Critical acclaim for C. J. Hopkins’ previous work
“A brilliant (and hilarious) critique of the emptiness of American life and the meaninglessness of the popular culture that attempts to fill the void.” - Toronto Globe & Mail
“A blistering revelation ... Hopkins’ body of work owes a huge debt to the absurdists and so manages to blast beyond the merely political or allegorical to the existential.” - Time Out New York
“Sharp, brilliant, intense, fast-moving, made for the moment we live in ... a portrait of a culture caught in a strange and painful paradox between progressive and reactionary attitudes.” - The Scotsman
“A feral ferris-wheel of comedy, confusion, contradiction, obfuscation and bent-out-of-shape straight talking that leaps out of the room at you and harnesses you to its mischievous mindset.” - Metro
“America’s relationship with consumerism and the media is unerringly skewered.” - The Times
“Sharp-toothed satire ... a dystopia in which the desire for consumer goods and high ratings trumps all principles.” - Village Voice
“Hilariously at odds with the mainstream, and much bigger and deeper than the sum of its apparent parts.” - The Herald
“Stimulating and thought-provoking ... a welcome addition to the canon of all things absurd and beautiful.” - The List
“A gripping satire, which spills into sinister weirdness.” - Die Tageszeitung
ALSO BY C. J. HOPKINS
HORSE COUNTRY
SCREWMACHINE/EYECANDY
(OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP
WORRYING AND LOVE BIG BOB)
THE EXTREMISTS
ZONE 23
C. J. HOPKINS
Copyright © 2015, 2017 by C. J. Hopkins
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks
This Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant trade edition May 2017.
SNOGGSWORTHY, SWAINE & CORMORANT is a trademark of Consent Factory Publishing.
Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant is an imprint of Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc., distributors of high quality literary content throughout the developed and developing worlds. For more information about Consent Factory Publishing, visit the Consent Factory’s website: consentfactory.org.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, corporations, or their subsidiaries, agents, or assigns, is not intended by the author, and is either a coincidence or the work of devious supernatural forces which neither the author nor the publisher would ever claim to understand or speak for.
Cover design by Anthony Freda and Dan Zollinger.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-3-00-055526-8 (pb)
For Billie and her cowboy ...
ZONE 23
1.
The Normals
For the Normals, the vast majority of consumers living and working in Northeast Region 709 of the United Territories, a globalized monetary and fiscal alliance of the nominally sovereign, democratic nations that were huddled together side by side on the habitable upper third of the planet, 17 April, 2610, or 02 Iyyar, 6370, or 01 Shawwal, 2049, or Day 600 in the Year of the Lemur (or any of a host of alternative dates, depending on their proprietary calendars), was just another perfect, peaceful day in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity.
Or at least it started out that way.
At approximately 0530 that morning, having finished their normal morning ablutions (i.e., waterless showering, laser body shaving, anal bleaching, and other ablutions), and having broken the seals on the recyclable containers of their anti-oxidant, soy-milk smoothies and lowfat, totally gluten-free breakfasts, Normals and their families were gathered together in their temperature-regulated, self-cleaning kitchens, heads slightly bowed in an attitude of prayer, scanning, each on their All-in-One Viewers, their personally programmed proprietary streams of individualized Morning Content, a lively mix of information, entertainment and social networking customized to reflect their interests and individual purchasing patterns ... everything was just as normal as could be.
The forecast that morning was particularly pleasant ... clear and sunny throughout the Region. Winds were out of the west and light. The projected high was 46 Celsius. Heat advisories remained in effect for Communities south of the 45th parallel. Consumers were advised to refrain from any non-essential outdoor activity. Everything else was looking rosy. SatCom signal strength was excellent. Check- in times at the local airports were averaging under fourteen hours, down from their previous eighteen hours, down from their previous twenty-two hours. The odds of a devastating Terrorist attack with an improvised low-yield nuclear weapon, or some horrible chemical or bio-agent that would kill you the second it touched your skin, were low to acceptable.
Life was good.
Business was good. Extremely good. Little green upward-pointing arrows were dancing across the bottom of their screens. They were chasing a parade of little three-letter acronyms ... CRS ... BBB ...HCM ... FFC ... each of which stood for some corporate entity, all of whose shares were trading heavily. Normal consumers could track this trading in Real-Time right on the screens of their Viewers, or they could download individualized streams of market data from selected Regions. Or they could visit these Regions on their Real-Life maps, search nearby for business establishments, zoom right into their virtual interiors, and virtually experience their virtual environments. Or they could search for Entertainment Content in which these business establishments were featured, or the names of which were casually mentioned ... household names like Chloe’s, Chaney’s, VR Universe, and Big-Buy Basement, where every GMAX Model 30, whatever that was, was drastically reduced. Or they could comparison shop at CRS, Big-Buy Basement’s fiercest competitor, which would match or beat Big-Buy’s best price on any prescription medication. Cylozilatrin Z, for example, a popular Amyloidosis preventative, or Buxafenanadrine, or something like that, which reduced the adverse effects of ... something. And that wasn’t all, oh no, far from it, because the Normals were free to share this offer (the conditions of which were subject to change) with their Big-Buy Family, Friends & Contacts, some of whom were just bound to be fans of Brandon Westwood, the Content designer, who had just won a Golden Penguin in Gothåb, where currently it was 18 Celsius and partly cloudy with scattered light showers, and to which last-minute round-trip tickets were being offered at the following portals ...
Which millions of Normals were actually doing, or were seriously considering contemplating doing (i.e., sharing this offer with their Friends & Contacts, or checking on last-minute flights to Gothåb, or searching to find out where that was, assuming it was somewhere that actually existed), when suddenly the peace of their perfect morning, or the fugue state they were gradually entering, was shattered by an all caps BREAKING NEWS message.
The news was bad. Extremely bad. Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III, founder and CEO of Finkles, had lost his battle with intestinal cancer, and died at the age of one hundred and thirty. The actual message read as follows:
CANCER SCOURGE CLAIMS FINKLES JIMBO!
Now this kind of thing didn’t happen all that often. In the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, given the rather staggering cost of intra-provider coordination (and the corresponding loss of advertising revenues), these multi-platform BREAKING NEWS messages were normally reserved for horrible accidents, or catastrophic hemispheric weather events, or the thwarting of devastating Terrorist attacks by t
he various corporate Security Services. The death of a single individual, even an extremely important individual, like a CEO, or COO, or the head of some Info-Entertainment conglomerate, newsworthy though it may have been, hardly warranted interruption of the constant flow of Info-streams upon which the global economy depended and to which most of the Normals’ eyes were glued at every waking moment.
But then Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III, was not just any important individual. No, “Jimbo” was a larger-than-life individual, an embodiment of the spirit of the age, a living symbol of all that was good and right in the world in the 27th Century. In addition to his bold and steadfast leadership of Finkles and the Finkles Family of Companies, and his tireless philanthropic activities, and generally serving as a living beacon of dauntless entrepreneurial vehemence, interdependent market fervor, and freedom, and, well, an inspiration to all, he was one of the shrewdest large investors in the annals of public and private equity, whose every random homespun utterance was parsed for meaning like Delphic prophecy. A quadrillionaire by the age of forty, with luxury condos and country estates in the most exclusive Communities in the North, where he hosted extravagant V.I.P. galas for A-List celebrities and the super-abundant (a limited selection of photos of which were sold to consumers and traded avidly), and being just unimaginably wealthy, and this quasi-Arthurian father-type figure whose face you saw like twelve times a hour beaming secret enlightened wisdom down at you out of some virtual screen, the news of his tragic and untimely death was a crushing emotional blow to the Normals, many of whom felt like they were facing the loss of a much loved member of their personal families.
People broke down and wept in their smoothies. They choked on their anti-oxidant breakfast bars. Those with irritable bowel syndrome (more than you would probably like to imagine) shuffled, or kind of crabwalked their way, to the nearest available waterless toilet. Families joined hands at breakfast tables and recited prayers and affirmations. Networks interrupted programming. Servers flooded with Fleeps and Tweaks. Luminaries were reached for comment.
All this went on for several minutes.
Once the initial shock had worn off, and the heartbreaking news of the death of “Jimbo” had been moved down to the headline creeper that scrolled across the bottom of everyone’s screen, and the various medications they were taking, the doses of which they had immediately increased, had upped their serotonin levels, and bound to their benzodiazepine receptors, flooding their brains with a mild but measurable sense of inner peace and well-being, the Normals went back to consuming their breakfasts and scanning their individualized streams ... sad, yes, definitely sad, deeply sad (very, very sad), but not in any debilitating, or excessive, or self-indulgent way that might have negatively affected their performances at work (which they knew were being continually monitored) or caused anyone to feel uncomfortable, because deep down, in addition to the meds they were on, they just knew in their hearts (and they reminded themselves on a daily basis with their affirmations), that the sadness they were feeling was just a feeling ... a feeling that would eventually pass, and that all they had to do was detach from the feeling, and try not to label or to judge the feeling, or the painful event that had triggered the feeling ... because everything, even painful events, like the tragic and untimely passing of “Jimbo,” or even just frightening and horrible facts, like the scourge of aggressive intestinal cancer, or colon cancer, or prostate cancer, or malignant melanoma, or frontotemporal dementia, or the more or less constantly imminent threat of a sudden and devastating Terrorist attack, or catastrophic weather event, or some other type of horrible accident, or even the knowledge that they, the Normals, represented the last generations of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, which due to a flaw in its genetic sequence was gradually being phased out of existence ... all of it, everything under the sun, no matter how frightening, or depressing, or horrible, or incomprehensible, or completely nonsensical, was part of some perfect, ineluctable, convoluted cosmic plan, or story, or evolutionary process, or had something to do with the concept of progress ... and anyway they were due at work, and the BREAKING NEWS message was gone from their Viewers, which were streaming and fleeping and tweaking again and ...
Taylor
Meanwhile, while the Normals were viewing their individualized streams of Content and enjoying their lowfat, gluten-free breakfasts in their comfortably air-conditioned, self-cleaning kitchens, Taylor Byrd was lying on his back on a sweat-soaked, sweat-stinking futon mattress, staring at a fuzzy little dot on the ceiling, which, the odds were, was some kind of mutant cockroach. This dot was more or less right in the center of an insanely intricate mandala-like pattern of moldy, quasi-concentric rings, or semi-orbiculate moldy shapes, the detailed dendrochronology of which was not, at the moment, of interest to Taylor. The dot, however, was of interest. It was more or less directly above his head, possibly preparing to drop down onto his face and crawl up his nose or something. This kind of thing happened on a regular basis. For reasons no one entirely understood, mutant insects, and particularly cockroaches, liked nothing better than to crawl up the noses, and into the mouths and ear canals, of unsuspecting sleeping persons, or to suddenly fly directly at them flapping their filthy little cockroach wings. Fortunately, there were ways to avoid this, most of which Taylor was familiar with. The thing to do was, get out of bed, or at least sit up, or just move, basically, extricating his face from the possible mutant cockroach’s downward trajectory. Taylor, however, was unable to do this (i.e., get out of bed, or sit up, or move), as his brain had been disconnected from his body. He lay there in the suffocating heat and humidity, staring upward, apparently paralyzed, trying to remember when it was, and where he was, and how he had gotten there.
Out the window of Taylor’s room (so, OK, good, that’s where he was) a Public Viewer was playing some sort of sickeningly sappy funereal music, which at this time of morning, or night, or dark, or whatever time it was exactly, was not what it was usually doing. So, OK, something odd was happening, apparently something historic, and sad. Taylor had no idea what it was, as due to the inscrutable vicissitudes of Fate, or the Will of the One Who Was Many, or something, he was one of an unfortunate minority of persons who were not in possession of an All-in-One Viewer, or a Multi-Max Viewer, or Mondo Viewer, or any other type of interactive device providing a stream of individualized anything. And thus, he had not heard the news of the tragic and untimely passing of “Jimbo” ... nor would he have given a rat’s ass if he had. It wasn’t just that he appeared to be paralyzed, and so trapped there beneath what was very possibly an orifice violating mutant cockroach, or even the fact that he had just been awoken by the sound, first, of glass shattering, second, Rusty Braynard screaming, third, Alice Williams screaming, and, finally, whatever the fuck they were doing hopping and kind of conga line dancing around the room in circles like idiots ... well, all right, that was definitely part of it, but the other and more significant part of it was that the tragic and untimely death of “Jimbo,” the prescription sale at CRS, the drastic reductions at Big-Buy Basement, the markets, the shares, the temperature in Gothåb ... all these bits of information around which the lives of the Normals revolved, and upon which, of course, their livelihoods depended, none of that shit meant shit to Taylor.
Taylor Byrd was an A.S.P. 3 ... a Class 3 Anti-Social Person. “[A] person,” according to the DSM, “constitutionally predisposed to pervasive violation of the rights of others and disregard for social norms.” He stood just under two meters tall, was heavily, if disproportionally muscled, prodigiously scarred about the chest and forearms, extensively, and rather poorly tattooed, and just overall looked like a dangerous character. Which, no doubt about it, he definitely was. By any definition of the word, he was. However, the only definition that counted was the one in the DSM XXXIII, which listed a number of hallmark symptoms commonly exhibited by Anti-Social Persons, more or less all of which Taylor exhibited.
Taylor, for example, was “prone to irritability.”
He often “failed to plan ahead.” He “lied repeatedly,” and failed to maintain “a consistent pattern of work behavior.” He frequently appeared to “lack remorse,” or “rationalize having mistreated others,” or “otherwise demonstrate an incapacity to process guilt and learn from experience, particularly experience involving punishment.” On top of which, he drank, smoked, urinated openly in public spaces, abused an assortment of illicit substances, frequently used offensive language, was uncooperative, sexually promiscuous, disrespectful, and just generally unpleasant. All of which was noted in his file:
asmedbase.ute/ASP3/BYRD/Taylor.0820.2565.709.Z23.
Now, whereas, in less enlightened epochs, a person such as Taylor Byrd would have been deemed an incorrigible criminal and locked away in a deep dark hole, probably for the remainder of his natural life, in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or “DSM”) had rendered the whole of Criminal Law and every edifice stemming therefrom as obsolete as the manual typewriter. According to the DSM, Anti-Social Persons like Taylor were neither evil nor maladjusted, but suffered an incurable medical condition, and could no more control their aggressive behavior than one could control one’s sexual preferences, or the color of one’s eyes or hair ... OK, granted, you could always dye your hair, or have your irises surgically altered, which people did, quite often, actually, just like the vast majority of people (i.e., people over the age of thirty, the so-called “Variant-Positive Normals”) took some form of medication to curb their latent Anti-Social tendencies, all of which, for most people, worked like a charm.
Unfortunately, there were these other people, people like Taylor Byrd, for example, who were non-responsive to pharmatherapy and thus, sadly, were more or less doomed to a life of squalor and social deviance. The DSM was quite clear on this point. As difficult as it was to accept, Anti-Social Persons like Taylor were beyond the reach of modern medicine, so, regrettably, there was nothing to do but quarantine them, humanely, of course, for the good and safety of all concerned.
Zone 23 Page 1