A name ... Max.
Off in the distance, under the humming, or the buzzing, or ringing, sirens were wailing. She was in some sort of covered alley. The air was misted with thin white smoke. She turned and looked out the mouth of the alley and saw the crater the size of a jacuzzi that had opened up in the charred black asphalt, and the carpet of shards of brick and steel and glass the glare of the sun was catching that extended outward from its ragged edges. The stack of boxes beside her was scorched, and shredded, and peppered with smoldering bits of metal and melted glass and asphalt, and the storefront at the mouth of the alley was burning, and yes, those were sirens wailing, and the baby was bawling, and her ears were still ringing ... and something told her she had better get up.
She got up. She didn’t appear to be injured. Except for her eardrums, which were probably punctured. She picked up the bag of bawling baby and bounced it up and down in her arms ... because that was what you did with babies, with uncorrected human babies, who were bawling inconsolably at you. She stood there, doing that, for about ten seconds, trying to figure out what to do, and what in the name of the One was happening, and other such things ... she was quite confused.
The sirens were getting louder now ... so, OK, that was Security Services, who were probably coming to retrieve this baby, and put out the fire, and survey their work. She weighed the options open to her. She could stand there bouncing the bawling baby up and down until they got there, and then give them the baby, and explain what had happened, and otherwise cooperate fully ... or she could set the baby down and run. Those were pretty much her options.
She turned and looked down into the alley. The smoke was too thick to see what was down there ... a cross street? Or was it just a dead end? It didn’t matter, because what was she thinking? She was in the Zone. There was nowhere to run. Or maybe she didn’t need to run. If she set the baby down on the ground, and calmly walked away from the scene, maybe they would just ignore her ... they didn’t know she had the baby. The alley was covered. They couldn’t see in. She could swear she had never even seen the baby, or the Anti-Social who had given her the baby. She didn’t have anything to do with all this ... whatever it was that was actually happening. Whatever it was, it was definitely trouble. This was an uncorrected baby, which everyone knew wasn’t allowed in the Zones. And that hole in the street had either been made by a bomb the Anti-Social had detonated or by some kind of Anti-Terrorist missile. So, yes, this was definitely her safest option, to put down the baby, who was bawling steadily, and groping for her with his little pink fingers (he had wormed his way out of the towel by now), and whose little red face was scrunched up into a Kabuki mask of extreme displeasure, and just walk away as if she didn’t know anything ... even in her shell-shocked, brain-zapped state, she knew this was the thing to do.
At the same time, something, some inner voice (perhaps the voice of her intuition, or that of her maternal instincts), told her those men, those Security Specialists, speeding up the avenue towards her, sirens blaring, in their puncture-proof armor, coming to apprehend this baby, and take him away to the One knew where, and do the One only knew what with him, if possible, should not be allowed to do that ... and instead, ideally, should go fuck themselves.
She turned and peered back into the alley. The smoke was clearing. There was something down there ... a vehicle. Probably a Security vehicle. No. It was just some HVAC van. The side panel door of the van slid open. No one emerged. There was no one in there. No ... there had to be someone in there. She stood there staring down at the van, bouncing the baby up and down in her arms. He seemed to be running out of energy now. She raised him up and kissed his forehead. Her ears were still ringing. She could hear the sirens. She looked down at the face of the baby. The face looked back at her, scared and angry. This was a very angry baby. A terrified baby. Whose ears were ringing. She kissed the baby. She lied to the baby. She told the baby it would be OK. She knew that it would not be OK. She turned and looked out the entrance of the alley. No one was there. Just the sirens. She turned back and looked down the alley again. Someone was ... wait ... yes, a woman. A woman was crouched in the back of the van. She was framed in the open side panel door, looking back at her. She waved, or beckoned, or made some sort of ambiguous gesture ...
Valentina Constance Briggs, 1208.2568.709.Z23, designated Class 3 Anti-Social Person, did not hesitate ... not one second. She clutched the baby to her breast and ran. She ran into the dissolving smoke, spiraling wisps of which swirled around her. She could feel the crunch of nuggets of glass and concrete and metal through the soles of her sneakers. The sirens were drawing closer behind her, but she couldn’t judge the distance as her ears were still ringing ... thoughts were racing through her mind. The thoughts in her mind were telling her a story ... a story about the woman in the van. In the story, the woman was there to help her. To help the baby. To protect the baby. To take the baby somewhere safe, some basement or secret safehouse somewhere, or maybe even somewhere outside the Zone, where everything wasn’t being blown to pieces, and the sky wasn’t swarming with invisible drones, and ash wasn’t snowing down on everything ... and there were people out there who would help the baby, who would feed and teach and love the baby, who would love the baby as it was, and who wouldn’t want to correct the baby, or medicate the baby with Zanoflaxithorinol, or some other MAO-A antagonist, or otherwise remake the baby into one more identical version of themselves (yes, it was coming back to her now, or some of it was in any event) ... or whatever.
It was just a story. She knew that it was just a story. But it was better than the other story. She ran the last few steps to the van ...
5.
Epilogue
In the 27th Century, H.C.S.T., pretty much everything that happened anywhere was documented for posterity somewhere ... somewhere meaning online, of course. The events of our story were no exception. Transparency being a guiding principle of the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, if you wanted, for whatever personal reasons, which you didn’t have to justify to anyone, to find out the truth or the facts of anything, like whatever was really going on in our story, you could search online on your All-in-One Viewer, and read all about it from a variety of sources, whose authors all offered their own opinions and interpretations of what it meant, none of which were censored in any way. In practice, however, when it came to accounts of historical events, or just things that had happened, the overwhelming majority of Normals turned to the Reconstruction Project, the voluminous and infinitely distensible network of interconnected online archives they unconsciously regarded as the official records, mostly because, when you searched for ... well, anything, it was always the first result that came up.
Some of what follows appears in these records. The rest is hearsay, folklore, and legend (i.e., stuff that people believe with no evidence), which doesn’t mean it isn’t true, but doesn’t mean it is true either. So let’s go ahead and start with the official stuff ...
We might as well start with Valentina, who along with Taylor and a lot of other people, disappeared in the chaos that morning, 17 April, 2610, or 02 Iyyar, 6370, or 01 Shawwal, 2049, or any of the other dates it was. According to the official transport logs, which remain accessible in the online archives of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin (which the Reconstruction Project links to), the patient, BRIGGS, Valentina Constance, 1208.2568.709. Z23, was successfully and uneventfully transported to Gate 15, Zone 23, N.E. Region 709 at approximately 0720 that morning, processed, assigned communal housing, issued the standard hygiene kit, and was never seen or heard from again. Although presumed to have been an “enemy combatant” and thus officially “deceased without remains,” no one really knows what happened to her.
There exist no records of a child named Max, or any other issue of BYRD, Taylor, 0820.2565.709.Z23, or, for that matter, of Cassandra Passwaters, who the following morning emerged from her bedroom, apologized to her annoying roommates for the drama her infectious Hepatiti
s had caused, and then went back to work as if nothing had happened, and so basically got away with everything ... although sometimes, early mornings, mostly, as the blistering sun broke over the rooftops, you could hear her in there, in her bedroom, crying.
Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard asked around in the Zone for a while, but they never found out what had happened to Taylor. They went on shooting up Plastomorphinol and living in squalor at 16 Mulberry with Coco Freudenheim, Coco’s cat, Dexter (who lived to the age of twenty-two), Meyer Jimenez, Sylvie, Claudia, and assorted other Class 3 Anti-Social Persons who they dragged home with them throughout the years to crash there just a couple of nights.
The Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action was somewhat less historic than planned. IntraZone Waste & Security Services, with generous support from several battalions of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s Regional and Domestic Security Divisions, neutralized most of Sector C, along with anyone who looked like anyone who had anything to do with the civil disorder (officially the “Domestic Terror Activity”), or who had ever even heard of the A.S.U., or who was still on the street after 0700. It wasn’t quite the all-out purge that Meyer Jimenez had prematurely prophesied (something in the neighborhood of thirty percent of the extant A.S.P. 3s survived), but the Inner Zone and the Southeast Quadrant, and the eastern half of the Southwest Quadrant, and a number of selected Terrorist “hot-spots” scattered here and there throughout the Zone, were reduced to enormous toxic plains of melted body parts and smoldering rubble. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered. It smelled like garlic in the Zone for weeks .
Adam was spotted in the thick of the fighting (or at least on the edge of the thick of the fighting) along with most of the Fifthian Cluster (Dorian somehow survived the carnage and made it back to tell the story) but no one actually saw Adam killed ... which didn’t mean he was an agent, but didn’t mean he wasn’t one either. He wasn’t mentioned in the official records, and no one ever saw him again.
Same kind of deal when it came to Sarah, except that she vanished before it all started. Some people say Security got her. Other people say she was Security ... people in the A.S.U., that is. Meyer Jimenez doesn’t say anything. If you ask him about the A.S.U., or the D.A.D.A., or, God help you, the N.I.N., he just kind of nods and smiles knowingly, which doesn’t mean anything, it being Meyer, and then launches into one of his theories.
Most of the regulars at Gillie’s made it, as they were already there when all hell broke loose. By the time the Specialists sweeping for 3s stormed in with their weapons drawn and shouting at each other like they do in the movies, they were hiding in the tunnel that T.C. Johns and Young Man Henry had been digging for years, the entrance to which was through this secret trap in the floor behind the toilet, which when the Specialists got there was overflowing, thanks to the efforts of Jim MacReady, who needless to say was the last in line to crawl down through the tunnel entrance ... and into the arms of Coreen Sweeney.
Young Man Henry finally died, a few years later, of old age, probably. He died on a pallet in the back room of Gillie’s. T.C. Johns was there beside him, wiping the sweat off Henry’s forehead with a normally filthy piece of old bar-rag he’d especially gone and washed for that purpose. He sat there next to Henry all night, as it took him a while to finish dying, retelling old stories from when they were young, which Young Man Henry already knew, having been there in person, but he might have forgotten. People’s memories get worse with age.
Billy Jensen, after going out in the semi-final round of KILL CHAIN! OUTBREAK!, resumed his routine of working diligently, sleeping soundly, eating properly, and playing KILL CHAIN! on a nightly basis. He married a Clear named Tabatha something, who raised their brood of Clarion children while Billy continued to work the night-shift, doing his best to meaningfully contribute to the profitability of Kierkegaard/Bose and the abundance level of its principals and shareholders. He enjoyed a long and contented life, throughout which he invariably slept like a baby, and was never really ecstatically happy or deeply depressed, as he had no soul.
Gregory Cramer rose through the ranks of the Interterritorial Security Division of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s District 12 Northeast Regional Headquarters, run by Robert “Big Bob” Schirkenbeck, who Cramer artfully weaseled his way into a mentor-type relationship with, and then a few years later successfully undermined, prompting one of the Hadley Board to reach out through sub rosa channels and task him to keep him (i.e., this other Director) apprised of Schirkenbeck’s every misstep, then secretly met with yet another Director who had it in for the other Director (i.e., the one who had it in for Schirkenbeck), and told him what was going on ... and otherwise meticulously boot-licked and butt-sucked and back-stabbed his way up the corporate ladder.
Following an extended and disastrously expensive stay at some celebrity Wellness compound on Baffin Bay that you could never get into, but that Cramer had allegedly wangled for him, Kyle was fired from BVCC for using the College’s database crawler to search online for, and print out a list (i.e., an actual, physical paper list) of, every known instance of a Variant-Positive running amok, like Valentina, then graphing the sharply increasing frequency of such instances during the preceding decades, and then posting all this stuff online, along with his theory of the causes thereof, and repeatedly fleeping and tweaking about it, and otherwise behaving in an inappropriate and unprofessional and unstable manner. After which, he was unemployable, at least in the academic community. Once his two weeks of unemployment ran out, he secured a job as a Product Picker in Northeast Region 713, short sold the condo on Marigold Lane, and disappeared from Pewter Palisades ... as had the Fosters, mysteriously, before him.
Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III, following a period of global mourning, and the usual series of star-studded tributes reflecting back on his exalted life, and inestimable contribution to society, was buried in the earth with the other Cartwrights, on a gentle hillside overlooking the sea, and the worms and the beetles and the maggots ate him, and the pigeons ate the worms and the beetles, and Meyer Jimenez ate the pigeons.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The Normals went on with their normal lives, scanning their streams of individualized Content, taking their prescriptions, walking their Path(s), variant-correcting their kids, and so on. It wasn’t like a utopia or anything. Those heat advisories remained in effect. And, all right, every now and then you had to deal with some weather event, like a super-cyclone, or mondo-tsunami, or those freakish blizzards that appeared out of nowhere and just ruined the entire season up north, and there was always the chance of some horrible accident, or a sudden and devastating Terrorist attack, probably with an improvised nuclear device, or electromagnetic pulse type gizmo, or Anthrax, or Cholera, or Encephalitis, which the Terrorists had definitely gotten their hands on (there were satellite pictures of their secret stockpiles) ... oh and let’s not forget the scourge of cancer, and the scourge of dementia, and the scourge of whatever (additional information on which was available at the Scourge of Whatever website: scourgeofwhatever.ut.biz) ... hey but shares were up and trading heavily, those little green arrows were dancing along, and you could view your personal abundance level on this app that apparently would also let you virtually visit property listings that you couldn’t afford at your current level, but you could sign up for free investment advice, and there were no-down weekly adjustable mortgages, and drastic reductions at Big-Buy Basement, and Brandon Westwood’s stepdaughter’s cousin, Kiki Brezinski, who was totally famous, although no one knew exactly what for, was hawking her new celebrity diet, or fashion line, or ... it didn’t really matter, because this was the dawn of the age of something, and it was morning somewhere, and a brand new day, and the human race was marching in perfect, peaceful lockstep into the future ...
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Julie Blumenthal, Mary Beth Wilson, Monika and Gerson Schade, Anthony Freda, Dan Zollinger, Victoria Gosling, Lorna N
euber, Michael Bartelle, Murray Miller, John Wills, Hugo Fernandez, Lanny Cotler, Jonathan Eric Miller, Paul Laup, Nathan Lemcke, Sascha Freudenheim, Steve Rinzen, Rilla Alexander, John Stauber, Martina Graichen, Maria Martinez, Jeffrey St. Clair, Tony Sutton, and everyone else who helped, or tried to help, to get this book finished and published.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning playwright and political satirist. His early plays and experimental stage-texts were produced during the 1990s in New York City, where he was awarded a 1994 Drama League of New York Developing Artist fellowship and a 1995 Mabou Mines Resident Artist/Jerome Foundation fellowship. Since 2001, his plays have been commissioned, produced, and have toured internationally, playing theatres and festivals including Riverside Studios (London), 59E59 Theaters (New York), Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney), Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh), the Du Maurier World Stage Festival (Toronto), Needtheater (Los Angeles), 7 Stages (Atlanta), English Theater Berlin, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, the Brighton Festival, and the Noorderzon Festival (the Netherlands). His playwriting awards include the 2002 Best of the Scotsman Fringe Firsts (Horse Country) , the 2004 Best of the Adelaide Fringe (Horse Country ), and a 2005 Scotsman Fringe First (screwmachine/eyecandy ). His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing/Methuen Drama (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. (US). His political satire and commentary has appeared on NPR Berlin, in CounterPunch , ColdType , The Unz Review , and other political journals, and has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German .
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