by Drew Magary
“Yep.”
He looked disappointed, like I had failed to invite him to a good party I was throwing. “Okay.”
“One more thing,” I told him. “No more sweeps. I don’t wanna deal with any more flu victims. Give it to the interns. I want a Greenie tomorrow. Or an insurgent. Someone whose teeth I can kick out.”
“Well, aren’t you bold? Did DES make you an offer just now? Whatever they’re offering, I’ll match it, provided it isn’t that much more than you make right now.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, Matt.” I clicked off and turned to Solara. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’m dead,” she said.
“That’ll work.”
Then I brought Solara to her new home.
DATE MODIFIED:
6/26/2079, 5:17 P.M.
“They wouldn’t stop eating”
No gangs swept by on the drive back home. We talked for hours and could have talked for hours more. I brought Solara into the Fairfax compound (the guards at the gate knew me and didn’t bother to check the back of the car) and ran over to a drugstore to buy her some basic necessities, including one of those old-fashioned, nongenetic hair-coloring kits. She had been staying with a friend and had little interest in going back to fetch her clothes, so I grabbed a handful of items at the Dress for Less and threw them on top of the cruddy blanket in the backseat. I bought her a new WEPS with a clean IP address and registered it in the name of Katie Baker. When we made it to my place, it was night all over again. I have no concept of days anymore. Just long patches of haze and glow.
My energy was sapped. Solara used my WEPS to erase all of Ingrid Malmsteen’s social accounts, as well as the ones the real Solara Beck still kept active. I asked her not to use the new WEPS to search for anything related to her old self, lest the search engines solve her new identity in a matter of frames. I asked her if she felt like watching a movie, and she said yes. So I overcooked a frozen pizza and gave her half as we sat down to watch. She sat on the couch, I on the recliner. Both of us craving distraction.
It was a bad idea to choose The Coldest War. I should have chosen a movie I could watch with my mind and body set firmly on autopilot. Instead I chose an Arctic War documentary that on the cloud had elicited the following samples of horror and outrage :
Carl Laing:
Filmmaker David Coggeshall gets great interviews with soldiers and generals who had a hand in the war that killed over ten million people and led to the eventual Russian annexation of Alaska and Canada. But it’s his moments with people on the outer edges of the conflict that bring the entire disastrous conflict into sharp relief. One of those moments includes an interview with an Alaskan woman named Sadie Carruthers.
Alaska, as you know, served as the base for American operations during the war. What most Americans don’t know is that the state, along with all other countries with landmasses close to the Arctic Ocean, was ravaged by Russian and American RMUs who had deserted the conflict and began pillaging at random. Sadie tells the story of soldiers from an American RMU who infiltrated her home and began eating everything in sight, including the houseplants. These American soldiers were part of an early test program for the Skeleton Key vaccine (Russia had a similar program in simultaneous development). And because the vaccine eliminated weight gain, many of the soldiers, according to the film, gradually increased their food intake to ten thousand calories a day, sometimes higher. Coggeshall found WEPS footage of an unidentified Russian RMU feasting on a live seal, devouring it until nothing but bones were left. Even from a distance, you can see the blood coating the soldiers’ faces. It’s far more terrifying than any horror film you’ll sit through this year.
“We had Russian and American RMUs sweep through our home, and they wouldn’t stop eating. Ever,” Carruthers said. “We’d stored five-pound bags of rice in our basement, and they found them. They opened them up and guzzled them uncooked, as if they were bags of crumbled potato chips. I lived in constant fear that they would return and try to eat me if I had no food around. I know for a fact that a woman outside of Barrow was eaten by AWOL Americans. You’ve heard stories, I’m sure. We called them LLs: the ‘living living.’ ”
The living living. That’s what the Arctic War helped produce.
Emily Hinton:
Coggeshall interviews army ranger Michael Armstead, a “super warrior” who has served a mind-boggling fifty consecutive tours of duty, which isn’t uncommon in the ranks today. Armstead explains that many of the American RMUs are not only converted collectivists and ex-cons but also longtime veterans such as himself. “You’re talking about people who have given decades of their lives to fighting on the front lines for our country,” says Armstead. “The military isn’t simply going to kick them out because they’re too shell-shocked to serve anymore. Most of the super warriors with thirty tours or more were given free rein by the army to do as they pleased. I know I was. It was half ‘we trust you’ and half ‘we don’t know what else to do with you.’ Now, think about what fighting and killing for that long does to a man’s psyche. I’ve been fighting for fifty years, and I’m relatively normal for my group. But there are others who have been fighting forever and can’t imagine living day-to-day without experiencing bloodshed. And they’re still physically able to make that happen. Those are the men who went pillaging in Alaska and Scandinavia. Those are the ones who became their own armies.”
Evan Bruni:
You see satellite photos showing the rapid expansion of the number of ships and rigs in the Arctic over the course of the past decade. The boats and people seem to multiply exponentially, as if grown from spores. And most tragically, you see photos of seemingly endless patches of ocean that have dead whales, polar bears, and other marine life floating on the surface. There’s a shot of a Russian aircraft carrier plowing through a field of dead sea lions, their bellies turned up to the sun and blown open by the foul gas that was trapped inside. You can see the seagulls feasting on the carrion. You look at this floating mass of death and you think to yourself that they died to make room for us. There are no more stones to overturn. There is not a swatch of land that doesn’t bear our footprint. We are everywhere—and we are increasingly alone because of it.
When the movie ended, Solara looked to my printer. I have a laptop with a scrubbed IP address, and that’s the one I use to print out new documents for our mock end specialization clients. The official U.S. government site I use to create the documents is monitored. But the fifty thousand illegal Russian mirror sites are not. Sitting in my printer tray was a fresh plug-in license for Katie Baker. She turned back to me.
“Is this stupid?” she asked.
“What?”
“All this stuff you’re doing for me. Is it stupid? We’re all gonna die soon anyway.”
“You’d be surprised at what people can live through and how much of it they can live through.”
“Do you have kids?”
“I had a son. He was killed by the insurgency.”
“So that’s why you became an end specialist.”
“No, I became an end specialist because I like it. What about you? Kids of your own?”
She placed a hand on her stomach and made a little circle.
I was floored. “Get the hell out of here,” I said.
“Fourteen weeks.”
“Who’s the father?”
“Some asshole who’ll never get to see what comes out of this body.” She sipped a Dr Pepper. “When I was in my thirties, I had abortions. Three of them. After the third the doctor told me I could never have kids again. That was my penalty for procrastinating, for being selfish. Then I got Skeleton Key, and the doctor forgot to tell me that all those little fancy robots would do me the added courtesy of repairing my mangled uterus. He never told me to start using birth control again. It’s funny what doctors decide to tell you and what they decide to keep from you.”
I stared at her with huge eyes. “It’s a miracle.”
She
glanced at the end credits of the movie. “No, it isn’t.”
DATE MODIFIED:
6/27/2079, 5:59 A.M.
“This is the next logical step”
Metro was down today. I walked the handful of miles underground, joined Ernie at the East Falls Church compound, and we set out in Big Bertha. On our way to Bethesda, we got stuck in the center of the American Legion Bridge, and I peered over the barrier down into the overflowing, toxic Potomac below. The little dock shanties jutted out into the wide path of gray sludge. I saw men in crude gondolas navigating the river with long paddles, there for God knows what reason. I saw bonfires sporadically lining the banks, with burnouts and addicts standing around the flames, content to stare. All of them were destitute, picked clean by gangs and left with nothing more to ransack. Reams of homeless men purporting to be Arctic War veterans wandered through the middle of traffic, eager to sell dandelions and any other colorful weeds they had found in the ground.
I turned from the river and stared at the dry-cleaning hook above the truck’s door. Solara dyed her hair this morning. I chose brown at the store. I don’t think I chose it deliberately, but who knows if that’s the truth. When she came out of the bathroom and let her new hair unravel, I found myself devoid of anything but primal urges. I thought of Alison as I looked at Solara, and the two merged in front of me into some new, otherworldly lifeform. Something better than anything that came before it. I couldn’t be around her without feeling like a hurricane someone trapped in a box, so I made her breakfast and left her alone as quickly as I could. My brain stayed dialed into her frequency every waking second thereafter, and I don’t think that’ll be changing anytime soon.
“You wanna look at the file?” Ernie asked.
“No.”
I let go and gave myself permission to imagine doing everything to Solara that I knew I wanted to do. Vagrants bashed on the side of the plug-in, and I didn’t flinch. Ernie had the WEPS radio on, and I heard something about China bombing Khabarovsk by accident while conducting a standard self-eradication. I heard it, but I didn’t hear it. I told Solara not to contact me while I was out on duty, and I found myself hating that rule despite its obvious need. Sometime in the middle of this internalized riot, we arrived at the Bethesda compound.
The address was 4912 Cedarcrest Drive, a small split-level house located within the NIH walls. It was a nicely landscaped home, with a white stone-lined path to the door and perfectly manicured shrubs and magnolia saplings dotting the outside. Fresh mulch had been spread, making the garden smell like my shoe after stepping in dog shit. A little black-and-white mutt was tethered to a post in the front on a retractable leash. He ran for the plug-in until the cord had no more slack, and then he started barking, nearly choking himself as he struggled to advance.
I opened the file on the WEPS and saw a little old lady staring back at me. The name on the file was Virginia Smith. She wore glasses with lenses that were no more than an inch in diameter. Dangling from her neck was a thin gold chain and a pendant with a small girl’s silhouette. Her birthday was March 1, 1950. She had a cure age of seventy-four. I turned to Ernie. “What is this?”
“It’s the file,” he said.
“This woman isn’t an insurgent. A softie? Matt booked us a softie today?”
“She didn’t file an RFE.”
“Then what the hell is this? Ernie?”
Ernie looked at me like he had just gone looking for something and returned with no clue as to where it was. “She’s just old, man.”
The dog barked and jumped onto its hind legs and fell back down, over and over. Virginia Smith opened her front door and looked out at Big Bertha, this orange monstrosity marring her perfect little cottage. She stared at us through her storm door, and I felt myself about to retch. She opened the door and approached.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Ernie.
“You didn’t want to be told. You were off in la-la land.”
“I’m calling Matt.”
“He won’t care.”
Mrs. Smith knocked on my window. I rolled it down. She looked like a human keepsake. She saw our licenses hanging from our necks. “Can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.
I lied. “I’m so terribly sorry, ma’am. My friend and I took a wrong turn, and we just need to recalibrate the GPS.”
“Oh, I could help you. Where are you going? I know the streets quite well.”
“You know, I didn’t even get the address right,” I said. “I have to call my friend and double-check it.”
“Can I get you boys some water or some zucchini bread? I just baked it fresh.”
“No thank you, ma’am. We’ll be out of your hair in just a moment.”
“Okay. Well, I hope you boys get where you need to go.”
“Thank you.”
She turned to the dog. “Momo, no barking!” The dog ignored her and kept lunging. She stood in her yard and watched us.
I frantically dialed Matt. He was painting his deck. “You calling about China nuking Russia ‘by accident’?” he asked. “That is some crazy shit.”
“What the fuck is this?”
“What is what?”
“Virginia Smith,” I said.
“Oh, that. That is our initial foray into the Senior Management Program.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Why are you freaking out about this? We’ve discussed this for the better part of a decade.”
“And I said I didn’t want to do it. And you said you didn’t want to either.”
“That’s because everyone says no to everything until they have to say yes.”
“What do you mean?” I turned to Ernie. “What does he mean?”
“He means the program is mandatory,” Ernie said.
“We don’t do it, we lose our license,” Matt explained. “All of us. We lose the benefits. We lose the government protection. Not only that, but anyone who says no goes right to the top of the program’s ‘to do’ list. Isn’t that neat? I’m a hundred and four, John. I’m too old to make the cut. And so are you.”
“They can’t do this,” I said.
“It passed Congress. What do you want me to say? ‘No, that didn’t happen’?”
“But millions have already died.”
“It’s not nearly enough. You know that. Whack one mole, a dozen more spring up. How long was your drive this morning? Eh? Come on, you knew this was coming. This is the next logical step.”
Momo the dog pulled up his stake and reached the plug-in at last. He scratched and barked, and I saw the tip of his nose pop up in the window every other second. Virginia Smith stayed where she was and now looked openly suspicious of us. I grew flush, every capillary in my face flooded with hot blood.
“We can’t do this,” I told Matt.
“We have no choice.”
“I’ve used that excuse before. You only get so much mileage out of it.”
“So this is the imaginary line you draw, Johnny Boy? This is where your appetite for this sort of thing goes sour?”
“It’s murder.”
“My God, it’s all the same shit at this point. They all bleed together. If I’d painted the old lady green, you would’ve blown her brains out by now. You’re just drawing lines in the sand to comfort yourself.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Then I have to fire you.”
“That’s it? Twenty years and this is where we end up?”
He bit into a pretzel and spoke with his mouth full. “Yep. How can I keep you around if I know you won’t do what I need you to do? What’s the fucking point, John?”
I sat there with the little dog trying to tear his way into the plug-in and Mrs. Smith now dashing into her home and picking up her WEPS to call someone. I looked at her—a small, frightened woman who had apparently overstayed her welcome—and thought of Julia, the first person I personally killed. I killed her at her behest, and who knows if her relaxed and happy face dead on the pillow meant murder or me
rcy or whatever came in between. It was all death, ugly and exposed. I turned back to Matt. I took his image in fondly, knowing it would be the last time we’d speak.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“See? That wasn’t so bad. Oh, and I never signed away Solara Beck’s file.”
“Why not?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Because you’re a crummy liar. I don’t blame you. She is somethin’ to look at. I gave you that mulligan. Not this one. Call me when it’s done.” He signed off.
The dog yowled. Mrs. Smith grew frantic. I had no way of safely contacting Solara, and suddenly I felt the Potomac widen to the size of the Pacific between us. I turned back to Ernie. “I lied to Matt.”
“I know that,” he said. “He knows that too.”
“You’re really gonna do this?”
He gave a flat smirk. “Here’s the deal. I’ve got the wife and the kids and the new kids and the grandkids and the new grandkids to think of. You don’t. We’re not in the same boat. I have a world of my own I need to protect. I don’t like it, but that’s what it is. You have more freedom than I do on this one. For me, having principles isn’t particularly realistic anymore. It’s all about craftsmanship.”
I formed a limp plan and committed to it fully, without bothering to play out the endgame. “This is what we’re gonna do,” I told Ernie. “We’re gonna drive away from here, and you’re gonna tell Matt that I drew a gun on you and went crazy and forced you to flee without killing that woman. Throw me under the bus. Then I’m gone for good.”
“What’s the point? There’s a stack of Virginia Smiths five miles high after you crap out.”
“I don’t care. You do what you have to do after this. I won’t begrudge you. But don’t kill her. That’s all I ask. Please, Ernie. Just tell him that happened so we don’t have to play this out for real. You’re my friend, and I don’t want that.”