He hadn’t been able to get back the program they had seen when they had first come across the laptop, and George still hadn’t had the nerve to try to contact anyone yet. He was tempted, but afraid. Granted, they wouldn’t be able to identify who was using the machine, but what if his contact were traced. George did wonder why they would bother to tap into the old phone lines. There would be a cost associated with following the activity on the phone lines, and the Conglomerates would see that as ineffective spending, and they would be right. George might have the capability of contacting the outside world, but what would he say, and to whom? He thought about all of the e-mails he used to send to his granddaughter Christine. They both had loved that.
George wrote an account of his day-to-day experiences on the old laptop. At first he thought it would be a way for him to keep track of things for Patsy, but he soon found that it was a means of dealing with all that happened to them. George found that when he put their experience into words, he was able to sort it through and come to some conclusions or, at least, to come up with some plans. It felt better to get it all out. Besides, he figured it was a good exercise for his memory, to record the day, and the typing was a way to maintain his motor skills.
“What the hell,” George said, as he thought of Christine. He filled in the subject heading with “Follow-Up.” “Innocuous enough,” he said as he clicked send and sent his story to Christine’s old e-mail address.
GEORGE LOOKED OUT the open door just in time to see an ancient saguaros burst into flames as a bolt of lightning struck the ground. It took a full second for the crack of thunder to follow. Rain, steady and strong, pelted their roof and the dirt outside the open door.
Patsy got up from the bed and walked toward the bathroom.
“No, Patsy.” George jumped up, but then he didn’t know if she was kidding him or not, until Patsy started to laugh. George did too.
Ichabod’s Train
As the need for capital had continued, the Conglomerate discontinuing procedure had trended upward. And the Dyscards, a growing populace of the rejected, had established a more and more sophisticated system to unify that which had been thrown away. Order and a rationale developed a more complete organization based on their common experience and necessity.
This development ran counter to the Conglomerate vision of the Dyscard solution. The Conglomerates projected that the Dyscards would die out of natural causes due to the hardships of being forced to live like rodents and vermin. But the Conglomerate calculations had not factored in the survivalist skills instinctive to those abandoned, and the Conglomerates underestimated how the discarded youth would survive and grow.
The Conglomerates grew more disgruntled as this result became more and more apparent, and the chairman of the Conglomerate party mandated that the authorities introduce an agent into the Dyscard populace that would do the Conglomerates’ destructive work for them.
“The smallpox in a blanket scenario,” the chairman had said.
As they did with most of the ideas from the chairman of the Conglomerate party, the party lackeys had jumped at the chance to please the boss. They had come to a consensus: they would release hard-core criminals into the community of the Dyscards in order to dominate and destroy the Dyscard social structure.
The first criminals were dropped into the underground one at a time, but it didn’t take long for the Border Patrol to pick them up and remove them. A pattern began to emerge.
The Conglomerates had been so sure of their solution that they had failed to consider that it might not go according to plan. The Conglomerates did not consider that the criminal—and the more hardened the criminal, the more true was the case—was one who had been discarded himself. They were people who had been shunned because of personality, appearance, economics, or a tick of the brain, and they had lived outside of the Conglomerate law. But Dee had considered that. Dee knew they would be grateful for their release, and if they weren’t, the Border Patrol was good at convincing drop-ins that it was in their best interests to play along. Either way, the Conglomerate counterinsurgents didn’t have much choice.
OTHER ENEMIES OF the Dyscards were those who wanted to exploit an opportunity the vulnerable presented—intruders from the city who were out for a risk and a kick, who wanted “to do a freak.” Once these guys were able to boast about it with their friends, they would come back in packs to exhibit their prowess at making kids scream. It was a habit encouraged by the Conglomerates, and some intruders even felt sanctioned by the chairman himself.
Word was spreading among the young citizens of the underground, and the Dyscards wanted to know what A and Dee were going to do about it.
So did they.
The combined energies of A and Dee were nearly consumed with the daily issues of an emerging culture: organization, housing, utilities, health care, security. And to have one of the leading health care and security issues come from an invasion from the people who had thrown the Dyscards away was troublesome.
While the burgeoning society of the Dyscards experienced many difficulties, it had avoided acts of aggression and violence, or more serious crimes. Sure, there had been sporadic episodes, but they had been more the expression of frustration than anything else. Most kids didn’t possess much of anything in the first place, so there wasn’t much to steal. Besides, the discarded were too dependent on one another. They relied on one another’s skills and experience in order to obtain what they needed to survive. No one thought of destroying that. So when word got back from the Border Patrol that there was a new breed of creep working the underground, A and Dee knew they had another attack from the Conglomerates.
It was no surprise to Dee when the solution to their security problems fell into their laps. Like most problems, it took a while to know the solution was at hand.
“It’s simple,” Dee finally said, “we get the Border Patrol to continue to work with the convicts the Conglomerates send down here, which is going quite well, and as a reward for service, the convicts get to unleash their aggression on the creeps who want to hurt a kid. Patrol can even show them how it’s done and leave the convicts to do the rest. I’m sure they’ll pick it up fast.”
Dee took pride in the idea that the Conglomerates were concerned enough by the growing community of Dyscards that they would launch such attacks on them. Dee liked it that the Dyscards might recruit and return this infection to the Conglomerates in kind.
THE THREE-QUARTER moon rose through the face on the Clock Tower Building and arced across the city skyline. The chairman of the Conglomerate party looked from behind the glass. He didn’t focus on the moon or the light it cast across the buildings of lower Manhattan. He never did. Instead he ran through his plans as if another option might occur to him. It didn’t. He had no problem with the moral decision; he’d passed that point. It was the implementation that concerned him. There was no new revenue to apply to the situation, and the rising costs were killing the Conglomerates, along with everyone else. It wasn’t as if the chairman could buy his way out.
When the Conglomerates had chosen to segregate themselves from their problems, as they had done with the Coots relocation program to the West and with the Dyscards here in the East, the Conglomerates had reduced the costs associated with care for the elderly and social services for the young. They had even been able to manipulate the reproductive issue into a profit center by offering second-chance parenting. But now that revenue stream was past further exploitation. There was no choice but change.
The chairman would cut off any further spending on the elderly. They produced nothing but costs. Let them fend for themselves in what was left of the communities to which they had been shipped. The weather out there was ideal, after all. It was a good place to die. The chairman would have the people in administration out there stay behind as well. He would instruct the employees of the Conglomerate party that they would have to pay their own moving and transportations costs to return to the East. They could afford it, as the workers i
n these posts had been ripping off the party for years. They had stolen from the Coots and gotten rich on the black market.
The chairman’s plans for the Dyscards would be even harder to implement. They had been remarkable survivors and they had spread out, splintered into factions from Detroit to San Antonio. It would be hard to affect them as a whole entity, but he could attack their power base, the home to the largest population of Dyscards: the New York City subways.
The idea of obliterating the Dyscards appealed to him. He couldn’t flood them out without damaging the infrastructure further, nor could he burn them out, though he liked the idea. It would have to be something drastic to disarm the Dyscards. Intelligence hadn’t worked. Neither had infiltration or terrorist tactics. The Dyscards had proved resistant to those measures and had, in fact, deflected such attacks back at the Conglomerates.
The Dyscards existed as parasites on the society that had gotten rid of them in the first place; this gave the chairman the idea for his method of attack. He would cut off their power. He would order a power failure, a blackout that would encompass the urban sprawl from Boston to D.C. and cause mass panic and further distress to the nation’s economy. But he would have to risk it to gain victory over the Dyscards and retain control over the party by saving the nation. The chairman felt that the greater the threat, the greater the glory.
It was true that there were auxiliary generators in the subway system, but it was only to keep the third rail live. It was not sufficient to maintain lights and ventilation. If he could cut off those two elements, the panic in the dark with an active third rail would result in death and injury beyond their limited means to respond. Such a tactic, the chairman reasoned, would deliver a crippling blow to the Dyscards and overwhelm their ability to treat the wounded and still care for the increased population. Yes, there would be some collateral damage among the Conglomerate citizens who were using the system at the time and also among those working there. Such losses were minimal in light of the Dyscard problem, and were necessary. The Conglomerates would have to go public and acknowledge the problem, and in so doing they would transfer blame to the Dyscards. The chairman would report that the crisis for the citizens of the city was due to the Dyscards’ continued theft of energy, which had caused the system to overload and had resulted in a shutdown that had brought down the power for the entire East Coast.
He would have to be careful that his new doctor did not know about the plans for the Dyscards. The chairman saw through Salter’s disregard for Gabriel Cruz. Maybe there was a way to use Cruz as a bargaining chip, the chairman thought. That could be useful. The chairman did what was good for the party, and what was good for the party was good for the nation. The rest took care of itself.
The chairman needed Salter’s loyalty, and the last thing he wanted to think about was what her retribution could be and to what lengths she could carry it out. It was these thoughts that occupied the chairman, not how he was going to inform the administration of his decision. The administration did what he told them to do.
AT FIRST, X had protested when her companion had wrapped the strap across her lap, but now she was glad he had. He extended it to include himself and clipped it at his hip. Their thighs pressed against each other. That is, when they weren’t bouncing on their butts as the I train barreled down the Lexington Avenue line. X knew it couldn’t be, but it seemed that everything got out of this train’s way, because they were flying down the tracks and taking the turns as if they couldn’t flip over. X and her companion could have been in space as they shot through the dark and watched the blue, red, and white lights recede behind them like stars.
The I train was black, and in between stations the train looked like a shadow sneaking between tunnels. X’s companion was speaking to her, but she couldn’t hear him even though he was shouting. Between the squeal of the train wheels that echoed throughout the system and the back draft, X’s ears where ringing. It was a good thing she hadn’t heard him, because if she had, she may not have believed him, and if she had believed him, she would have been even more scared than she was now.
Her companion was telling X that the I stood for Ichabod, as in Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which, of course, also employed the headless horseman. As no one in the current generation had read the book, the details were fuzzy and the characters confused, and the train with no driver had become the headless horseman named Ichabod Train, which became the I train with the ghost driver, Ichabod.
Since the I train made no use of its interior lights, or the exterior headlights and taillights, there was no visible tip-off that the I train was coming. The I had steel-edged wheel rims and side grating. The train was one car made of stainless steel painted flat black with black gloss appointing and black tinted windows. No one had seen the driver, nor even a shadow or silhouette of the motormen. It was a train that appealed to the imagination.
THE DRIVER HAD been an engineer in the heyday of the MTA and he, like many others, had been forced to retire. Later, when the Family Relief Act was instituted, he, like many others, was ordered to relocate out West. But unlike the many others who did relocate, the driver of the I train refused to make the move. The engineer had other options. He knew the subways better than the police did, and he submerged himself back into his old work world years before the banishment of the Dyscards.
The engineer prepared by setting up supplies—gathering tools and paint in an abandoned toolshed and workshop at the hub of an obsolete network of tunnels—before he made his ultimate move. He had been collecting maps of the subway system since he was a kid, and he had made a hobby of studying them and memorizing lines and routes long forgotten.
The engineer found a work yard and two abandoned subway cars. He moved his tools to the work yard. The engineer’s new home was spacious and utilitarian, with huge hoists and pulleys above the section of track. The yard was outfitted with a welding area complete with equipment and tanks of propane gas, which to his surprise were full and ready to go. Welding had been a job he had earlier had time to develop.
The I train took shape. The driver lined the exterior with a four-inch catwalk to which he attached a wrought iron railing welded onto the outside of the train. He knew the train width was not enough to breech the tunnels or the steel support columns. He used razor wire around the steps and the undercarriage. He lined the windows with chicken wire prior to applying the black tint. And then he sanded the stainless steel by hand so the flat black paint would adhere to the car; he proceeded to give the car coat after coat to make sure. He had the time. He couldn’t help it and painted the razor wrap and the railing in high-gloss black.
It was about that time that the accident happened. He was getting careless with the torch. He had a steady hand, and he had used the torch so often on his moveable fortress that he felt he could deal with any problem, because he had so far. That is, until the hose leaked. The high-pitched hiss of the leak caught the welder’s attention, and he hoped the stream of propane was not headed toward the nozzle. His focus switched to the flame as the stream of gas encountered the nozzle, causing a flare of magnesium right before his eyes. And before he realized he was looking at the flame, that flare fused his optic nerve, producing an instantaneous white-blindness. He kept his eyes closed and counted to thirty and prayed the blindness was temporary. His experience told him to stay still, and he held the torch exactly where he had it, away from his body. He didn’t want to lose track of that. He was sure his vision would return—he hoped so—but if he were to burn his hands, or his legs, he would be in even more serious trouble.
He opened his eyes, but his sight had not returned. Instead the flare inside his head grew in intensity, as did the pain behind his eyes. He would have doubled over if it were not for the lit welding torch in his hand. With his free hand he followed the hose to the propane tank. He touched the top of the tank until he found the valve. He twisted the valve to close and felt the pressure in the hose diminish. He
ran his fingers back along the hose toward the torch, careful not to touch the nozzle. Only then did he put the extinguished torch down; only then did he put his hands to either side of his head and scream.
He remembered thinking that while he felt completely different, outside of him nothing had changed. He thought of the locations of his workbench, tools, and supplies, and he called them out loud again and again, sure that that would help fix them in his mind.
The engineer wasn’t exactly sure just how he was able to drive this one-car train, but the method he was using matched the vibration of the wheels on the rails beneath him with the visualization of the system map that was impressed into his memory. It was funny. Without having to be distracted by watching what he was doing, he was able to picture the position of his train in relation to the map in his mind. After all, he had driven every kind of train over every inch of track, so that he could have driven the system with his eyes closed.
“WELL, NOW I get my chance,” the driver said aloud, but he didn’t think about that for long, because just then he heard a change in the tone of the hum of the wheels and it felt almost as if the train were digging into the turn. He knew no one would believe him, but he could feel the wheels on the tracks anticipate the switch. He leaned to his right as he swung the helm with his weight and his customized train followed the command.
X hadn’t heard a word that her companion had said about the train driver’s story. Wasn’t that just the way with this guy, X thought. It seemed that either he was talking to her when she couldn’t hear or she was talking to him, only to find he wasn’t there. X was beginning to have her doubts, except that he kept taking such good care of her.
The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future Page 14