Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Simply put, when the drugs were working, the world was ... OK, not quite perfect, but considering what the world had been like for thousands of years of human history, a brutal, ugly, savage place, where cruelty, violence, and sadism reigned, where torture, war, slavery, and genocide had become the norm, and were not just ignored, but were subtly integrated into society, and often even celebrated ... well, OK, compared to a world like that, the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity was something close to a textbook utopia. Seemingly unsolvable social problems (i.e., widespread poverty, homelessness, hunger, lack of access to medical treatment, illiteracy, smoking, traffic congestion, substance addiction, public rudeness, war, naturally, but more than just war, violence itself, all forms of aggression) had been eliminated, or virtually eliminated. Medical advances had gradually increased the average life expectancy dramatically. Cancer, although not entirely eradicated, had become a routine, manageable illness. Pharmaceutical breakthroughs enabled the vast majority of Variant-Positive Normals to live fulfilling, contented lives, free from anxiety, depression, boredom, envy, resentment, and other conditions that had plagued humanity throughout the ages. Despite the fact that the Age of Anarchy had set the march of progress back, who knew how many hundreds of years, technological development had now been resumed. Information proliferated, and was instantly accessible around the clock. Crime was virtually non-existent, apart from occasional isolated instances of fraud, insider trading and such, which was almost always unintentional, and was one of the costs of doing business. Thanks to the non-existence of crime, there wasn’t any need for jails or prisons, or any other type of penal industry, most of the leading members of which had converted over to Security Services, or A.S.P.-Management and Quarantine Services, during the Age of Emergency Measures. Nations, although technically still in existence, were nothing more than administrative bodies, fiscally, financially, and in every other way, dependent on the corporations. Which meant that they, these nominal nations, * would never again be in a position to launch such wars as had brought the world, over and over, to the brink of destruction, and the list went on and on, and on. Clearly, to anyone thinking properly, the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, if not an ideal utopian society, was ... well, things could have been a whole lot worse.

  Or so it seemed when the drugs were working. The problem was, when the drugs weren’t working, this textbook utopia was just a veneer, a gleaming front for something sick, something far worse than the wholesale slaughter, carnage and conflict that had led up to it, something that wanted much more than to merely kill, enslave and oppress its victims, because one could at least identify and fight that ... but no, not this, this simulation, which guaranteed “peace” and called itself “freedom,” but was really just about domination, not the kind that crushes your face with a giant despotic Orwellian boot, or puts a bullet in the back of your head, despite the fact that everywhere you went was swarming with teams of Security Specialists, surveillance cameras, biometric scanners, and other Counter-Terror measures ... no ... this was far worse than that, smarter, infinitely more efficient. This was the kind of domination that controlled your MIND, and not just your thoughts, opinions and expressions, but how you perceived, and what you perceived, controlled, not you, or any individual, but REALITY ITSELF, not with some kind of fake reality that you lived in like a video game, ACTUAL REALITY ... THIS REALITY ... such that someone, let’s say, for example, Joachim Maria-Torres Oakley, was, in fact, in reality, FREE, and NOT a slave, and NOT exploited, and no one was stealing the value of his labor, his time, his life, his very BEING, sucking it leech-like out of his body and using it to enrich themselves. And this was not merely some online pundit’s or tenured academic’s opinion, but was actually a FACT, a provable FACT ... and such that, when a doctor told you that what you were thinking was symptomatic of Human Anti-Social Disease, this, too, was a FACT, a medical FACT, a scientifically provable FACT, and not just a tactic to marginalize you, to separate you, to undermine you, and convince you you were losing your mind ... and such that, when it wanted to kill you, this vast conspiracy that didn’t exist, in the end, when it decided it needed you dead, once it knew it couldn’t control you, could never quite get all the way inside you, and completely possess your eternal soul, it didn’t have to physically kill you ... all it had to do was CHANGE REALITY, as in invent some new disease or condition, which wouldn’t be a fake disease or condition, but an actual REAL disease or condition, and write it up in the DSM ... or ... or ... and this was the HORROR ... genetically design some brand new human, better-than-human form of human ... a perfect, blue-eyed pseudo-human ... bred to obey and serve ... IT (this horrible something, whatever IT) ... feeding IT ... multiplying IT ... substituting IT for everything ... until ... until ... eventually, one day, not one trace of anything other than IT remained and finally no one would even be able to ever imagine anything other than IT ... EVER!

  Kyle was part of IT. Yes ... he was. Kyle was the one who wanted this baby. Yes, it was all so clear to her now. Kyle and the doctors were racing time. It didn’t matter if she lost her mind. As long as they could keep her physically healthy until she delivered ... that’s all they wanted. They would strip the baby’s DNA of all her Anti-Social genes. They would rip them out like the spine of a fish and toss them into the yellow bio-bin ...

  DING!

  “YES, THAT’S R-I-I-I-GHT, VALENTINA!,” boomed Big Bob, the host of Quandary.

  DING!

  WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS LOOKING AT?!

  Sixteen incredibly happy people in seasonally appropriate business attire who just couldn’t wait to get up to their offices and start taking orders from their supervisors were standing in front of her, smiling at her, waiting for her to exit the elevator. One of them was waving his hand in front of the sensors to prevent the doors from closing. Each time he did that the doors went ... DING! Valentina wasn’t quite sure how long she’d been in there, hallucinating, and how long they’d been out there, smiling, but it felt like maybe it had been a while. She blinked, coughed, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the brightly lit lobby of 6262 Lomax Avenue, a vast, vaulted, corporate cathedral muraled with 3D PlasmaTron screens. It was like a simulated Sistine Chapel ... the ceiling crawling with video footage, or possibly the actual reanimated corpses, of CEOs, CFOs, COOs and DHRs, the Lomax Industries’ canon of saints, beneath which swarms of mid-level managers, key account managers, senior vice presidents, department heads, executive assistants, personal assistants, paralegal assistants, assistant archive retrieval technicians, copy technicians, and assistant receptionists were crisscrossing back and forth between the beams of camera crab eyes panning every which way on Styrofoam stalks, tracking Valentina’s every step, firing their laser Ultrasound signals into her womb to monitor ... IT! They were feeding the data to relay units hidden inside ... THIS woman’s purse ... THIS man’s briefcase ...

  “WHAT ARE YOU SMILING AT?!”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Where’s the EXIT? ”

  “The exit to where?”

  “Call Security.”

  “Exit! Exit! Do you speak English?!”

  Lomax Security was onto her now, all darting eyes and earpiece whispers, her vitals up on their in-lens screens ... hairless murdering nametagged mannequins ...

  RUN! NO! DO NOT RUN!

  Walk.

  Smile.

  Blink out the tears.

  Ten more steps to the escalator.

  Will your lips to stop their quivering.

  Hold the handrail.

  Down she went ...

  Down the tubeway, suctioned down the seamless, sterile, white intestine ... Valentina Funiculus Briggs, talking chrysalis, symbiont, host, the parasite within the parasite, feeding the seed of her own erasure ... way down there the tube was spitting picture perfect pellet people into a sea of writhing worms, while here, up here, its inner membrane, some reprogrammable digital skin, was running a stream of Content in which th
e CGI models, affluent people, with bleached white teeth and hairless nostrils, were gazing down into bowls of salad as if into the countenance of God ... and there, ascending, flowing past her ... whoosh ... whoosh ... other faces, smiling faces ... empty eyes ... single grains of necrotic ... NO! She gripped the handrails to either side of her, squatted slightly to keep from falling, blinded by the wave of light that hit her like a wall of wind and blew her brain out into pieces ... infinite, ever multiplying pieces, shattering, splitting, subdividing, spraying out through all eternity, drifting, floating ... throughout all time ... ever finer ... dust ... stardust ........................................ and ......... then ........ all at once ....... the pieces ..... particles ... specks ... of her ... as if inhaled all fell together ... interlocking. CLICK. SNAP. SEAMLESS. ALL OF IT ... EVERYTHING ... ONE. She stood there, in the center of the station, smiling commuters streaming past her as if she were part of the architecture. Someone had turned off the sound in her head. All her life she’d had it backwards. All her life she’d been fighting the disease. Or someone who she thought she was had. Someone she had never been. Someone she had tried to be. For Kyle. For her parents, her doctors ... everyone. But Valentina was not this someone. Valentina was some other someone ... the ugly one, the one she’d been fighting ... or the simulation of her had been fighting. But if the One was truly one, and truly infinite and multiplicitous, why was she fighting? What was she fighting? What was she fighting if not the One? All her life she had seen the disease as something alien, attacking her body. But what if it wasn’t ... what if she wasn’t ... something alien, sick, and wrong? What if, actually, nothing was wrong, and everything, as it was, was perfect? And she was perfect ... as she was. Whatever she was. And the Path(s) were circles. All her life she’d been running in circles, desperately trying to arrest a disease she did not have, and no one had, except insofar as they all believed it, as she’d believed it ... and now it was nothing ... and they had torn the skin off the sky for nothing, and had boiled the seas and the lakes for nothing, and had scorched nearly half the earth for nothing, and they had killed the bears and the birds and the cats and the fish and the snakes and the dogs and the frogs and every creature that had walked the Earth except for the pigeons and the roaches and rats ... and, OK, maybe a handful of dogs ... and had killed and tortured and raped each other and beaten and bombed and enslaved each other until there was no one left to enslave and rape and bomb and torture and kill, until all that was left was to kill themselves, to turn their hatred on themselves, which is what they were doing ... replacing themselves, remaking themselves in the image of IT ... human beings, Homo sapiens, who they hated even more than they hated the creatures who had walked the Earth, or the Earth itself, or the even the black abysmal heavens in which it hung a dying world, and the timeless winds of time itself ... existence itself ... this cosmic mistake ... this insult ... this sickness, this disease they would cure ... but Valentina would not let them. Standing there, right in the middle of the station, in the clearing the commuters were forming for her, staring up at where heaven would be if up and down weren’t totally relative, arms outstretched and palms turned up like those statuettes of the Virgin Mary, the muscles in her face and neck all tense, protruding through her skin, and twitching slightly, she saw her Path, and she was already on it. They, the minions, the armies of IT, were on the verge of ... well, she wasn’t quite sure, something unimaginably horrible, and almost definitely apocalyptic, and she, Valentina Constance Briggs, of 3258 Marigold Lane, Pewter Palisades Private Community, had been chosen by the One to stop them.

  Ordinance 119

  Four months later, Taylor Byrd, who when we left him was right in the middle of trying to make it across Clayton Avenue ahead of those teams of Security Specialists who were locking down the entire sector, was having his own little spiritual experience ... which all right, while it wasn’t as dramatic, or as revelatory, or possibly psychotic, as Valentina’s Lomax Escalator Vision, in its own way was probably just as spiritual ... or at least it had something to do with faith. Taylor didn’t want to call it faith. But it was. It was basically a question of faith. It wasn’t a question of faith in God (or The One Who Was Many), as it was for Valentina. No, for Taylor, it was more about faith in people, and the future of civilization generally, which as far as he could tell was on the verge of becoming the sterile, conformist nightmare it had always secretly dreamed of becoming, and was probably always destined to be.

  Now this is a rather important distinction, because we’re dealing with two different types of faith, each of which, in their respective ways, were deadly threats to peace and prosperity, but which were threatening in very different ways.

  One of these threatening types of faith, religious fanaticism, was as old as the hills. The historical sites were replete with accounts of wars, pogroms, holy crusades, inquisitions, and other such atrocities, carried out in the name of God, which was what people used to call the One, and what some in the older generations still did. It wasn’t only the Christians who had done this. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of other, less popular religions, believing themselves to be the Chosen People, had slaughtered millions on account of their “beliefs.” In reality, of course, these fanatical “beliefs” were nothing but the morbid fabulations of untreated late-stage Anti-Social minds, minds besieged by paranoia, hallucinations, delusions of reference, aggressive compulsions, and other pathologies ... like the kind Valentina was experiencing that Christmas. The difference was, in earlier ages, before the advent of modern pharmatherapy, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the public was late-stage Anti-Social, which meant that their pathological delusions were not perceived as aberrations, but, rather, being shared by virtually everyone, were considered normal, and just the way things were. The fact that nearly everyone shared these delusions, and regarded them, not as irrational beliefs, but as axiomatic and self-evident truths, didn’t make them any less pathological, at least not in the eyes of the Normals, for whom the idea of killing, or dying, for any such “beliefs” was inconceivable.

  Which isn’t to say the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity was religion-free. On the contrary, throughout the United Territories, Normals were permitted (and were actively encouraged) to belong to any of a number of religions, or to several religions, or to no religion, or to otherwise worship the One Who Was Many in whatever shape or form they chose. * Religion being a question of taste, the general feeling was, the more the merrier. The specific symbolic system one adopted was strictly a matter of personal preference. The One Who Was Many/the Many Who Were One (i.e., the ultimate referent of all such symbols) contained all faiths within Its infinite, multiplicitous singularity.

  This liberal attitude toward religion was not just convention; it was written into law. The Tenth Amendment to the Global Civil Code guaranteed each individual the personal freedom to believe in whatever, and to worship whatever, in whatever fashion, as long as their personal religious beliefs did not infringe on, or offend, or threaten, or insult, directly or indirectly, the rights or property of other individuals, or corporations, or their subsidiaries and assigns. Thus, although religions abounded, and their followers exhibited a fierce brand loyalty (much in the way an HC Systems All-in-One user would never, ever, consider using a MultiMax Viewer), peace, acceptance, and tolerance reigned .

  This hadn’t come about by accident ... this novel “brand-based” approach to religion. No, the primary thing that had made it work was the privatization and wholesale restructuring of the hundreds of formerly powerful churches and other global religious bodies, first and foremost the Christian churches, but also the Jewish and Islamic unions, Buddhist and Hindu organizations, and every other such institution to which believers had once felt devoted.

  This privatization and wholesale restructuring had occurred in the early 24th Century, so during the Age of Emergency Measures. Following the horrors of the Age of Anarchy, from which the world was then just emerging,
fanaticism, in whatever form, but above all else religious fanaticism, was, it was universally agreed, something that needed to be done away with, now and forever, by whatever means. Priests, ministers, rabbis, clerics, religious leaders of every stripe, those who had somehow survived the chaos, were rounded up and made redundant, and replaced with teams of “interfaith consultants,” who immediately set about the delicate business of repositioning their respective brands. This repositioning was, of course, a meticulously coordinated intra-corporate effort, the goal of which was to preserve and strengthen the individual faiths (or brands) while simultaneously rendering them harmless ... attractively distinct yet interchangeable multi-market lifestyle commodities.

  And this is where the One Who Was Many came in.

  The One Who Was Many was marketing genius. In one fell swoop, it put an end to thousands of years of religious conflict, united all faiths under one umbrella, and upended the whole personal worship equation. The One Who Was Many was not a deity, or not in the traditional deity sense. No, it was more like an aggregate meta-deity that contained all deities within itself, and so was all these deities, and was none of these deities, and was also the laws of space and time, and each physical unit of space and time, and each and every other physical and metaphysical aspect of being. In other words, the One Who Was Many was pretty much anything you wanted it to be, as long as you were able to keep in mind that it was also what other people wanted it to be, and that it was simultaneously all of these things, and none of these things, and was utterly unknowable.