Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Mike suspected what might be coming. “Treat ‘em and street ‘em”—he’d heard one of the medtechs mutter that to a co-worker when they thought he was unconscious. Up loomed the image of living unhappily ever after out of a shopping cart—what one of the orderlies called a “MALR: Mobile Autonomous Lifestyle Receptacle.”

  “Due to recent austerity measures, rehabilitation and therapy expenses will likely not be covered by the state,” the social worker said thoughtfully. “The fact that you weren’t more brain-damaged than you in fact were will work against you when it comes to state support. By law you’re not legally disabled if you’re able to ‘act in your own self-interest in a planned and pre-meditated fashion’—”

  Find and secure a MALR, Mike thought.

  “—are ‘self-motivated’—”

  Able to push a MALR.

  “—and have shown that you are, without special funding, ‘capable of rehabilitation and gainful employment’.”

  Can use a toilet brush, mop, and broom, and work for sub-minimum wage while living out of a MALR.

  “I’m afraid the state will likely deny you support payments of any sort,” the social worker said at last, pursing her lips. “Not eligible. The new government has already made it quite clear that it is very fond of saving taxpayers’ money—er, ‘tithes.’ Patients with a history of drug use, like your own, are at this time uniformly being rejected for government disability support on the grounds that the disabling event was a result of ‘conscious lifestyle choice’.”

  Getting his skull bashed in with shotgun butts wasn’t what really hurt, Mike now realized. After saving his life, after employing a team of surgeons to pick bone fragments out of his speech centers hour after hour, after caring for him for ten days and running up a charge of over $80,000, the hospital planned to discharge him into the trauma afterworld, too poor to live and too dumb to die.

  Even deeper, though, was the pain of a larger injustice, one that dawned on Mike only after some time: Left to its own devices, the law would never punish the men who had done this to him. That realization made him want to finish the job his assailants had started. Instead, however, his depression drove him into a sleep as deep as forever, but not as wide.

  Through the sinister winding streets of an unknown city he runs, thunder beating like drums all around. Stormclouds. He laughs at the thunder until it grows angry and comes charging forward, whipping him with its winds, shooting lightning bolts down at him, chasing him, firing bolts down at him again and again....

  “Mister Dalke?”

  Running on all fours through a marshy field scaring frogs into great leaps strange frogs whose skins are currencies of the world in many denominations running but not trying to catch them running from the deep whir of the enormous harvesting machine behind him the whir gaining till up ahead a wooden ladder with wings of fire and rungs of ice stands waiting and desperately he reaches out for it but hand is paw and then hand again and the ladder rises as hands rise in the clinging and letting go that is climbing until reaching the top of the fiery ladder its wings are about his shoulders his hands have turned talons he is a creature half sparrow-hawk, half shooting-star—

  “Mister Dalke?”

  The vision dissolved, into white noise and hushed voices and the monitoring frogsong of his hospital-room hothouse. Half-conscious, falling out of dreams like premonitions or pre-emanations, he felt himself spun about dizzily in a slipstream of memory and waking and memories of waking, returning to consciousness between the blonde social-worker woman on one side of his hospital bed and a tall, dark, thin man—tennis-athletic, well-dressed, carrying a briefcase—on the other.

  “Self-assembling crystal memory, Michael,” explained the thin man who had been introduced, or rather re-introduced, to him as Richard Schwarzbrucke. “The buckytubes serve as circuits. We at CMD believe an injection of these crystal memory components, followed by regrowth along neo-Edelman lines, could restore what was lost and eliminate your temporal lobe seizures. Of course, the decision remains up to you.”

  “I must warn you, however, Mister Dalke,” the blonde social-worker woman said to him, but also for Schwarzbrucke’s notification, “the procedure is experimental.”

  “But our extensive research with animals,” Schwarzbrucke insisted, “bears out the concept that crystal memory components can integrate themselves into the pre-existing neuronal matrix, very much in accord with the revised theory of neuronal group selection.”

  They both stared down at Mike with glances which were supposed to be meaningful, although they meant nothing to him.

  “You would still be the first human subject to undergo this particular procedure,” the social worker cautioned Mike, then brightened. “It’s difficult to predict how head trauma victims will retrain themselves. The fact that you’re left-handed meant your language processing areas were not as devastated as they might have been. A person of an intellectual bent, such as yourself, might find being unable to speak articulately a life sentence of sorts—and you therefore might choose to work incredibly hard to restore lost capacity on your own.”

  Mike began to feel a bit like a tennis ball as the two of them abstractly and dispassionately volleyed his future back and forth.

  “Give it some thought, though, Mr. Dalke,” Schwarzbrucke continued. “If you choose to participate in our program, all your medical expenses will be paid by Crystal Memory Dynamics. Your family will be absolutely relieved of any financial burden arising from your emergency treatment or your ongoing care. We’ll transfer you to state-of-the-art biomedical facilities in the Bay Area and completely oversee your recovery. We’ll also cover your rehab and therapy expenses. I gather from Ms. Kohurst here that it’s highly unlikely the state will do the same.”

  “I informed him,” Ms. Kohurst—yes, that was the social worker’s name—said, somewhat defensively. “I certainly didn’t mean to lower his spirits by it, however.”

  Kohurst turned to “address the ball”: Mike himself.

  “I’ve just been trying to give you the overall picture,” she said. “To let you know the risks and the benefits, so you can make an informed decision about the choice Mister Schwarzbrucke and Crystal Memory Dynamics is offering you.”

  “Of course we’re not trying to make you any more depressed than you must already be,” Schwarzbrucke said consolingly. “I’ve heard that the right-side-damaged are often unaware of the extent of the brain damage they’ve suffered, so since they don’t know, it doesn’t bother them as much. Leftsiders, like yourself—they can still be aware of just how much they’ve lost and, understandably, it depresses them.”

  They both gave Mike that meaningless meaningful stare again.

  “Do you have any questions for Mister Schwarzbrucke?” the social worker said quickly, since Schwarzbrucke had begun gathering himself to leave.

  Mike tried to croak out a comment, but then motioned for something to write with instead. When implements had been brought, he managed with considerable difficulty to scrawl out WHATS INIT 4 U?

  Schwarzbrucke laughed indulgently, locking his black briefcase shut with a resolute click.

  “I’ll be honest. This could be a major step toward something my investors and I have been after for a long time: a thoroughgoing mind/machine interface.”

  Either from seeing the newly blank look on the face of the social worker, or Mike’s own crackbrained thousand yard stare, Schwarzbrucke felt moved to explain further.

  “Think of how such an interface would fulfill an ancient human dream,” he began. “Each of us has always been trapped inside a solitary skull. As a species, we’ve tried many ways to reach through the bone walls that keep our minds apart. All our arts and all our forms of communication down through the centuries are attempts to dream together, to share our experiences, to escape what is, at bottom, a life sentence of solitary confinement for each and every one of us inside our own skulls. An integrated mind/machine link would almost inevitably become a mind-to-mind link
too. Think of it: a technologically-mediated empathy and telepathy. It would free us from our narrow selves, into a fuller communion with our fellow beings than we have ever known. That’s the adventure CMD is embarked on, Michael. I hope you’ll join us on it.”

  Obviously won over by the vision Schwarzbrucke had sketched out, Ms. Kohurst joined her voice to the rhapsodizing.

  “Imagine what that would do for human understanding, for art, for peace—”

  “And for profits,” Schwarzbrucke said with a sly wink as he stepped toward the door, “for profits!”

  Weakly waving Schwarzbrucke adieu, Mike remained skeptical. Shotgun-wielding thugs had done their bit to break through the bone wall of his skull, but he hadn’t found it a particularly pleasant or enlightening experience—and it certainly had not done much for his faith in the Brotherhood of Man.

  * * * * * * *

  Shooting Up with Prayer

  BY THEIR TRASH SHALL YE KNOW THEM, the sign said. Lydia watched as her boss, Dr. Khalid “Kal” Elliot, clad in worker’s coveralls and standing on a ladder, removed screws from the sign hanging over the doorway to the Garbage Project’s main offices.

  “Why are you taking it down, Kal?” she asked. She was surprised to find him working this late, when nearly everyone else had already gone home for the day. “It pretty much sums up what we’re about, here.”

  “Maybe,” the Project’s chief archaeologist said, drilling out another screw as the sun set in the sky beyond the office trailer. “Though it’s not technically correct. I know you worked in paleontology before coming here, but remember the history, Lydia.”

  Lydia remembered, all right. Trash referred primarily to ‘dry’ discards, while garbage referred to ‘wet’ discards. The so-called Trashlands here, though—they were more accurately Rubbishlands. Refuse (wet and dry discards) plus construction and demolition debris equaled rubbish. Since the Southern California Waste Disposal Area, Yucaipa-San Jacinto-Moreno-Beaumont Quadrangle, was founded upon whatever Great L.A. Quake debris could not be shoved into the ocean, the rubbish designation was especially true here.

  “Surely you’re not taking the sign down over such hairsplitting distinctions?”

  “No,” the black man in his late fifties said as he undid the last screw and descended the ladder carrying the sign with him. “No, I’m removing it out of fear that a flippant Biblical paraphrase might offend the new fundamentalist masters.”

  It was odd for Kal to go on like this. He was usually much more laconic. Something was on his mind—something Lydia suspected had to do with the current crisis. Lydia followed him as he carried the sign back toward the Garbage Project’s storage area, behind the office trailers. The Trashlands’ methane vent flares—those that hadn’t yet been piped and siphoned off for their usable energy—dotted the twilight with columns of glowing orange fire for as far as she could see.

  “You don’t really think things are that bad, do you?” she asked.

  The chief archaeologist glanced back at her over his shoulder, frowning, absently stroking his gray-streaked pharaonic chinbeard.

  “I know the chaos of the breakdown has numbed us all to the point that we barely feel change anymore,” he said, “but we are under martial law.”

  “Because of the infosphere blackouts, yes,” Lydia said nodding. She could not forget the shots of nightside Earth which had begun appearing in the slowly reviving postCrash media—the satellite images of the jeweled light-fog from Earth’s cities and highways going utterly dark in waves. The pale green-white fire of the auroral crown reaching nearly to Mexico and Italy. When they saw that star-filled night sky behind rippling green curtains, more than a few life-long urbanites believed the end of the world had come at last. And the experts said the electromagnetic effects, at least, had only gotten worse on the dayside.

  “But politics didn’t cause all those solar flares and sunspots,” Lydia said, recalling her personal experiences of the Crash in depth. Like many others, she had seen riots of angels. More electromagnetic disturbances in the interpretative cortex of her temporal lobe, she gathered—even more severe than those she had experienced during the Great L.A. Quake and its aftershocks. She figured she must have a particularly sensitive “IC” in her “TL”.

  “Oh, I don’t deny there was an unusually high level of solar activity,” Kal said, as he opened a storage shed and slid back the door. “But look at what was going on before that.”

  He slid the sign into a bin and turned around to her.

  “The urban warfare assault ‘scenarios’ the Marines have been running in major American cities for more than a quarter of a century,” he said, counting off examples on his fingers. “Supposedly training exercises for taking out terrorist strongholds abroad, but also mighty handy experience if you want to shut down dissent at home. The contested election, three years ago, of the first non-New Commonweal president in years—and the threat that posed to the NC. The federal standoff with the Covenanters in Smithville. The evidence those zealots had biological weapons. Then the presidential order and the massacre there, troops and law enforcement bombing Smithville to ashes—”

  “What does that have to do with the infosphere crashes?” Lydia asked, perplexed, as they loitered in front of the storage shed.

  “Hear me out,” Kal said, raising a finger for attention. “Where was I? Yes. The rumors of United Nations and international security involvement in the massacre. Economic and social stress. The last in a series of constitutional crises involving the president. The militia uprisings and troop revolts against ‘internationalist conspiracies’ and ‘collectivist secular elites’. Then a surprisingly convenient solar storm, just in time for the president’s jet to go down in a ‘storm-induced’ electromagnetic pulse. The vice-president’s sudden helicopter crash in Morocco—supposedly the result of terrorists using a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile. Quite convenient for the installment of House Speaker George Nadarovich as president—and additional grounds for his immediate declaration of martial law. Then the amphibious assault on San Francisco, the call for a new constitutional convention, and the establishment of the Christian States of America? Hmm?”

  Kal had long since run out of fingers, but that didn’t stop him from shaking his head.

  “That’s an awful lot to load onto a bunch of sunspots and solar flares.”

  “Oh?” Lydia said, looking at him skeptically, yet fearful that too much of what he was implying might just be true. She remembered too clearly the closing down of research at the tar pits. “And you have another explanation for all the blackouts and computer crashes?”

  “Not totally,” he said with a shrug as he closed the door to the storage shed behind them, “but before our systems went down, I got an interesting masscast e-note from my old buddy Al Davis. He was a roommate of mine from way back, when we were in grad school together. He worked skeleton crew at NOAA, usually on what’s known as the K-index. The index measures disturbances in several vectors of the Earth’s magnetic field, averaged over three hour periods. Sort of a measure of how the Earth’s magnetic lines of force are being tweaked and torqued. The K-index is generally calculated for the mid-latitudes—in Colorado in the northern hemisphere and Australia in the southern. Disturbances tend to be much more severe poleward.”

  Lydia began to walk slowly ahead of him, back toward the main office trailer.

  “And this all has something to do with the solar storm that caused the infosphere crisis?” she asked, trying not to sound impatient.

  “Everything to do with it!” Kal assured her. “What it takes to precipitate a technocrash depends on whether the tweaking of the field lines is the result of a pulse or a sustained period of severe storming. The K-index is not an instantaneous quantity, so a quick pulse of high amplitude would not normally be significantly reflected in the K-index. For a quick pulse the K-index would generally be irrelevant—and, as a result of the crash caused by a killer pulse, the index would probably never be calculated for
such a pulse.”

  Dr. Elliot slowed and stared down at his feet as one of the undergraduates on the Project walked past them, toward the storage area from which they had just come. When he spoke again, his voice was lower.

  “But Al was working on atmospheric phenomena called sprites and jets,” he continued, “which are related to much briefer electromagnetic events in the Earth’s atmosphere—as brief as lightning bolts during thunderstorms, in fact. So his equipment had a lot narrower resolution than almost anything else out there. His detectors had much finer discernment than those used to calculate the usual K-index. His e-note said he was seeing some interesting things.”

  “Such as?” Lydia asked, curious almost against her will.

  “A sustained period of severe solar storming takes out electrical systems on the basis of how well protected they are,” Kal said. “The less protected a system is, the more readily it can be knocked out. The main danger is not from the storm itself, but from the disturbances the storm causes in the power grid, which tends to amplify whatever perturbs it.”

  “And your friend Al’s instruments showed him something to do with that?”

  “Right,” Kal said. “As the solar activity’s effects began to peak in the index’s low 20s, a series of precisely timed pulses began to appear, mainly over North America as it came out of night shadow, but with a few spikes scattered over the rest of the planet too. Totally artificial—and virtually invisible, as far as standard K measures were concerned. Glaringly visible to Al’s research equipment, however.”

  Lydia craned her chin inward in disbelief.

  “Someone manipulated a solar storm in order to shut down the infosphere?” she asked incredulously. “Who? Little green men?”

  “No—men of ordinary stature from Earth,” Kal said. “In the usual range of skin colors. Perhaps dressed in army green, but otherwise not at all alien. And not ‘manipulated’ a solar storm—exploited it. For cover. I haven’t heard anything from Al since, but it’s not so hard to figure out the rest. With a series of precisely timed electromagnetic pulses, those non-little non-green men set up oscillations in the power grids. Those oscillations, at least at the surface of the Earth, unleashed far more power than the storm itself did. With the right timing and placement in the upper levels of the atmosphere, they wouldn’t even have needed to use nuclear explosions to generate the pulses. The ultimate bang for their buck.”