So that was option number one.
Option number two was an abortion. It didn’t get more Anti-Social than that. The Normals, obviously, had no qualms with contraception, IVF, or genetically modifying human beings. Abortion was an entirely different matter. Abortion was murder, plain and simple, the taking of a healthy human life. Like any other type of premeditated homicide, it earned you a Class 4 designation, which got you just as disappeared as if you walked into a ConCept clinic. Cassandra was willing to take that chance, or would have been, had there still been anyone able to perform an abortion safely, which, of course, by the time of our story there wasn’t. IntraZone Waste & Security Services had disappeared anyone even halfway qualified. The only abortions still on the market were performed in the basements of derelict buildings with a shot of Plasto and a hot piece of wire, by some ninety-year-old junkie sadist.
So, OK, option number three.
Option number three was Taylor’s idea. It had come to him, more or less fully-formed, while he was lying in bed with Cassandra that morning. It was either a stroke of utter genius or the worst idea he had ever had. Option number three was, basically, to take Cassandra down to the basement, soundproof the basement with some egg crates or something, set her up with a bed, some cards, an offline Viewer, a box of Content, some kind of nasty makeshift toilet which Taylor would have to empty out, hide her down there for the next seven months, make up some story her roommates would buy explaining her sudden disappearance, let her have the baby down there, and then, assuming all that worked, get the baby out of the sector and into the hands of the A.S.U., which rumor had it was building some kind of underground army that would someday launch ... well, no one really knew what, exactly, some kind of global revolution or something. The A.S.U. would smuggle the baby out to the so-called “Autonomous Zones,” which no one really believed existed, but which according to legend were isolated pockets of virtually uninhabitable wilderness scattered throughout the Recovering Areas, where tribes of mutants and free A.S.P.s lived some neoprimitive existence, drinking rain and cactus water and hunting skinks by the light of the moon.
Taylor and Cassandra had been over these options. Option number one was out. Cassandra was not going to walk into some ConCept clinic and disappear. Option number two was also out. Cassandra had heard too many stories of women who had ended up bleeding to death, and had been left to rot in some abandoned warehouse, or their bodies dumped in the Dell Street Canal.
So that left option number three. Crazy as it was, Cassandra reasoned, if she could just make it until the baby was born, and not get snitched on by one of her roommates, and somehow account for her absence at work, and if Taylor could contact the A.S.U., and assuming they would take the baby ... after that, it would all be over, and she could go back to work like normal, and the baby could go live with the A.S.U., and grow up to be a Terrorist or something, and they’d all live happily ever after. She wasn’t going down to the basement, however, or shitting in any kind of makeshift anything. She would hole up in her bedroom, she said. The bathroom was right across the hall. And if one of her roommates did get wise, Taylor would have to deal with that.
Taylor didn’t have any better ideas, so option number three it was. OK, there were no Autonomous Zones, not really, but the A.S.U. existed, and they probably had a network of safehouses, or tunnels ... or somewhere they could hide the baby. Certainly they would want to do that. They probably did it all the time. There were probably hundreds of unauthorized babies, and maybe entire unauthorized families, living in an underground network of tunnels, or hiding in a series of revolving safehouses ... or something like that. Sure there were. Which meant that all he needed to do, aside from all the logistical details, was get in touch with the A.S.U., which was easy ... however, there was one little catch.
The A.S.U. was notoriously paranoid. At least the more militant members were. It wasn’t like he could just walk up to one of them and start blabbering about Cassandra and the baby. They’d make him for a Cooperator, or a moron, one, and probably kill him. No, if this plan was going to work, Taylor would have to earn their trust. And there wasn’t any way to do that on his own, or not in the time he had available. He needed someone they knew to vouch for him. He needed someone to do that promptly.
He sat there, in that booth at Gillie’s, and drank, and gave it considerable thought, and somewhere in the dead of night, or the dead of morning, or whenever it was, at approximately 0330, let’s say, he determined, against his better judgment, and all his instincts, and his intuition, that that someone was probably Meyer Jimenez.
2.
Cramer
Now, before we get started with Part Two of our story, in the interest of fairness and objectivity, let’s look at things from a different perspective, one that isn’t so cynical and gloomy, or depressing, or whatever ours has been so far. It’s good to stop and do that sometimes, because it’s easy, when you’re all immersed in a story, to forget that there’s this larger world outside the world of the characters in the story, who are often in the midst of some dramatic crisis, and who you really can’t help but identify with. For example, in our case, you might assume that everyone living in the 27th Century (or whatever century it really was) was miserable, and desperate, and totally confused. But that was not entirely true. No, despite whatever personal problems an unfortunate minority of troubled individuals like Taylor and Valentina were having, for the vast majority of individuals, life in general was pretty darn good in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity.
OK, it wasn’t any kind of utopia or anything, because, granted, there were still the Zones and all that, and Anti-Social Disease was still there, lurking in the folds of people’s brains in its cunning and diabolical fashion, and there was always the chance of a weather event, or a sudden and devastating Terrorist attack, or cancer, or early onset dementia, and a host of other disturbing aspects ... but these were not things the majority of Normals walked around consciously thinking about, or made repeated inadvertent reference to, or lay awake in their beds at night with the lights off more or less totally obsessed with.
Life, for the most part, was pretty fulfilling. People, as a rule, were happy. People had choices. A lot of choices. People had nearly unlimited choices. This is what freedom meant, after all ... the freedom to make individual choices. Which is mostly what the Normals did all day. They went around making a lot of choices. They did this whether they wanted to or not. They didn’t have much choice in the matter. The choices were there. They had to be made. Or not be made. Which was still a choice.
And it wasn’t just all those streams of Content among which the Normals had to choose. They made all kinds of other choices, personal choices, professional choices, and ... well, a lot of other choices, mostly involving products and services. They made these choices day after day from the moment they woke until they passed out at night. Then they got up the next day and did it again.
Life was an endless series of choices.
Given all these choices they had, and the overall spirit of peace and prosperity, and entrepreneurial ingenuity, and fervor, omnipresent security, that prevailed throughout the entire U.T., how could the Normals not have been happy? They couldn’t have not been. They were very happy. The Normals were very, very happy. And, OK, it wasn’t only the choices, and the peace, and the other ethereal stuff. There were also lots of products and services ... an unbelievable amount of products and services. There were so many different products and services you’d have thought they couldn’t come up with any more. And yet they did. There were always more. And when there weren’t, there was always a way to privatize something that hadn’t yet been privatized, and offer and relentlessly market that.
Now there were numerous bold and innovative and otherwise shining examples of this (i.e., the Globalized Proprietary Sewage System, Privatized Community Customs Services, Conversational Advertising, et cetera, the list went on and on, and on), but the boldest and shiniest example of them
all, and the revenue-generating mother of them all, was the one that had gotten the whole thing restarted ... the Global Proprietary Calendar System.
The Global Proprietary Calendar System, commonly known as the G.P.C.S., and adopted throughout the United Territories in 2310, H.C.S.T., * despite what you’d probably naturally assume, was not a retail calendar product (which is to say an actual calendar), or any type of calendar-related product, but an Interterritorial trade agreement completely deregulating and privatizing same. Despite the dire and hysterical warnings of 24th Century apocalypticians, professional naysayers, and other critics, the G.P.C.S. had been functioning smoothly for going on over three hundred years. Now this was totally revolutionary, because after nearly five millennia of government regulation of time, consumers were finally free to choose among a wide and ever-expanding array of proprietary annotated calendar systems, most of which were moderately priced or offered at competitive corporate discounts. By this time (the time of our story, of course, so 2610, H.C.S.T.), there were four predominant (i.e., widely used) calendars, and in excess of eighty “alternative” calendars, each of which generated spin-off products and assorted licensing and franchising streams. There were also a variety of open-source calendars, and amateur calendars, and vanity calendars, which consumers were equally free to choose among, and to use for business and personal purposes, and to personalize however they liked to express their individual tastes. The G.P.C.S. was extremely popular. The Normals just loved their proprietary calendars. The only minor problem was, no one knew when it was anymore.
This, however, if you asked Greg Cramer, was really nothing more than a technical glitch, and a temporary technical glitch at that.Gregory Cramer was Senior Vice President of Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage at the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s District 12 Northeast Regional Headquarters. He was forty-one years old, fit as a fiddle, and handsome in a completely unmemorable way. At approximately 0420 o’clock on a sleepy afternoon in officially March, he was staring into the physical screen of his HC Systems desktop Viewer, in the upper right-hand corner of which his biometric face was staring back at him. The face was smiling a becoming smile. There was nothing remotely reptilian about it. Its features were angular. Its forehead prominent. Its hairline was prematurely receding. It was receding right off the back of his head.
Cramer had an office on the 26th Floor with a view of some other 26th Floor office. There was nothing terribly wrong with his office, except that it was on the 26th Floor. Which meant that it was not on the 70th Floor, or the 71st or 72nd Floors, in Interterritorial Security Management, which was run by Robert “Big Bob” Schirkenbeck. Cramer, of course, did not resent this (Zanoflaxithorinal relieved resentment) but he thought about it two or three times an hour as he read and responded to the thousands of queries that came up on his screen all day, most of which, in one way or another, concerned the question of when it was. Cramer did not resent these queries, and was perfectly content to sit there and answer them (it being his job to do that and all), but somewhere, way in the back of his mind, he wondered idly whether, just possibly, some of them might not be so vital.
This one, for example, from Jim Matsumura, of TeleDynamic Systems, Inc., asking, basically, when it was. Or this one, from someone named Aksel Torres, who appeared to be some kind of salesman of something (probiotic shampoo, it looked like), beating around the bush a lot, but essentially wondering if anyone at Hadley happened to know when it really was.
Which, all right, here was a prime example of the kind of thing that tempted Cramer to walk down the Path of Toxic Resentment, because obviously no one at Hadley did (i.e., happen to know when it really was), or why would Cramer be sitting in his office fielding queries regarding same, as opposed to sitting in some other office, on the 70th to 72nd Floors, let’s say, doing something that might conceivably get him noticed by Big Bob Schirkenbeck?
What Cramer didn’t actually consider doing (the hazy concept just drifted through his mind) was writing a boilerplate response-to-query message to send back to Jim and Aksel, and whoever, regretting the fact that neither he, nor anyone at Hadley, nor anyone else, was privy to when it really was (nor, as everyone plainly knew, would anyone be for quite some time), and wondering whether, on the next occasion they felt compelled to query him, again, regarding when it really was, they might refer back to this boilerplate message, or stop and think for a half a second (i.e., before they sent their latest query) about what they were about to do, and how utterly pointless and inane it was.
This hypothetical boilerplate message, which Cramer would never even consciously contemplate much less actually set about writing, would be written in terse, yet extremely professional, demonstrably compassionate, irony-free language, in compliance with both the letter and spirit of Hadley Communications Policy. But terse. The message would definitely be terse. Terse, in this case, would be appropriate. Because, seriously, Cramer thought to himself (and he made a mental note to up his dosage), what did it matter when it really was? Everyone knew when it was officially. The date was right there on the screen of your Viewer. Depending on which calendar you followed, it was 04 March, 2610, or 16 Sha´ban, 2049, or 17 Adar, 6370, or day Whatever in the Year of the Lemur, and all the other dates it officially was.
In Cramer’s personal professional opinion, which he shared in his weekly online check-ins with Charmane T.R. Haverson-Cho, the fairly-abundant Department Head of Info-Management, Maintenance & Storage who was never going to help him transfer anywhere and had zero suction with Big Bob Schirkenbeck, the G.P.C.S. was running smoothly. The one little minor ongoing glitch (i.e., the one that people like Jim Matsumura and Aksel Torres were all worked up about), was that even there, in the Western Territories, where most people tended to use the same calendar, although you were free to choose, of course, the dates had been changed so many times that you couldn’t work back from whenever it was to whenever it had been before they’d changed them, and even if you did, or thought you had, by the time you did, they’d have changed them again, which meant you would have to start all over, which would mean going back to whenever it was (i.e., the post-adjusted current date) and reentering the dates of whatever events you’d chosen to use as your set of variables, and then trying to rerun your algorithm, only to discover that one or more of the dates of your variables had also been adjusted, so you’d have to go back and adjust for that, and then start the entire process all over.
Naturally, one was free to do this. The system wouldn’t prevent you from trying. All that would happen was, after a while, this no-reply message would come up on your screen reminding you that dates and events were tentative, due to the Reconstruction Project, and so really what you were sitting there doing was probably just a waste of time. The text of these messages varied slightly, but the essential content was always the same. One was advised to do one’s best, and to plan for further, albeit diminishing, chrono- and philological adjustments, on a more or less randomly-occurring basis, out into the foreseeable future, and to otherwise, basically, have a nice day.
How had things gotten into such a state? No one really knew for certain, but the official story went something like this ...
Back in the early 24th Century, at the dawn of the Age of Emergency Measures, Future/Past-Continuous, Inc. (a not-for-profit corporation founded but neither owned nor controlled by The Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, and run by a consortium of global corporations representing most of the United Territories) had been charged with the almost impossible task of reconstructing recorded history, the majority of which had been obliterated, or overwritten with malicious intent, during what was known as The Age of Anarchy, which most intelligent people agreed had, at some point, actually occurred. ** Intelligent people agreed on this mostly because the official story (the details of which were subject to change as Future/Past-Continuous, Inc. unearthed new informational artifacts) consistently featured The Age of Anarchy, which preceded the Age of Emergency Measures, whic
h everyone knew for a fact had occurred. The Age of Emergency Measures had ended in 2550, H.C.S.T., so anyone over the age of sixty had been alive then, and remembered it clearly, or at least well enough to be sure it had happened. Also, although the United Territories were enjoying a Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, a number of these Emergency Measures remained in effect in some remote locales.
According to the Reconstruction Project’s current tentative historical timeline, the Age of Anarchy had officially begun sometime circa 2100, give or take a couple of decades, and had ended circa 2300 (these dates being H.C.S.T., of course). So it had lasted, at minimum, two hundred years, and possibly longer, no one was sure. At one point, back in the 2580s, the inception date had been tentatively listed as sometime circa 1940, but now, the general feeling was, that that couldn’t be right, so it had been amended.
The point being, at least in the minds of the Normals, this Age of Anarchy (whatever the dates were) was like a temporal or historical bridge, stretched across a river of time, linking the present ( i.e., the world they knew) to a distant pathological past, the facts of which were at best unproven and at worst were purely hypothetical. Unfortunately (and this was the root of the problem), at some point during the Age of Anarchy (in the mid-to-late 22nd Century, it was thought), this temporal bridge to the distant past had been tactically nuked beyond all recognition. In other words, nobody actually knew what had happened during this Age of Anarchy, or when, or where, or why it had happened, or not in any definitive way.
Thus, for over two hundred years, or as long as anyone alive could remember, the official dates of The Age of Anarchy (as well as the dates of the events it comprised, along with the facts of those events themselves) had been continually adjusted, revised, and rewritten, as Future/Past-Continuous, Inc. discovered and correlated new information, which adjustments, in turn, it went without saying, had triggered the adjustment of any and all dates prior or subsequent to the dates in question (and the events to which said dates referred), which dates (and often the events themselves), prior to the latest adjustment, had been based on the original dates in question (of events which had or had not occurred).
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