mascis: Wouldn’t it have been more noble to refuse and die?
Dmitrov (laughing): Nobility sounds wonderful as a concept. But nobility tends to go out the window when you find yourself forced to choose between life and oblivion.
Mascis: How many people did you shoot?
Dmitrov: Not many.
Mascis: Do you remember their faces?
Dmitrov: Every wrinkle. Every strand of hair on their head. I try not to think about it, because what good does it do me? I’m just relieved that I wasn’t forced to shoot more of them. After reports of the shootings began to leak out, Solovyev decided the water purges would be much more effective. He learned about them from Ndiaye in the Congo.
Mascis (narrating): Water purges like the one executed in the small town of Dunsk, which has no water supply of any kind. In 2032 over fifty thousand elderly people were transported to a small, walled-off section of town, then left to die of dehydration.
Mascis: Were you part of herding people to Dunsk?
Dmitrov: Yes, I was.
Mascis: Did that bother you?
Dmitrov: It did, but I was caught up in this bizarre mentality where, as I said before, I was just glad that I didn’t have to shoot people directly. Obviously, there’s not much difference in shooting someone and leaving them out in the middle of nowhere to die. But somehow it felt less severe. “It’s not murder if you’re supposed to be dead.” That’s what our superiors told us, over and over again, whenever we sent the old geezers off to Dunsk. After a while, I took it as gospel.
I remember one time I was going into a house to claim an old woman to get her on one of the trucks, and her family was hanging on me, clawing at me, desperately begging me to let her go. And while they were doing that, all I could think about was my grandmother. She had been taken from us by the police. And now here I was. I was the guy who stole my grandmother now! That was me! (laughs)
Mascis: You’re laughing.
Dmitrov: Well, how else can you react? Laughter helps to cover it all up. I don’t know how else to deal with the memory.
Mascis (narrating): After performing mission after mission, Dmitrov grew weary of his job—of the ugliness of his orders, and of his unit’s payoff for successfully carrying those orders out.
Dmitrov: We noticed that our food supply was growing smaller and smaller. Our supply of vodka was growing smaller and smaller. We were continually asked to go and find these resources, and once we found them, they were immediately taken and given to people up the chain of command.
Mascis: You didn’t feel like you were getting a good cut.
Dmitrov: We felt like we weren’t getting a cut at all. And there we were, doing all this dangerous work, sacrificing our very souls, yet the payoff was less and less. All the water. All the coal. All the women. All of it was going to government officials or the mafiya. Just like my childhood. It occurred to me that, while we were sending people off to the farms, we were part of the farms as well. We were servants just like the Latvians or Ukrainians we brought in.
When we were sent to that small Romanian town, our plan was, as usual, to burn the village down and take anything and anyone useful with us. So we began the collection, and right in the center of town was this very small girl. She couldn’t have been more than four years old. But she was beautiful. Gorgeous. With the brilliant blue eyes and everything. I saw her, and I knew we would have to claim her. And she was very still as I approached. She had a small wooden train car in her hand, and she sat there calmly, as if she knew what was coming and had accepted it. That’s when I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to be part of this process where a child who is only four years old has already given up, has already accepted that her life will be thrown away into prostitution or organ harvesting. I went and picked her up, and I ran with her to the west edge of the town, gave he
r all my food, gave her a pistol, and told her to go. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Romanian terrain, but the woods there are darker than any woods I’ve ever seen. The forest doesn’t even have a floor. Between the trees, there’s just this black void. So when this little girl ran into the forest with my pistol, it was like she had vaporized. Like she never existed. And I thought, better for her that way. To have never existed.
Mascis (narrating): After pillaging that small Romanian town, Dmitrov gathered his men, and together they agreed to defect. They spent the next year, between missions, planning their escape. When they were again sent into the Romanian woods in the winter of 2057, they fled into the forest, disappearing from sight.