Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  The Empire lasted almost a hundred years before it was brought down by two very different forces. As it expanded northward along the coastal archipelago, the Slaver Empire ran into a loose federation of pirates called the Tong Syndicates. They came from north of the Seattle Firewall and were led by a brilliant Chinese commander.

  In the first engagement he wiped out most of the Slaver fleet. Then, he started island–hopping southward towards the Hollywood Burst and the heart of the Empire. At the same time, the Slavers were facing rebellion at home led by a charismatic leader with a belief in old-time democracy and a burning hatred of the repressive regime.

  Together the Tong Syndicates and the democratic rebellion smashed the First Slaver Empire. Afterwards, they somehow managed to settle their differences and set up the Tong Relegate, a kind of constitutional monarchy, with a Tong Emperor sharing power with a weak, democratically elected parliament.

  There followed fifty years of relative peace, prosperity, and consolidation. Then, within another forty years everything changed. First, a time vault was found deep in the central highlands of the Hollywood Burst in what had once been the Mohave Desert but was now tropical jungle. The vault contained the basic tools and instructions for kick-starting an industrial revolution. It seemed that some secret government agency of the old USA had had the foresight, or more likely foreknowledge, of what was coming and tried to save what could be saved to get the survivors started again.

  There were hints of more vaults buried all over the former USA, but few people ventured across the Dire Straits between the Burst and the Continental Quarantine where plague wars and radiation burn were still producing a deadly harvest of genetic damage. In a grotesque twist of fate, the early quakes that shattered California left nothing for the rest of the world to fight over, and so spared its survivors from the long term damage that resulted from the plague wars and tactical nukes that so devastated the mainland.

  Within ten years of the discovery of the time vaults, scavengers digging in the ruins of the old film studios on one of the tail-end islands of the Hollywood Burst unearthed another kind of time vault. This one was not put down by secret government agencies but was Hollywood’s own contribution to the future and contained a vast film library covering the whole history of movies and all the production and projection equipment from celluloid projectors to quantum DVDs. It was probably meant to be a kind of time vault, museum, or theme park in praise of the film industry but, by a quirk of fate, the quakes buried it almost intact, although water damage and scavengers destroyed or stole most of the films from the late seventies onward.

  This library was a treasure-trove beyond imagining for a people starving for a vision of a better world, a golden age before plague wars, earth displacements, and radiation burns. Within ten years, the first spring-loaded projectors were unreeling film classics from Chaplin’s “Modern Times” to Bogart’s “Casablanca”. Portable wind-up projectors soon began to find their way into even the most remote and backward communities where they filled an insatiable hunger for the old, time-honored Hollywood formulas of love conquers all, good winning over evil, and courage triumphant against all odds.

  For isolated communities digging out of the ruins of the Crash, these old movies became the touchstones for a shared, almost mythological past, a Golden Age that promised a new and better future, a shared dream of hope and faith that might once again be theirs. It was not long before New Hollywood picked up these themes and began producing movies of its own.

  Forty years later, these wind-up projectors were spreading their flickering light dreams through the northern ruins of Sacramento where William Danzig was putting together the first anti-gravity engine. Like most great inventions, it was an amazingly simple, efficient device that happened almost by accident. Danzig wasn’t trying to produce an anti-gravity engine. He was just tinkering around with copper coils, old car generators, bar magnets, flywheels and an eclectic assortment of junked pre-Crash technology, scavenged from deep in the city ruins.

  When he finally realized what he had, he built a larger engine, attached it to the chassis of an ancient Ford pickup that had somehow survived beneath the ruins of an old dealership parking garage, and headed south. He had been brought up on the flickering light dreams of those spring-loaded projectors. They fired his vision with a can-do optimism that produced the first anti-gravity engine, and now, he was going to return the favor and carry it down to the fabled city of New Hollywood.

  When he arrived, floating across the deep water bay of New Hollywood in his old Ford pickup, he set off an explosive technological revolution such as the world had never seen. His anti-gravity engine was the zero-point energy, perpetual-motion Holy Grail of pre-Crash energy research, producing clean, free, unlimited energy.

  With Danzig spin-generators at its disposal, the twin islands of the Hollywood Burst and the Baja Plateau exploded into dynamic centers of reconstruction and development for a whole new era. The cities of New Hollywood and Baja grew and expanded upwards with shiny new skyscrapers shooting into the sky almost overnight.

  But behind all the boomtown reconstruction, New Hollywood kept doing what it did best. The New Hollywood dream machine rolled on, entertaining, inspiring, giving hope, and spreading the egalitarian values of self-reliance and democracy, “with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all.

  More than anything else, it was the New Hollywood dream machine coupled with the Danzig spin-generator that midwifed the birth of a new civilization. From the Mexican Break to the borders of the Oregon Quarantine, they knitted together isolated communities into one nation. These same twin forces operating a hundred years later would defeat the Seraphim Jihad and turn New Hollywood into a continent spanning empire.

  Even after the city of New Hollywood became the center of culture, wealth, and power for a continental empire, its most important business still remained the Hollywood dream machine. Its actors, producers, and directors became the new nobility. They were rich, famous, powerful, and politically connected and, like all elites, they were pampered, jaded, bored, and always on the lookout for the next thrill. The cannonball runs through the LA Sinks were only the latest in a long series of fads to fill this craving.

  7

  A Core Sample of the Dark Side

  Over a dozen grav-cars were lined up in the parking lot beside the country club that night. The club was built in the cup of a shallow bay. Its white, sandy beach extended all the way up to the end of the lot where the cars floated a couple of inches off the ground with their grav-coils whining in anticipation and their drivers tense with excitement, waiting for the start signal.

  Harry let his gaze slide over the newest models, the low sleek sports cars, the coupes and cabriolets with their clean aerodynamic lines that had about as much character as the computers that designed them.

  This being New Hollywood though, there was also an eclectic collection of cars modeled on the behemoths of the Golden Age. There was a cream colored nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac Eldorado convertible, mounting dual, chrome plated, .50-caliber Gatling guns like an ostentatious hood ornament. Another Cadillac parked beside it was a pink, Elvis knockoff driven by three giggling young starlets, posing for the grav-cams and dressed mostly in undress. A heavily armored Godfather, Crown Chia limousine pulled up behind them. It was as black as Darth Vader with dark tinted windows and oversized grav-coils that thrummed intimidation.

  Harry shook his head and wondered how they expected to maneuver those dinosaurs through the narrow, twisting waterways of collapsing, overgrown debris that defined the Sinks. They’d either get jammed up or have to pull up and quit early.

  A beautiful copy of the original James Bond, Aston Martin DB5 slotted in beside him. He recognized the driver, a young, upcoming, action star. Harry eyed the car and nodded appreciatively at the subtle way weapons systems and grav-drives had been integrated without spoiling the classic lines of the car. He gave it a thumbs-up, and the young star grinned as if he’d
just received a Christmas present.

  A balding New Hollywood director, dressed in an immaculate white tuxedo, strode drunkenly up to the starting line, waving a woman’s red, silk panties. He raised them and paused dramatically as the grav-cars revved their engines. The whine of the grav-coils rose to a tearing screech, and the vehicles bounced impatiently up and down on their grav-fields.

  Unlike the others, Harry ran his grav-coils up slowly; and his sleek, midnight blue convertible seemed to hunch down like a lion getting ready to spring. The car was modeled on a classic Steve McQueen, nineteen sixty-seven Ford Mustang but had been heavily customized to accommodate powerful grav drives and state-of-the-art weapons systems.

  The old wheel wells were covered front and back with sleek teardrop-shaped weapons blisters, each housing a pair of mini-guns that could be rotated three hundred and sixty degrees while spitting out a constant stream of .45-caliber explosive slugs.

  In the front fenders beneath the headlights, he’d mounted a pair of high-impact rail-guns. If push came to shove in the Sinks, the magnetic coils lining their barrels would kick a half inch ball bearing up towards light speed in nanoseconds. At those speeds a half-inch of steel massed enough destructive power to bring down a battlewagon or blow a man-sized hole through a half a block of concrete walls. If you were looking to make a fashion statement with overkill status, R-guns couldn’t be beat.

  For close encounters he kept a pulse rifle clamped to the inside of the driver’s door and an original, antique, snub-nosed .38 Police Special in a shoulder holster beneath his tuxedo. The Police Special was worth a small fortune and was more a status symbol than a serious weapon, although at close quarters it could still kill.

  There was nothing exceptional about this arsenal. Personal weapons were de rigueur for all citizens of the Empire. They strapped them on as casually as slipping on a pair of shoes. A citizen’s limitless right to bear arms was a cornerstone of New Hollywood’s constitution, backed up by history, tradition, and sheer necessity.

  The Slaver Empire was never really defeated. Instead, it retreated into the ruins of the Los Angeles Sinks and the vast labyrinth of islands and mangrove swamps that made up the Skeleton Keys. From there it carried on low-level guerrilla warfare that lasted more than a hundred years as it gradually devolved into squabbling gangs of thieves, pirates, and murderers, that still carried the old Slaver banner when they rode out, attacking any target of opportunity from long-haul merchantmen to solitary travelers, or isolated island communities.

  Even after the advent of the Danzig spin-generators, New Hollywood never had the resources to police over a hundred thousand islands scattered from the Sacramento Palisades down past the Mexican Break, and most of its citizens were left to fight off Slaver attacks on their own. It forged a kind of survivor mentality, an individualistic, Wild West self-reliance where each person was responsible, not only for his own defense, but ultimately for his own life, for the decisions he made, the actions he took, and the consequences that resulted. There was no court of appeal for, “I didn’t know what I was doing”, “I didn’t mean to do it”, or “I was forced to do it”. You punched the ticket, it was yours and you paid the penalty, which was often swift and deadly.

  For over a hundred and fifty years, this loose federation of individuals that grandly called itself, The New Hollywood Empire, went about its business expanding, consolidating, growing richer, and every once in a while fighting off Slavers.

  Then about eighty years ago The Tong Relegate, which had ruled New Hollywood from the beginning, was ripped apart by rebellion. In a way, it was inevitable. The old fault lines that ran through the Relegate between the Tong Emperor and the growing democratic demands of parliament finally split wide open. The Tongs themselves were split, one side favored the absolute power of the Emperor, the other a parliamentary democracy. When the dust settled, the rebellion was crushed, the Emperor became a figurehead, and his Tong renegades fled into the Sinks and drove the Slavers north into the Skeleton Keys. Once they gained control of the Sinks, the renegades established The Second Tong Relegate, which was nothing but an excuse to join in pillaging the wealth of New Hollywood, which they proceeded to do with bloodthirsty gusto. And once again individual citizens had to take up the slack and fight off yet another enemy.

  As New Hollywood grew in wealth and power, it began expanding eastward over the Dire Straits and across the southern coast of the continent where radiation scars and genetic plagues were gradually burning themselves out. At first, its traders and caravans brought back only distant rumors of troubles in the East, but as the Empire continued to expand, it began running into swarms of panic-stricken, plague-scarred mutants, fleeing the outriders of something called the Seraphim Jihad. These holy warriors of the Caliphate of the Blessed spread a witch’s brew of old time religion, racial purity, and holocaust cleansing, all mixed up in the end-of-days revelations of their mad Caliph.

  The Seraphim were disciplined fanatics, spreading their brand of hell with guns and fire all along the underbelly of the continent. You were either with them or against them; there was no middle ground. You either converted or died. You were either pure-blood human or died.

  All across the Caliphate from the shattered eastern seaboard and across the shores of the Mexican Break, the ovens burned, consuming all those with unclean, plague-scarred genes or infidel beliefs. The Seraphim called them all, “Muties”, nonhuman abominations in the eyes of their god, who called upon his righteous to cleanse the earth of them.

  When the two empires met, war was inevitable. The Caliphate War was short, brutal, and a foregone conclusion. New Hollywood had the Danzig Spin-generator, the Caliphate Empire didn’t. It was as simple as that. The Caliphate was a steam-powered behemoth, condemned to crawl across the ground and the surface of the sea and be cut to pieces from the air by New Hollywood gunboats.

  In a final desperate attempt to salvage victory from defeat, the greatest war fleet of the Caliphate Empire made an end-run through the treacherous waters of the Mexican Break to attack New Hollywood from the rear. They might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for a monster storm blowing out of the Pacific that smashed their proud war fleet against the ruins, reefs, and shoals of the Sinks.

  Out of over twenty thousand holy warriors, only a thousand survived the wreck of the Seraphim fleet and were stranded in the Sinks. Within a year these disciplined, well trained fanatics quickly took over the ruined city, driving the disorganized bands of Tongs and Slavers into the ruined northern suburbs and the mango groves of the Skelton Keys. With the end of the Caliphate War, New Hollywood inherited a continent spanning empire, and an enemy host camped in its own backyard.

  Although the Seraphim were now the titular rulers of the Sinks, the situation remained fluid. Borders were nonexistent and turf wars a constant. Pockets of Slavers and Tongs could be found throughout the Sinks while Seraphim holy warriors made deep incursions into the Keys and southwards into the Slaver islands of the Mexican Break. There was also a steady trickle of disaffected, New Hollywood outcasts and fortune hunters, forming small infected pockets throughout the Sinks.

  The only thing they had in common was a hatred of New Hollywood and a desire to plunder its wealth. They rode out of the Sinks and Keys on patchwork fleets of stolen grav-cars, Banshee grav-bikes, and armored gunboats, cobbled together from scrap metal and stolen grav-units, while the citizens of New Hollywood fortified homes, armored grav-cars, and fought back with everything from heavy Gatling guns to the latest plasma cannons.

  After nearly three hundred years, the Sinks and Keys had become a kind of core sample of the dark side of New Hollywood’s history, and it was into this dark side that Harry and his cronies were riding with drugs, alcohol, machismo, and the arrogance of money fueling an illusion of invulnerability.

  8

  Cannonball Run

  Susan had no illusions about what they were riding into, but she loved Harry too much to let him go alone. At the last moment, she jumpe
d into the open convertible with him. If she couldn’t stop him, she could at least be there if he needed her.

  Harry looked over at her and winked owlishly. “Through thick and thin, right, Sue?”

  “Yes, Harry.” She smiled tiredly. “Through thick and thin.” At that moment, the director swung the panties down with a theatrical flourish, and Susan was thrown back in her seat as the car reared up and leapt into the night with grav-coils screaming.

  Harry took the lead as they shot off across the bay and out into the oily blackness of the sea. Even though the grav-car floated effortlessly over the earth it was still essentially a ground effect vehicle, incapable of climbing higher than three hundred and fifty feet. Speed and altitude were in an inverse relationship. The closer you stayed to the earth, the more speed you could get out of the coils, and Harry kept the car skimming the waves, inches above the sea.

  He’d also chopped his spin-dampers, filing them down to a razor thin safety margin. The dampers were there to prevent a runaway coil explosion. In case of a major systems failure, they instantly shut down the coils. They also prevented the coils from exceeding their spin safety parameters.

  Old racing drivers like Harry knew these parameters had a safety margin of their own and routinely filed their dampers down to a hair trigger, pushing the coils deep into the red, balancing on the edge, and getting the last fraction of speed out of their engines. A few, with a death wish and an addiction to winning, even removed the dampers altogether.

  With his dampers chopped, Harry was already pushing his engines to the limit. At that speed and altitude there was no margin for error. Any sudden obstacle in their path could rip out the bottom of the car and send them pin wheeling to their death, but Harry was determined to secure his lead before they got into the twisted maze of the sunken city. Besides, he had the latest navigation radar, grav-wave detectors, and infrared sensors to help him and could even keep the car on autopilot and let it steer itself, but he knew from experience that the built-in safety parameters would never allow him the kind of speed and maneuverability he needed to win the race. Instead, he disengaged the autopilot and took control himself. Even though he had raced grav-cars professionally, he had to admit that racing through the LA Sinks at night was in a league all by itself.