by Charles Ray
The Culling
Charles Ray
North Potomac, MD
This book is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The reproduction or distribution, by any means, including electronic distribution, is expressly prohibited without the written consent of the copyright holder, except for fair use quotes in connection with reviews.
For information about this and other works of this author, contact the author at [email protected].
Printed in the United States of America.
Copyright © 2013 Charles Ray
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0615929192
ISBN-13: 978-0615929194 (Uhuru Press)
DEDICATION
To Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and George Orwell (1903-1950) who’s writing set the standard for dystopian fiction. Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, which addressed psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, and how they impact social development, and Orwell’s 1984, in 1949, with its warning against Big Brother, might have been slightly off the mark in their predictions on the trajectory society was taking – but not by much. An avid reader from childhood, I was introduced to these two books at an age before I fully understood how society worked, but was nevertheless struck by how close they were to what a young country boy in segregated East Texas observed around him. Fiction doesn’t have to get all the facts right to hit close to the truth.
“Evil prevails when good men do nothing.” – Aristotle
Cull. v.t. ‘to separate from others.’
n. ‘anything selected from others; especially something inferior picked out and set apart.’
Prologue
When the end comes, will it be with a bang or with a whimper?
From the around the middle of the Twentieth Century, when the nations of the earth battled against each other, and two nations emerged from the ashes of the greatest conflict the earth had ever seen possessing enough weapons between them to obliterate all life on the planet many times over, this question was asked many times by many people. There were those who believed that one or the other of the two great powers, the United States of America, representing the so-called Free World, and the Soviet Union, representing the Communist World, would someday miscalculate and trigger a conflagration that would destroy humanity in a blaze of nuclear fire, leaving the planet’s surface scorched and barren. Others felt that man’s tendency to willfully ignore his impact on the planet’s ecological balance would lead to a slow squeezing out of life, leaving the planet just as bare and sterile as a nuclear war.
The demise of one of the great powers, the Soviet Union, which suffered an economic and political collapse late in the century, somewhat allayed the fears of those who feared the end would come with a bang, but the continued pollution of the land, water, and air, continued to feed the angst of those who thought the end would be prolonged in coming, but would be no less final; who believed that irreversible changes were being made in the climate that would initiate geologic forces that would eventually reach a tipping point, triggering conditions that would make the planet uninhabitable, or at best, destroy the underpinnings of the global economy; leading to mass starvation and depopulation until it reached the point where humanity would first be plunged into a dark age of bare subsistence, and then, with a whimper, disappear.
Both, however, were wrong. Not about the end coming, but in what would bring it about.
Civilization ended, but it was with neither bang nor whimper.
Instead, it reeled, lurched, and staggered from crisis to crisis like a drunken man on a spree going from gin mill to gin mill, blind to the direction it was taking until, like the leaves of autumn that, one by one, disconnect from the boughs and fall aimlessly to the ground, leaving the trees bare, civilization’s bones were laid bare, stripped of skin and muscle. It was process that, even when seen in retrospect, didn’t signal clearly the final condition. One day though, the tree was bare.
That is how civilization ended; without a sound. One day it just wasn’t there anymore.
At some time, in the far distant future, should some advanced race of alien archeologists visit this doomed planet, they will see the rusted and pitted signs of a great civilization, and they will wonder what caused it to disappear, to be replaced by small tribes of grimy, illiterate bipeds who cling precariously to life, but who have no higher purpose than survival from day to day. But, no matter how deep they dig, they will search in vain for an answer to that question, for there is no single answer, and it is unlikely that they will be able to communicate with the few bipeds left, for along with civilization, language will have been lost as well – or, language that carries meaning beyond ‘danger,’ ‘food,’ or the other single syllables of animals who eat, sleep, reproduce, and die. There are, however, many answers, but they don’t fit together into any coherent narrative. The reasons for the decline were many. It was caused by forces that, unmindful of each other, worked in uncoordinated concert to precipitate an inexorable decline; a descent into an age that, while not quite dark, was cloaked in dimness.
Of all the factors contributing to civilization’s demise, perhaps the most important two, because they created conditions that caused people who should have been aware to be ignorant of the other forces at work, was the unholy confluence of politics and religion – a marriage made in hell.
The religious factor had been at play for many years, dating perhaps from the very founding of organized religions, as there were always those who adopted a non-compromising view of religious doctrine, and insisted that theirs was the only valid doctrine, and all who failed to follow it were doomed to perdition – who often endeavored to assist ‘non-believers’ in achieving perdition through purges and massacres. In the late-Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries, the religious fundamentalists of all sects began to exert an inordinate amount of influence over the politics of their respective societies. An influence that extended into education, commerce, external relations, and eventually even family life, with disastrous consequences.
Religious fundamentalism would have been only a nuisance, though, had not a sense of fundamentalism taken hold in politics around the globe as well. Wars and economic upheaval created anxieties that gave political zealots an inordinate amount of influence in the halls of politics, especially in the industrialized countries where people saw their standard of living being eroded. When the political zealots met and made an uneasy alliance with the religious fundamentalists, the downward slide began in earnest.
The exact nature of this marriage of inconvenience varied from culture to culture, and from religion to religion, but all were characterized by strict adherence to whatever religious text the particular sect viewed as the ‘container of the holy word,’ and an extreme intolerance for divergent views. The impact was felt first; and perhaps most harshly, in education. Local institutions were pressured; at first by the religious leaders, but later by the political establishments as well; to teach only approved subjects. Books containing information that contradicted fundamentalist dogma were at first banned, and then later burned. Teachers who insisted upon academic freedom were shunned, dismissed from their positions, and in some cases either exiled or executed. The result was a generation of students whose education was warped to fit the views of those in charge, a disdain for independent academic inquiry, and erosion of scientific research. Teaching of evolution was banned in favor of religiously-based theories of mankind’s origins, and research into climate change and its impact on the world’s ecosystems came to a halt.
Whether religion influenced politics, or politi
cs encouraged religion, the result was increased fragmentation between communities, a decrease in academic enquiry and scientific research, and an erosion of trust between people or in institutions outside those approved by the ruling cliques. Cross-border immigration, always a hot political issue, came to a virtual standstill, when many jurisdictions enacted harsh laws against illegal immigration, including in some places summary execution. Central governments began to break down as first state, and then local governments asserted more control over local affairs – and, local governments ceased to be servants of the population as order broke down, and became controllers in their misguided efforts to restore order and discipline. In some small countries, this led to open hostilities between central and local governments, but defections from central armies weakened the ability of bloated central bureaucracies to respond effectively.
Confined at first to the countries of the ‘less developed’ world, the fragmentation of world governments went unnoticed in the industrialized nations, who were busy dealing with their own local problems at the time. By the time the fragmentation effect began in the developed countries, it was too late.
The process of decline, which began in earnest in 2025, was essentially completed by 2035; in the space of a decade, nearly two thousand years of political, social, cultural, and scientific progress had not just been halted – it had been reversed. The great, and not so great, nation states disappeared. In their place there appeared a vast number of feudal communities, existing apart from each other in most cases, in reluctant and barely civil contact where geography made total separation impossible.
During this period of moral decay, nature was not still.
The decline in academic enquiry shut off all research into the potential deadly impact of climate change. At the same time, the loss of effective government control left the industrialists of the world, with their toxin-belching factories and insatiable greed for profit, free to rape the environment at will. The effect of greenhouse gases and pollution of air, soil and water increased to a tipping point; but, no one was paying attention until it was too late.
The production of greenhouse gases had been upsetting the earth’s temperature for many decades, but when all government controls on industrial production were either lifted or ignored, it was no longer business as usual; it was rapine on a grand scale. By 2030, the regular average temperature worldwide had risen by ten degrees, and each year after that it got hotter by a degree. The melting of the polar ice caps, which increased the amount of water in the oceans, combined with the warmer temperatures which caused the water to expand, caused an average rise in sea levels of two meters globally. This took away some two hundred meters of shoreline from every coast, with high tides swamping most coastal cities, causing mass evacuations to inland locations and disruption of industry and commerce.
Seaports and coastal roads became unusable. Utilities such a water and power were disrupted, and the incidence of water borne and heat-related diseases rose dramatically. What few hospitals that remained open were quickly swamped. As food supplies, medicines, and other necessities became scarce, the crime rate skyrocketed. In a period of five years, law and order had broken down. People withdrew into small communities of the likeminded. Millions died, and with no one to bury them, corpses lay where they fell, further adding to disease.
By 2045, the surviving remnants of humanity had established a few thousand feudal communities scattered throughout the globe; out of touch with each other from a combination of loss of long-range communications technology, suspicion, and fear.
One such community, calling itself New Liberty, was established on the new east coast of what had been the United States of America; an area stretching from fifty miles south of the now inundated cities of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Wilmington, Delaware, southward to a point twenty miles north of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
In Washington, DC, the capital of the world’s most powerful country, an alliance between political zealots and religious fundamentalists had been forged during the Twentieth Century, and as economic, social, and political crises increased in the late Twenty-First Century, this alliance deepened and was formalized in what became known as the People’s Principles Party (PPP). While the party’s public platform was a return to a literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, this was underpinned with an insistence on a literal interpretation of the King James Version of the Bible – said interpretation being validated and approved by the party’s founder, Markham Christopher, an evangelist preacher who had run for and won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from a rural district in North Carolina. He was known for making public pronouncements of a coming Apocalypse, which would be divine punishment for all the sins humanity was committing in the name of science and progress. When the ocean moved in toward the west, wiping out coastal communities, large and small, it was seen as a vindication of Christopher’s views.
As the world economic situation worsened, Christopher won more followers, and quickly became a kingmaker in what was left of national politics. When it became apparent that the sea levels were rising, threatening the 80% of the earth’s population that lived in coastal areas, Christopher’s gloom and doom predictions seemed validated. Christopher, though a fundamentalist zealot, was at heart a kind man, and the years under his rule were filled with hardships that were shared equally. When he died, though, he was replaced by Robert Cruz, owner of a chemical plant located in Delaware, just south of Wilmington. Not as kind-hearted as Christopher, he began to change community rules, establishing distinctions between workers and those for whom they worked. Under him, industrialists, as long as they hewed to the party line, ruled. It made the age of the nineteenth century robber barons of the railroads and mining interests seem mild. Workers became nothing more than replaceable economic units, whose only value was what they could produce for the bosses.
When Robert died in an unexplained bathroom accident, he was replaced in turn by his son Hector, who had been nothing but the heir apparent from birth. He continued what his father had begun, but under the tutelage of Elder Jebediah Robertson, a hard-core evangelist who had completely rewritten the King James Bible to reflect the coming of Apocalypse. He called his book, which was a perversion of Christopher’s views, The Book of Apocalypse.
A ruling committee, consisting of Hector Cruz, Robertson, Minister of Defense Armand Wheelwright, Drake Edison, Minister of Population Control, and Colonel Gravius-One, commander of the New Liberty internal security unit, known as the Monitors, ran the affairs of the community with iron-fisted discipline.
The ruling committee, known only as The Committee, members of the elite citizen community, which included members of the new clergy and those who controlled production, designated full citizens, moved across the swollen Potomac River into what had been Rosslyn, Virginia. The Committee had its headquarters in the Pentagon, formerly the headquarters of the American defense forces, now the dreaded seat of power over everyone in New Liberty.
The rest of the population lived on the east side of the river in the former capital city, mostly in what had been low-income high rise buildings that had, since the collapse, become even more squalid. Overcrowding, disease, and crime were at first endemic. But, Edison, working with Gravius-One and his Monitors, moved to restore order. Despite his best efforts, though, Edison was unable to keep the people, now known as proles, from doing what impoverished people had been doing for ages, to relieve the tedium of their poverty, they procreated. The prole population doubled during the first five years, putting a strain on already limited resources. Edison then made a recommendation, which Cruz was all too willing to implement, and which was also supported by Robertson; new laws were passed making a long list of hitherto minor crimes, such as petty theft, having children without permission, and the like, capital offenses. Executions were carried out immediately after sentence was passed. While this did lower the population, it wasn’t enough to stem the drain on food, which the proles were forced to grow and
transfer the major part across the river to the citizens. The prole community was left with just enough to keep energy levels sufficient for their labor. Malnutrition was common, and most proles went to bed hungry at night.
It was in the sixth year after Hector Cruz assumed the office of Chairman of the Committee that the culling started. No record was made of the meeting at which this procedure was decided, but rumors circulated that it was a joint idea of the good Elder Robertson and Minister Edison. Each year, those in the population who reached the age of nineteen would be evaluated for their potential for contributing to society. Those with no skills, or who were chronic misbehavers, were placed with the convicted criminals who were scheduled for execution – and, this was almost all convicted criminals. The selected ones were then taken to the Culling Ground, the area that had been known as the National Mall, where they were placed in a cleared area near the obelisk that thrust up like a misshapen phallus in the center of the area, under the watchful eye of a unit of Monitors. The prole community would be ordered to assemble to observe the process; those who could not find space near the Culling Ground were required to watch on television monitors at their places of work.
A device that was located at the top of the obelisk would be aimed at them. At the stroke of midday, a yellow light would emanate from the opening at the top of the obelisk, bathing the assembled prisoners below. At first, they would stumble around in confusion, but very quickly the searing pain would start, and someone would scream. But, before they could flee the unbearable agony, there would be a flash, and the stench of burning flesh and billowing smoke would fill the air. After a few minutes the smoke would clear, but the odor would linger, often for days. In the clearing at the base of the obelisk, where only moments before living, breathing human beings stood, were piles of gray ash, which work gangs of proles would be ordered in to rake up, place in baskets and take to the agricultural fields to be spread as fertilizer.