Because that was a Bad Sign.
When it came time to leave my hiding place I went out the back and kept watching the sky. Shell disappeared so as not to distract me, but the short walk proved uneventful; two streets away I found Henry waiting for me in an almost identical town car. This one was cleaner.
Henry assured me that he was fine and I had to accept that. Considering his age and how he’d gotten slammed around, I wasn’t willing to bet that he wasn’t secretly a D Class Ajax, or maybe a Paragon. Breakthrough-boosted specimens of physical perfection, Paragons didn’t have any obvious powers but they tended to have incredible stamina and bounce back nearly as fast as Ajax and Atlas-Types.
If he was, he was smart to keep it quiet.
Henry didn’t say much and neither did I—after everything that had just happened I wasn’t in the mood—but the rest of the ride to wherever stayed blessedly uneventful. We did get stopped at a US Army checkpoint; Henry explained that most of the troops were home protecting the food and fuel and helping reestablish order under a suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act and declaration of quasi-martial law in large parts of the country.
The soldiers checked Henry’s ID—and mine, which I hadn’t known I now had—to make sure that we didn’t have records or warrants on us before they let us continue. They did suggest we not go much further south than we were; apparently “Southcamp’s gang fringe” had gotten pretty wide. Southcamp was run by the state, not the Army, and from what the soldiers said it sounded like Springfield was doing a less than wonderful job with Illinois’s displaced. Looking at the streets we were driving through, my only thought was It’s worse than here? Henry thanked them politely and they waved us along.
And half the country was like this? Or worse?
Then I saw the white towers.
They weren’t high towers—none of them could be more than twenty stories and they were wide enough to look pretty squat—but they stood out against the empty fields and the single-story homes closest to them. From here it looked like they were made entirely out of shipping containers and steel scaffolding, bright white-painted exteriors broken only by rooftops and platforms covered with green and flowering plants. Steel-scaffolding walkways, festooned with more hanging plants, connected all of the towers on their lower levels so that it looked like they melded together to form almost a single structure.
“What is that?”
“West camp free hold.”
I blinked. “Okay so, I understand all those words individually…”
Henry laughed. “Westcamp Freehold,” he enunciated carefully. “It’s…complicated. It’s on private property, Miss Hope, and it doesn’t recognize the authority of the local city or state government. You’ll be safe, there.”
“It’s a camp?”
“It’s not like Southcamp. You’ll see.”
I considered asking what Southcamp was like, but kept quiet and watched as we got closer.
At the entrance to a gated parking lot, men in white uniforms with orange helmets and vests labeled Westcamp Public Safety checked my ID and a return pass Henry showed them. Henry paid a fee and they took my picture and thumbprint, entered them, and gave me a day pass with my picture and print on it. They politely cautioned us against losing our passes—we could be asked to show them by any Public Safety officer.
“What did they check?” I asked Henry as soon as we’d pulled away from the booth.
“Their private system and the National Criminal Database. Westcamp Freehold is private property; no one with a criminal record gets in, and no one who they’ve ejected gets back in.”
When we parked Henry tried to take my bag—I slung it over my shoulder—and we walked through an open street gate into the camp. The place didn’t look like private property to me.
Outside of Chicagoland the streets had emptied and we’d driven past whole neighborhoods that looked like ghost towns. This street was bustling, full of people going places. It was a pedestrian street—no vehicle traffic other than slow moving electric carts—made of some sort of rubber-coated metal grill system instead of poured asphalt and with wide green-planted medians down the center around and between molded benches and busy kiosks. I stopped in the middle of the street and stared. Just like in downtown Chicago, everyone and their dog was packing—actually more of them, here—but it was the towers that captured my attention.
The entire “camp” wasn’t really constructed from steel shipping containers; someone had fabricated modular boxes that had the same dimensions. For transport? Quick assembly? Each tower was up to twenty stories of stacked and connected boxes, every other story above the second wrapped with wide balconies most of the way up. The lower wrap-around balconies of each tower were linked to the adjacent towers by broad steel-scaffolding walkways, and every tower gleamed brilliant white under the green and flowering plant boxes and baskets and trellises that had been strung up literally everywhere, like the place was one big garden nursery. With the shadows cast by the towers I imagined that most of the species were shade plants, and why was I even thinking about that?
I stared around as we walked. The first two stories of each tower were given over to businesses, shops, and what looked like community centers and dining halls. Everything was clean. Theme park clean, like they had professionals come out every night and hose the streets down. I spotted two paint crews further down the street touching up tower exteriors and another crew working on newly hung planters. There wasn’t a graffiti-tag or piece of loose litter in sight.
“Good morning, ma’am.” As I’d been taking everything in, a helmeted and orange-vested PS officer had walked right up to us. He smiled, nodded politely. “May I see your passes?” When we presented them he passed a reading pad over both, then looked at my large handbag. “Are we staying with a resident, ma’am?”
“Miss Evans is,” Henry said. “Her host couldn’t meet us at the entrance.”
“Residence number?”
“Four-Seventeen A.”
He entered the information in his pad. “Very good. We’ll expect a notice from your host and will deliver a guest card once he has done so if he does not check in. Is there anything I can do for you?” When I shook my head he nodded again before strolling off.
I watched him go, looked at Henry. “His visor has a camera in it?”
“Yes.”
“Facial recognition system?”
“Oh yes.”
“So…the officers at the booth don’t search vehicles, and just issued me a day pass. But my bag says I might be staying, and any safety officer who sees me will know from the entry just now that I am but haven’t secured a guest card yet. Right?”
“Correct. You won’t be bothered again but you will see another officer tonight, who will either give you a new card or escort you from the camp.”
“What about people who work here?”
“If you work here, you live here.”
I nodded, still not getting it. So Westcamp really was private property? But it sported public business like a mall, and private residences like a gated community? What kind of camp was it—and how did it get away with its own security and no cops? How could Westcamp not recognize city and state authority? And—most important—if anyone tracked me here, how could Westcamp keep the State of Illinois from issuing a warrant and forcibly collecting me? Forget about fleeing to Canada; I already felt like I’d crossed the border into another country. This was completely messed up. What had happened?
Henry got me moving again.
We walked to the center of the “camp.” A huge open plaza with a fountain, a tiered arena and stage of grass and concrete, and tree-flanked walks with more benches and kiosks, it was all so professionally laid out and landscaped that I wanted to call time out. Who built this in the middle of a national crisis?
Just beyond the plaza, Henry took us into the lobby of one of the towers—as clean as everything outside—and we caught an elevator to the tenth floor and stopped outside the door
to apartment A. He knocked.
“Come iiiiin!” I knew that voice and Henry chuckled when I glared at him accusingly.
Shelly greeted us, standing proudly in the middle of the apartment’s main room. She gave Henry a playful kiss on the cheek. “Any trouble getting here?”
“As if you don’t know, young lady. Miss Hope, I hope we will see you again.” And he was gone. Shelly tackle-hugged me. I braced and didn’t go down. Dropping my bag, I hugged her back.
“Let me guess. Galatea?”
“Yup! Fully humanform gynoid drone-bot. Vulcan’s best work! What do you think?” She jumped back and twirled. Her hair was black and cut in a short bob that matched mine but otherwise it was Shelly, maybe eighteen or nineteen—I had to look close to see that her skin was too perfect and smooth to be real.
“So you’re not actually in there?”
Her eyes rolled. “That would be stupid, moving myself into a vulnerable shell.”
I nodded weakly. “Yeah, it sounds a little dumb. So who knows about you?” Why aren’t you with the Sentinels?
“Vulcan of course—but he thinks I’m a cyberspace-phantom breakthrough named Cypher. Come on—let me show you around!”
Shelly’s home—and I supposed all of the apartments in the tower—was made out of two joined eight-by-forty boxes. The interiors were probably completely modular; hers had an office-bed-bath suite (made bigger with a workstation and bed that folded into the walls), a common kitchen and living space, and an armory.
That was different.
“As Galatea I’m a member of Westcamp Freehold’s CAI team,” she explained. “So I’ve got extra armor, racks of non-lethal loadouts—gluetape, freezefoam, flashbangs, that kind of stuff. I’m great for riot control and non-lethal force.”
My first mental picture was Shelly—Galatea—loading up and then taking the stairs or elevator down. Then she tapped the outside wall and it turned into a door onto her small private balcony. It had hanging plants on it, of course.
“Got a green thumb?”
“Westcamp law. If you have a balcony you grow stuff on it; if you can’t or won’t then you pay with Westcamp Bucks for a service that does. Same for cleaning—they’re big on cleanliness and hygiene here after the sickness of the first post-Pulse year.”
“Strict homeowner’s association?”
“You have no idea.”
She handed me a black wig to match my shades and took me to Charlies’ Wok for lunch. It turned out that not all of the businesses and shops were down on the street; her tower had a couple of eateries open to the pedestrian balconies—again packed into the double-wide spaces. Mostly they cooked for delivery, but there were adjacent public spaces with tables for eating at.
Charlie’s Wok did Chinese food, rice with wok-fried or steamed sides in returnable bowls. Charlie wasn’t Chinese (he looked like a truck driver and wore a Harley Davidson cowboy hat) but he spoke it. His army-unit and mission tats explained where he’d picked up the skills.
Shelly traded Chinese with him when she ordered and with a couple of fellow eaters before bringing our tray of bowls to our table. I watched her tuck in, and realized that for some reason our half of the public dining space had emptied of everyone but us.
“We can talk,” Shell said. “Trust Charlie.”
I nodded, picked up my sticks. This was Shelly’s territory and she wasn’t my Shell but I’d trust her with my life. “So, does everyone here besides Vulcan think that you’re, you know, a meat-person?”
“Everyone here thinks I’m a burn victim who got a Second Skin treatment, and they’re always asking if it ‘feels real’. FYI, they also think I’m a D Class Ajax-Type and my silver-blue Galatea armor is a Verne-tech powersuit. If you’re here long I’ll introduce you to the rest of the local CAI team.”
“Is that safe? I mean—”
“I know. Trust me, you won’t be you. And you’re safe in the freehold, even if Chicago or Springfield figures out where you disappeared to.”
And now I had to know.
“I keep hearing that. Freehold. Doesn’t that just mean your land isn’t owned by the bank?”
“Nope. Well, yeah, but a lot more than that now.” And over the excellent mushroom chicken, she told me.
I couldn’t believe it.
The way she said it, the federal and state governments were mostly smashed. Just overwhelmed. The Pulse and everything that happened after had wrecked things to the point where, with all the federal agencies, with most of the Army brought home and all the National Guard and state militias called up, they’d barely been able to hang on—hadn’t been able to keep things going in a lot of cities in the face of the mass flight and food riots. All over the place people had had to do for themselves, forget about the government. Focused on keeping the marginal zones from also descending into hellholes, the governments let them. At first.
After the initial crisis had passed—which took months—the state agencies tried to move in back in and administer centralized policies to places surviving on their own. And a lot of those places said no. Camps with barely enough food where the government wanted them to take more refugees. Counties holding onto the food they had to stockpile or trade. And of course nut-job survivalist communities who’d decided that This Was It, the end of civilization that they’d been waiting for. They all told the state governments to pound sand.
Shelly said that when the states cried to Washington for help, President Touches Clouds refused to let them use the distributed US military units to put down the “insurrections.” Governors tried to use National Guard and militia units to do it themselves, but in a lot of places the guard and militia units weren’t willing to fire on fellow Americans who weren’t looting or shooting at them. Where they were willing…
Before the Pulse, the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) had estimated that there were around three hundred million personal firearms in the US. The DSA had estimated that for every three known breakthroughs there was at least one unknown breakthrough. They’d both been conservative; there were a lot more guns than that and independent-minded Americans could shoot back. Adding the startling number of unaccounted-for civilian breakthroughs to the mix…there were pitched battles in a few places, and a lot of people died. With the legitimacy and continued authority of the national and state governments on the line, Washington had to do something.
And it did, just, according to Shelly, not what the states wanted. She was almost grinning ear to ear as she told me the story; President Touches Clouds addressed an emergency session of Congress, and they worked out the Freehold Protocols, which strong-armed the states into backing off of the insurrectionists by withholding ammunition (most of the armories were in federal hands). The states had to stand down military operations and settle for holding onto what they controlled.
Then she sent in the US Marshals—augmented by CAI heroes recruited into the Marshalls Service for the purpose—and they made sure that the freeholds were being run according to God Bless the USA principles. The freeholds that were nothing more than gang lord fiefdoms, self-declared white supremacist “states” (or black supremacist—there were a few of those), or otherwise not honoring democracy and freedom, were Taken Care Of as soon as the marshals and the US Military could get to them.
“The one exception to that rule is Haven,” she finished up. “It’s a breakthrough-supremacist enclave on the California coast. They dodged the wrath of Uncle Sam by setting up their operation where there were no normals already and then only letting breakthroughs and their families in. They’re democratic, just exclusive.”
“So that was it?” I really found it hard to imagine. “The government just let them form their own states?”
She shrugged. “The good ones, anyway. Washington is still negotiating the freeholds’ actual legal status with the state governments. Touches Clouds wants the states to voluntarily cede freehold land to the federal government as self-administering territories, and every
one’s leaving us alone while they work it all out.”
“So what about this place?” My wave took in all the box towers we could see. “This is just… I don’t know what it is.”
“This is Vulcan’s place.”
I put down my chopsticks. “Vulcan. The mad scientist in the basement?”
“Nnnnot following you.”
“He’s a Sentinel here, right?” Wait, he hadn’t been on the plaque.
“Huh? No! When did that happen?”
“Blackstone recruited him after—” My stomach sank and I tasted bile. Please no. I hadn’t been around for the Villains Inc. fight, here. “What happened to Blackstone and Chakra? Rush?”
“Rush was killed last year. Blackstone works for the DSA now, and Chakra went back to Heroes Without Borders. Why?”
I felt both guilty and grateful. I’d light a candle for Rush the next time I was in church, but hearing that Blackstone and Chakra were still alive filled me with relief. “And you?”
“I joined up with Vulcan before the Pulse for the prosthetic bodies. He liked me for the Galatea and Prometheus Projects.”
And that made it three realities where Shell and Vulcan got involved by different routes. When I got home I was going have to give more serious thought to questions of fate. “Prometheus?”
“That’s what started all this.” Her wave to the world outside matched mine, and now she was actually smiling fondly.
“Eric’s—Vulcan’s—polymorphic molecules let him make a lot of different things, but most of that’s just harder or more durable versions of modern alloys. The two things he really dedicated himself to were transformative technologies; molecular switches and networks capable of the sort of organizational processes needed for a neural network supporting a true artificial intelligence, and a way of producing a durable, safe, high-energy fusion chain power source.”
She frowned, considering. “I have no idea how the Sentinels recruited him in your history. Here he built his workshop just outside the Fermi National Accelerator in West Chicago for access and buried himself in it. He’s…focused.”
Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers Page 18