The People's Republic of Everything

by Nick Mamatas

  “It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it,” he said to the pulp writer. “All these changes.”

  “Snuck up on me, and I was the one who came up with the word ‘Industrivism.’ I wanted ‘industraturgy’ at first, but I was worried that people wouldn’t know what the suffix—‘turgy’— meant.”

  “INDUSTRIVISM”

  Now it was time for Jake and the pulp writer to both inhale sharply.

  “INDUSTRIVISM IS”

  The pipe on the left shoulder of Diesel’s tank-suit blew and the sound reverberated throughout the basement almost as if had been designed with that acoustic effect in mind.

  No, not almost, Jake realized. Exactly.

  Where the tank-suit had once stood there was a door, and now that door opened. It was the swing-shift, the noon-till-eight crowd. All men, as was typical, and . . . not all men.

  The first was armless, but his limbs had been replaced with a remarkable set of prostheses. He actually had eight hook-like fingers at the end of each arm-rod, and they opened and closed like a rose whose petals could snap shut in the blink of an eye. Behind him was a legless man, his waist a corkscrew, legs thin and pointed, but perfectly balanced in their way like a drafter’s compass in expert hands.

  The entire shift, and there weren’t many of them, had some replacement. Jake had never seen any of these men before, not in the factory. Maybe on the streets, one or two begging, or just idling listlessly. The last man seemed to Jake to be whole, and he Jake recognized. It was the man from the electroplating vats upstairs, the utterly normal-appearing man with no defect at all. He walked up to Jake and the pulp writer and undid several buttons of his work jumpsuit, to show off the chest still fresh with a huge incision.

  “I have a combustion chamber for a heart,” he said, fingering the surgical line. Thick staples held his flesh together. “You know what’s interesting about Industrivism, what we all just found uncanny about it? Every other ideology they’re selling out there— Communism, Americanism, Kaiserism, you name it, they all promise that you’re going to die. Spill blood for your country, or your class, or the Glorious White Race, or something. The only difference is that they all promise that the other fellow will kill you worse.

  “But Industrivism, when I started reading about it, I noticed that nothing about death or blood or glorious combat was ever mentioned. It sounded sweet, so I came here and went looking for it. We all came here, just over the last month or so, for the same reason.”

  Jake glanced at the pulp writer, who was smiling.

  “I don’t think we’re ever going to die,” the man with the combustion chamber heart said. “We’re making tank-suits.” He hiked a thumb at Diesel. “They work fine. He doesn’t even need to dream anymore.”

  “THIS IS MY DREAM.”

  Jake said to the pulp writer, “Good thing it was you, eh? I bet most fellows would have to throw in a little of the old blood and guts.”

  The pulp writer shrugged. “Women know a lot about blood and guts. I was just tired of writing about it.

  “Mr. Diesel, I’ll be pleased to write about you.”

  “What about me? What am I supposed to do with all this!” Jake said, suddenly red in the face. It was fine when the pulp writer was just as confused as he was, but now she had signed on for something he still didn’t understand at all. “How come you didn’t tell me, ‘old man’? I did everything for you!” He pointed to the pulp writer, and seemed nearly ready to shove her in Diesel’s direction. “I found her for you!”

  The pulp writer tensed, and deep within Diesel’s tank-suit something whirred and whirred. Finally, from the horn came the words.

  “I APOLOGIZE.

  “I NEEDED YOU AS YOU ARE.”

  “But why?”

  “CONTROL GROUP. IN THE FACTORY, BUT NOT OF THE FACTORY.”

  “We’ve been working on something for you,” said the man with the combustion chamber heart. “We’re building all sorts of devices and implements, all diesel-designed if not diesel-powered. Tank-suits for men on the edge of death, limbs for vets, and even spines. We haven’t gotten your thing quite perfected yet, but maybe . . . how would you like to never need to sleep again?”

  Jake shivered and started to cry. The pulp writer reached into her purse for a handkerchief, and laughed when the tips of her fingers caressed the brick. She recovered the hanky from under it and handed it to Jake, who took it without a word and blew his nose into it.

  Finally, Jake said, “I have to get back to work.”

  “Spoken like a True Industrivist,” said the pulp writer.

  Once upon a time There was a knock on the door of the second-class stateroom, but Herr Diesel’s embarrassment was not due only to his reduced circumstances but to the fact that he had been on his hands and knees, ear pressed to the ground, to listen to the reverberations of Dresden’s steam engines. An article Herr Diesel had read promised that her steam engines outputted twenty boiler horsepower at five hundred revolutions per minute, but Herr Diesel suspected Dresden’s capabilities had been overstated by its proud engineers.

  The door opened, and the mate who opened it jingled the keys on the wide ring he carried. He was English, but Diesel was a polyglot and so understood the man perfectly.

  “You’re to come up to the poop now, sir. There is an unfortunate issue with your accommodation.”

  Diesel rose to his feet and dusted off the knees of his trousers, which was not strictly necessary as the rooms were kept clean, even in second class.

  “What would the problem be, sir?”

  “Well, there’s an issue with the water,” the mate said. “The water supply, I mean to say. The WCs are all overflowing, the urinals as well, so we need everyone to clear out. All the other passengers are already in the dining hall, sir, but you had not answered any previous knocks.” With that, the mate made a fist that flouted several large white walnut-knuckles, and knocked on the open door slowly, three times. Then he crooked a finger and said, “Come along then, sir.”

  Herr Diesel followed the large mate out of the second-class area. Something was very wrong, Diesel knew it. He asked, “Pardon me, boy, but what is the problem with the water supply?”

  “It’s the piston in the pump, sir. It got all stuck like a you-know-what in an underserviced you know where, eh?” The mate winked at his own crudeness, reveling perhaps in the reputation of sailors and the absence of any of the fairer sex as he led Herr Diesel to the poop deck.

  “Why, sir, have you led me astern if the rest of the complement is in the dining hall, presumably at least enjoying some English tea, if not a glass of complimentary beer?” Herr Diesel enquired.

  “Well, sir, it’s a bit embarassin’ to say, but we know your reputation. You’re the famous Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the eponymous engine. We have a lot of toffs in first class, sir, and you see they caught wind of your name on the manifest, but also that you were sequestered in, erm, humble accommodation. We told them that in addition to our own capable mechanics, we’d have you take a look.”

  “I see, and you’ve told me that the problem is the water pump’s piston.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And this was explained to you by the German hands, or by a fellow Englishman?”

  “Sir, we are all bilingual round here. Sea life, eh?” The mate winked again, crudely, and nudged Herr Diesel with his elbow.

  “Then, sir, I am now convinced that you are not simply mistaken, and I have diagnosed the mechanical difficulty. It can be repaired instantly.”

  “It can?” the mate said.

  “Yes. You see, you mountebank, Dresden is outfitted with a pulsometer pump, a clever and economical design which takes advantage of the principle of suction. A ball valve separates two chambers, one filled with water, and the other with steam. A pulsometer pump requires no piston, and has no piston, as it depends solely on suction!”

  “Suction, eh? Yes, something like that!” The fraudulent mate, in actuality a paid assassin in the employ of cert
ain Germanic interests determined to keep the patent on Herr Diesel’s inventions the exclusive property of the sons of Goethe, launched himself at the man. But Diesel, forewarned by the inaccuracies in the thug’s narrative, had already plotted a stratagem. He ran to the right, evading the killer’s apelike arms, and secured for himself an emergency flare from the poop deck’s box.

  “Stay back,” Herr Diesel cried, holding the flare before him. “Or I shall ignite it!”

  The assassin paid no heed, having taken the measure of the inventor and finding the man’s courage wanting, but he had again misapprehended Herr Diesel. Diesel yanked the cap from the end of the flare, igniting it, just as he was tackled by the assassin. Flaming and tumbling, limbs coiled about one another like a pair of enraged octopodes, they rolled the length of the poop deck and fell into the churning white sea below, dangerously close to Dresden’s rudder head, where surely both lives would be lost.

  Jake slipped the carbons back into the envelope, reared back like a major league pitcher, and flung the manuscript over the open transom and into the office of Espionage!, a pulp dedicated to spy stories and non-fiction features about a new philosophy dedicated to anti-Communism, technological-organic unity, and physical immortality. It was catching on.

  ____________________

  Dieselpunk! That’s just like steampunk, but greasier and more efficient, right? This was a hard story to write. I started and stopped perhaps half a dozen times, until I came upon the character of the pulp writer and integrated her into the story. The diesel engine changed the world into one amenable to science fiction as a commercial genre—if you like mass-produced fiction or electricity sufficient to run radio sets, movie theaters, and TV channels, give the diesel pump at your local gas station a kiss—and dieselpunk itself constantly references its own pulp roots.

  If steampunk in its reactionary form is a response, as Nisi Shawl wisely observed, to the arrival of people of color into science fiction, then dieselpunk is a response to the arrival of writers who didn’t grow up consuming the greasy kid stuff into science fiction. It’s an aesthetic rearguard action appealing to the imagined golden age of square-jawed engineers slapping together giant robots in their garages. Videogames comprise the core of the genre, and it’s often an excuse for baroque displays and military action, with an analysis of industrial culture being secondary at best. I felt that “We Never Sleep” had to tangle with both pulp and industry, and struggled with that until I realized that I could just bring in the pulp explicitly in the form of an industrial-strength writer of the stuff. In those days, sitting at a typewriter and cranking out fictions to order was the equivalent of by-the-penny piecework in a factory.

  Interestingly, despite the genre’s popularity, almost nobody writes about Rudolph Diesel, an intriguing fellow who grew up in a Europe shattered by war, and who died under mysterious circumstances. The one English-language biography, Diesel, the Man and the Engine, by Morton Grosser, is long out of print and reads more like a primer for children interested in mechanics than anything else. Diesel could be a pulp-fiction hero, and may yet be one. I’ve recently revisited “We Never Sleep” and think it may well be the bones of a novel.

  UNDER MY ROOF

  Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

  —H. L. Mencken

  1

  MY NAME IS HERBERT WEINBERG. I know what you’re thinking. That sounds like an old man’s name. It does. But I’m twelve years old. And I know what you’re thinking.

  In fact, I’m sending you a telepathic message right now.

  Yes, it’s about the war. And yes, it is about Weinbergia, the country my father Daniel founded in our front yard. And yes, I have been missing for a while, but I’m nearly ready to go back home.

  But I’ll need your help. Let me tell you the story.

  It was Patriot Day, last year, when Dad really went nuts. Thoughts were heavy like fog. Not only was everyone in little Port Jameson remembering 9/11, they were remembering where they were on September 11th, 2002, September 11th, 2005, 2008, on and on. The attacks were long enough ago that the networks had received a ton of letters and email demanding that they finally re-air the footage of the planes slicing through the second tower, because nobody wanted to forget. Schools took the day off. Banks closed. Some cities set up big screens in public parks to show the attacks. I was excited to finally see the explosions myself. Nobody else could really picture them properly anymore. I drew a picture in my diary.

  My mother Geri had forgotten pretty much everything except how beige her coffee was that day. She had been pouring cream into her blue paper cup when she looked up out of the window of the diner and saw the black smoke downtown, and she had just kept pouring till it spilled over the brim. She found my father later that day and told him that they were going to move to Long Island immediately.

  And they did. Every year since, she forgot a little bit about that day. What was the name of the diner? Did she order a bagel with lox or just the coffee? Did she think it was Arabs or did the liberal centers of her cerebellum kick in to say, “No no no it could have been anybody”? Did she want to kill someone? Drop an A-bomb on the entire Middle East? She didn’t know anymore. All she remembered, and all I plucked out of her head, was her off-white coffee.

  My father Daniel, on the other hand, didn’t remember anything but the nuclear weapons. Dirty bombs, WMDs, suitcases filled with high-tech stuff; that was all he could think about. He took a job mopping floors at SUNY Riverhead so he could take classes for free. Physics. Mechanical engineering. His head was like an MTV video—all equations, blueprints, mushroom clouds, people running through the streets, and naked ladies, in and out—flipping from image to image. With every war Daniel got more frantic. The president would say some stuff about not ruling out nuclear weapons, and I could tell he wasn’t kidding. My father would stay up all night, just walking around the dark kitchen and smacking his fist against the table. On the news, they kept showing more and more countries on a big map, painted red for evil. All of Latin America was red now and even the normal people in California died when someone ran the border with a bomb or shot down a plane over a neighborhood.

  Dad read the newspapers, spent whole days in the library and all night on the computer. He was getting fat and losing his hair. He was a real nerd though, so nobody really noticed that he was slowly going mad. Actually, the problem was that he was going mad more slowly and in the opposite direction from everybody else. At night he dreamed of being stuck on an ice floe or on the wrong side of a shattered suspension bridge. Mom and I would be drifting off to sea on another ice floe or sliced in half by snapping steel cables. Then Dad would see the ghosts of firefighters and cops, white faces with no eyes, and they would point and laugh.

  So Daniel studied. Researched. Thought of a way out.

  Dad waited until I was out of school for the summer to make his big move, because he knew I would make a good assistant. He was laid off by SUNY because of budget cuts—Mom blamed his erratic behavior, but Daniel wasn’t really any more eccentric than his other co-workers. He sold his nice car and bought a ratty old station wagon even junkier than mom’s Volvo hatchback, and spent all day tooling around in it, while Geri clipped coupons and made us tuna fish with lots of mayonnaise for dinner. They didn’t send me to genius camp that summer (I’m not really a genius, I just know what smart people are thinking) so that’s how I ended up being Prince Herbert I of Weinbergia.

  Dad woke me early one hot day, just as the sun was rising. He looked rumpled, but was really excited, almost twitching. I half expected to see a little neon sign blinking Krazy! Krazy! Krazy! on his big forehead like I did back when Lunch Lady Maribeth went nuts and started throwing pudding at school, but he was actually normal.

  “C’mon Lovebug, I need your help,” he said, shaking my ankle. He hadn’t called me Lovebug since fourth grade, and his mind was going three thousand miles an hour, so I didn’t know
what he wanted.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re going to the dump to look for cool stuff. C’mon, we’ll get waffles at the diner on the way back.”

  I always wanted to go to the dump and look for cool stuff. I was really hoping to find something good like a big stuffed moose head or a highway traffic sign, but then in the car Dad told me that we were going to look for the ingredient that made America great.

  “In fact, they call it Americium-241. It was isolated by the Manhattan Project, Herbert.” Daniel loved to talk about the Manhattan Project.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find that stuff at the dump, Dad.”

  “Smoke detectors, son. Most smoke detectors contain about half a gram of Americium-241,” he said with the sort of dad-ly smile you usually just see on TV commercials.

  “How many grams do you want?”

  “Well, 750 grams is necessary to achieve critical mass, but we’ll want more than that to get a bigger boom,” he said. He was thinking about turning on his blinker and how much smoother the ride in the old car was, not about blowing anything up. “I guess we’ll need about 5000 smoke detectors.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t plan on finding all of them today.”

  He pulled the car into the dump and gave me a pair of gloves and a garbage bag. It was still early morning so the dump hadn’t started getting hot and stinky yet. Dad let me go off on my own too, so we could cover more ground. I bet Mom or a social worker would have complained that Dad wasn’t worried enough about my safety, but really, he was. As far as he was concerned, the safest place in the world was in a garbage dump, digging around for radioactive smoke detectors.

  There wasn’t all that much cool stuff at the dump, mostly just big bags of rotting food and milk containers, and broken Barbie Dream Houses—lots of those for some reason. There were old computers too. I liked checking out the motherboards and the stickers the college kids plastered on the side of their old monitors, but I couldn’t find any moose heads or old hockey sticks or valuable comic books that some angry mother threw out or any smoke detectors. Mostly, people just leave them up on the wall, even if they don’t work anymore.