Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

“A sauna? And you would know this how?”

  Coco Freudenheim emerged from the hallway, Dexter prancing along behind her. She waved Taylor out of her way with her little bird-bone hands and started past him. He grabbed her shoulders, turned her gently, and planted a noisy kiss on her forehead. She pushed him away and made the little puffing noise she frequently made. She was wearing the ratty old yellow bathrobe she wore whenever the pink one was drying.

  “One for dinner,” Meyer announced.

  Claudia bellowed something utterly incomprehensible from down the hall. She sounded like she was having a boil lanced .

  “Two for dinner,” Meyer noted.

  Dexter hopped up onto the table and yowled and hissed and slapped with his paw at the puddle of beer that Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard had recently spilled, and otherwise showed that puddle who was boss. Coco sat and adjusted her hair, which she’d teased up into a frightening bouffant. The saxophonist on the jazz recording (which by the way belonged to Coco, who was something of an aficionado) completely abandoned what was left of the melody and went off on some honking, squeaking, squealing type of atonal run. Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, outfitted now in the latest line of Plasto-copping evening wear, streaked through the kitchen and out the door as if the apartment was about to explode.

  Taylor staggered down the hall in a last-ditch effort to make it to his futon before he passed out on his feet in the hall and fell on his face and broke all his teeth. Along the way he threw a quick glance into into Dodo’s alcove, where Dodo was not, and had not been for quite some time, and Sylvie’s nook was also empty ... whereas Claudia was in her room with some enormous conceivably Cuban fellow, who Claudia was riding like a mechanical bull, apparently trying to fuck him to death.

  Taylor dropped down onto his futon and lay there staring up at the ceiling ... at those quasi-concentric rings of mold, which had always been there, and were who knew how old. He set his mental alarm clock to go off at 2200, or thereabouts. Just as he was drifting off, he got that feeling you get sometimes, lying in bed, where it feels like you’re falling, falling forever through endless space, which technically speaking, you always are. All his worries, cares, and woes, his suspicions, the questions he couldn’t answer, the filmy images his mind kept conjuring of neo-primitive desert outposts, the faceless faces of the nameless dead that floated just beyond the visual periphery of whatever half-conscious state he was in, entering his dreams, which he wouldn’t remember, were fading like the receding waves of an almost out-of-range radio signal ... Sarah, Cassandra, Dodo, the D.A.D.A., the Autonomous Zones that didn’t really exist, Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, the face in his mind he called his mother, or some other woman, making his bed, lighting a candle to set in the window of the house that he had never seen but had visited repeatedly, all his life, Coco laughing, Dexter yowling, music wafting up from the street, the indistinguishable murmur of voices talking, shouting, laughing, singing, blending into the bending notes that weren’t even musical notes anymore, running, the rising sun at his back, burning through the paper skin of the sky, across some featureless desert of salt that stretched off forever in all directions, the baby, the time it would be at the tone, the time it would never be at the tone, the time it would always be at the tone ...

  The One Who Was Many

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this ... the world. Not at this stage anyway, not at the dawn of the 27th Century, or whatever century it actually was. Where were all the flying cars, the household robots, the magic foglets, the TV dinners you could zap into being in a nanotech-oven right there in your kitchen? Where were the squadrons of nanobot-operated, self-replicating interstellar spaceships, the supercomputers the size of planets, the obsolescence of work as we knew it, and all the other wonders they’d promised?

  All right, sure, there had been advancements. The world was finally at peace and all that. And there were All-in-One Viewers and Info-Streams, and Immersions and other Entertainment Content, and life expectancy was dramatically up. And there were Cranio-Implants and virtual screens, and nearly everything was solar-powered, or nuclear-powered, or bio-fueled, and everyone was either vegetarian, or vegan, or they were intravenously fed. And thanks to the miracle of ThermaSoak skin there were outdoor domes and pedestrian tunnels, and the trains and planes and trams and taxis were mostly unmanned, or remotely-piloted, and even if there weren’t any android servants, there were all kinds of other nifty gadgets, like self-cleaning kitchens and programmable clothes, and anything plastic was totally recyclable, and up around the Arctic Circle the weather was still for the most part fine. And there were artificial limbs, and joints and organs, and menageries of cloned and artificial animals, and artificial wilderness areas, and satellite-assisted senior golfing, and there were IQ-boosters, and orgasm drops, and do-it-yourself cosmetic surgery, and there were apps where you could spend your weekend navigating lifelike fantasy realms that you completely controlled like some kind of god, the inhabitants of which were being threatened by fanatical Terrorists, or deadly pandemics, or whatever projection of groundless fear you felt you needed to face and conquer ... and there was market data around the clock.

  So it wasn’t like there hadn’t been progress. There had. There had been phenomenal progress. And not just on the material front, with respect to products and gadgets, and so on, and the basic amenities and creature comforts that everyone mostly took for granted, also on the knowledge front, with respect to philosophy, and stuff like that, like universal rights, and ethical behavior, and on pretty much every other front involving the betterment of human nature. Certainly, in evolutionary terms, looking back across the ages to the dawn of human civilization (which according to the Reconstruction Project had emerged in a then quite fertile region extending northwestward from the Persian Gulf that was now an enormous radioactive desert in Recovering Area 3), there had been nothing short of mind-blowing progress. In the space of a scant six thousand years, which in cosmic time wasn’t even a blip, we’d progressed from crafting primitive metal implements out of copper and tin to devising thermonuclear weapons that could scorch the entire surface of the planet. We’d progressed from scratching rows of wedge-shaped pictographs into slabs of clay to authoring, not just representations (i.e., stories, movies, maps, and so on, which were mere interpretations of the world), but fully-immersive simulations, copyrighted little worlds of our own. We had progressed from magical herbs and shamans to redesigning our genetic code, from peasant farming to agrifactories, from slavery to gainfully rewarding employment, from countless forms of discrimination to a totally free and equal society, from despotism to cooperative corporatism, or democracy, or whatever this was, exactly.

  Looking back even farther than that, back to our rather humble origins as inorganic matter, or dirt (which at some point, billions of years ago, had somehow gotten electrically-stimulated, or catalyzed, into proto-molecules, which proto-molecules had evolved into cells, which cells in turn had gradually evolved into these slimy, disgusting spongelike creatures, which evolved into worms, then fish, and so on, up the evolutionary scale, which was clearly like a ladder leading somewhere upward, or onward, or outward, or in any event away from the Earth, and the dirt and filth from whence we came, toward some terminal goal or stage, or ultimate, possibly godlike knowledge the universe was concealing from us, and maybe even taunting us with, the attainment of which knowledge, which was ours by right, would be worth all the horrors we had perpetrated, and the mindless devastation we had wreaked, in our quest to obtain and exploit this knowledge, which we deeply regretted, all the horrors, and so on, and swore on a stack of The Path(s) to Prosperity we would never, ever repeat, again) ... in light of how far we had come from then, who could claim we were not making progress?

  And yet, if you actually sat down and read (i.e., not just skimmed in a cursory way as you searched online for some celebrity’s birthday, but actually consciously read the words of) the voluminous online historical records at the Reconstruction Proj
ect’s website (not all of them, of course, but a representative portion) and thought about them, and drew little graphs, and timelines, and so on, as Valentina had done, and even after you took into account the setbacks during the Age of Anarchy, which were kind of like the Middle Ages that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, and during which dark and savage period there’d been no technological advances, nor accurate historical records kept, or they had all been destroyed or maliciously altered beyond all hope of reconstruction ... something cardinal did not make sense.

  According to these records, the Age of Anarchy officially began in 2101 (H.C.S.T., it went without saying) and ended at the dawn of the 24th Century. So it had lasted a mere two hundred years. Prior to which technological progress had been increasing exponentially. It had been doing this since the Age of Enlightenment. By the end of the Second Thirty Years War, when the United Territories of the Earth were established, in 2076 H.C.S.T., * people were already scanning streams of more or less individualized Content (not on All-in-One Viewers, of course, but on a range of earlier, more primitive devices that were basically the same as All-in-Ones). Human Anti-Social Disease had not yet been officially discovered, so of course there were no Quarantine Zones, but people lived in Residential Communities, which in those days were much more heavily fortified, and were also known as “gated” communities. Also, it appeared, in these historical records, that people, by the end of the 21st Century, were taking a variety of differently labeled but pharmaceutically virtually identical medications to control their aggression, and depression (which was epidemic at the time), and there were high-, if not quite Whisper-speed trains, and solar power, and nuclear power, and GM food, and UAVs, and biometrics, and corporate Security, and bioengineering, and the Internet, of course, and there were all sorts of staggering medical advances, and it seemed, at least to Valentina, that in purely technological terms, nothing ... or, all right, very little, had changed in any meaningful way.

  People, sadly, were still just people.

  Mammals.

  Animals.

  Even the Clears.

  As far as she understood the science (or what parts of it weren’t proprietary secrets), even with all their genetic enhancements, the Clears, biologically, were still just people ... OK, creepy, synthetically enlightened people, attractive in a sterile, airbrushed way, with perfect teeth and hair and skin, who went around beaming inner peace and boundless love and well-being at you, but nonetheless people, in human bodies, physical bodies ... mortal bodies. Here it was, whenever it was, late in the game in any event, and we were all still chained to these physical bodies (like the body growing inside her body). Weren’t we supposed to have arrived at some sort of technological singularity, or have evolved into some numinous form of super-intelligent spirit-entities? Wasn’t that supposed to have happened by now? Where was that gentle master race of cybernetic sentient beings who were going to descend like a rain of angels and bear us up out of the physical world and all its senseless pain and suffering and up the stairway to haptic heaven?

  Valentina did not know. However, she knew where they definitely weren’t. They weren’t out there by the pool. Valentina had been out there for hours ... and she hadn’t encountered any haptic beings.

  The swimming pool of the Skyline Motor Lodge, which was poured concrete and kidney-shaped, and the deep-end of which was full of garbage, hadn’t been used for at least several decades, except as a kidney-shaped waste receptacle. The deck, or poolside patio area, which was also vaguely kidney-shaped, was cracked and buckled and chunks were missing and saw grass and other species of weeds were growing up through it in various places. Valentina was stretched out on a rusty aluminum reclining lounger, the sagging plastic strapping of which was starting to kill her lower back, gazing up into a constellation of spastically twinkling satellite beacons, or she was whenever the monstrous sharklike soot-streaked metal underbellies of assorted private and commercial aircraft weren’t screaming across the sky above her scaring the bejesus out of the colony of rats that apparenty lived in the courtyard ... so you’d think they would have been used to the planes flying over all the time like that, but they weren’t. The planes flew over every two or three minutes, so much less frequently than during the day, and every time one did the rats would scramble up out of the pool en masse and scurry off into the dark somewhere in a state of abject rodential panic. Once the noise of the turbines had waned, they would all creep back and crawl down into the pool and into the mound of garbage and get right back to nocturnally feeding on the greasy bits of disgusting, gooey, processed non-cheese cheese-like substance and the streaks of waxy, tasteless chocolate that were smeared all over the shiny wrappers that apparently the people who lived down there, or people who visited the people who lived there, couldn’t be bothered to recycle properly and just threw down into this horrible pool as if they didn’t all have to live in such close proximity to all these rats.

  Valentina wasn’t scared of the rats. She sliced up cancerous organs for a living. And naturally, being a histopathologist, she’d euthanized her share of rats. ** They scrambled across the courtyard in waves, flowing like currents of fur around her, as she lay there on her caved-in lounger, gazing up between the satellites (the majority of which were geostationary, and so were always there, whatever the hour) and out into the charcoal gray expanse of the seemingly starless sky ... somewhere (technically speaking everywhere) within the ever-expanding expanse of that very same seemingly starless sky, approximately fourteen billion years ago, give or take a billion years, everything had exploded out of nothing, all at once, for no discernible reason. Precisely what this nothing had been doing prior to its propitious explosion remained, even now, at the time of our story, an intransigent and thus somewhat embarrassing mystery. In addition to all the above-mentioned things that were supposed to have happened but hadn’t happened, the theoretical physics community, in spite of all the groundbreaking work it was doing with its very (and extremely) large particle colliders, had still not been able to solve this quandary. They had proposed a number of intriguing theories, which served, among the physicists at least, as grounds for constant and lively debate (and which were promulgated to the general public in simplified versions, with lots of special effects), but as far as any actual knowledge went, none of them had the slightest idea ... and neither, of course, did Valentina.

  Nights, as a child, when the heat was bearable and there weren’t too many hungry mosquitoes, often when Catherine was off her meds and she and Walter were having a “discussion,” Valentina had gone outside and stretched out on the reclining lounger that no one ever used on account of the heat and so sat out there on the concrete dock, or massive untreated slab of concrete, beneath the glassed-in concrete patio, overlooking the man-made pond (which was almost exactly the same as the pond behind her house on Marigold Lane), and she peered up into the sky for hours and fervently prayed to the One Who Was Many. She prayed for patience, and forgiveness, and guidance, and blind acceptance of the Path she was on, which was what little girls were supposed to pray for ... but sometimes, also, she prayed for knowledge. Not for knowledge you could learn at school, or find online in two or three seconds, and then more or less immediately forget, deeper knowledge, secret knowledge, like of what that theoretical nothing was doing before the beginning of time. She didn’t know why she wanted this knowledge, or what this knowledge was, back then, but she knew she wanted, or needed, or craved it, in some unhealthy, selfish way. She told herself she shouldn’t want it. She tried to will herself not to want it. It didn’t work. She wanted it anyway. She lay on the lounger on the dock in the dark and desperately prayed to the One to be given it, the blue-white bits of broken images emanating from the streams of Content running on the screens of the neighbors’ Viewers dancing like flames in the frames of the windows of the nearly identical houses surrounding the artificial pond in which nothing lived. Whatever it was, this knowledge she had craved, or needed, as a child, and had never received, an
d had later, at some point, given up hope of ever receiving, and had given up praying for, and had totally forgotten she had ever needed (at some point grown-ups stopped asking such questions, and focused on more important things) ... whatever it was, she needed it now.

  The probably mostly adrenaline-influenced sudden clarity and utter certitude with which she had been completely possessed at the time of her Lomax Escalator Vision was gone. She was currently out of clarity. She was running dangerously low on certitude. What completely possessed her now was fear.

  She could not do this. She simply could not. She had told them she could, but now she couldn’t. She could not terminate ... abort ... kill ... Kill? How she could possibly kill? She’d euthanized rats, but that was different. This was an actual human being. A child. A baby. This was her daughter ... Zoey, or whatever they’d decided to call her. She had to do it. Did she have to do it? No. She did not have to do it. If she wanted out, she had to do it.

  Did she still want out?

  Yes. She did.

  But why did they need to make her do it? And why in this horrible, unclean place? Couldn’t they come here, and take her away, far away, to their Terrorist camp, or cave, in some remote Recovering Area, and anesthetize her, and do it there? No. Of course not. She had to do it. She knew why they needed to make her do it. They were testing her. This was all a test. Because how could they trust her if she couldn’t do it ... if she couldn’t commit an act of violence, intentionally hurt, or horribly maim, or murder, another human being, or any other type of sentient being (which healthy Normals could never do)? How could she possibly be entrusted to perpetrate (or otherwise materially participate in) a horrific series of sickeningly violent and senseless and devastating Terrorist attacks on unsuspecting innocent consumers if she couldn’t even summon the inner fortitude (and the cold-hearted totally fanatical hatred of everything Normal society stood for) required to abort the tiny defenseless ten-week-old fetus of the Clear she was carrying?