Goldstein

by Troy J. Grice

  “Seriously, sir. I’ve been talking to the Chinese. They said they’ve got enough tech to build their own fusion reactor back home. They’re fine with us taking an aggressive posture so long as we play by their rules.”

  “Their rules? Those Chinese bastards are always trying to tell us what to do. They act like they own us.”

  “Listen,” Axel explained as he poured himself a brandy. “The Chinese will green light you to green light me so long as NaPol lets their inspectors in to examine the Goldstein fusion plant.”

  “Not good enough,” President Mellon replied before gulping down his brandy. “I don’t want Chinks getting their little, yellow, paws on our technology. No way.”

  “Well, I think you need to consider this as well.”

  “Quick. I’ve got a ballgame to catch.”

  “Well sir, there’s the problem of the Singularity.”

  “The what?”

  Axel was making it up on the fly. “The Singularity. Goldstein is only months away from assembling its first computer with super-human intelligence.” Axel knew this was not entirely accurate but proceeded out of desperation.

  “So I should be worried about a computer that can kick our ass at chess?”

  “Frankly, yes. It’s a game-changer. They’re already ten years ahead of us. Once they get machines that can outthink their developers, their progress will accelerate. The technology gap between them and us will widen exponentially. This will have huge repercussions for national security. Our containment strategy will no longer suffice. They will be able undermine our security systems and take us on directly. We really need to act soon. The integrity of our security demands action.”

  President Mellon refilled his brandy glass and walked over to the window behind the desk. He stared out at the Whitehouse lawn. The sun was nearly down.

  “What security integrity?” His face became ashen. “You’re joking, right? I’ve got Hajis and Crusaders shooting each other up in fifty cities. I’ve got Mormons ready to take over Idaho. Even the blacks and Mexicans are one price hike away from burning down Atlanta and L.A. So tell me, Axel, what security integrity are you referring too?”

  “Sir, I’m referring to the illusion of security. If that dissolves in the wake of a conventional defeat against Goldstein, anti-patriots everywhere will be emboldened. Things could unravel rather quickly. We are already stretched thin. We need to make a bold statement. Let all these anti-patriots know that disobedience will not be tolerated.”

  “So what are the risks?”

  “Frankly, sir, waiting too long. There’s some intelligence that indicates that they also plan to make a Delivery at some point in the near future.”

  “A Delivery? What is it? Deliver what?”

  Morgenthau knew he had the President on the ropes. It was time to go in for the knockout.

  “No one knows for sure, bio maybe, maybe a dirty bomb, maybe cyber. It’ll be some kind of mass destruction for sure. They know that we’re coming back at some point so they want to hurt us while they still have the chance.”

  “I can’t afford any god damn nuke going off, Axel. You better sterilize that issue before you proceed.”

  “Well,” Morgenthau was interjecting his straw man option, “hypothetically speaking of course, think of how unified it would make the country. The sheeple love a reason to rally around the President. They’d go bananas over it. You’d get twenty points instantly.”

  “Letting a nuke go off is a little bit out there, Axel.”

  “Just a brainstorm,” Axel replied. It was time for the knockout blow. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll make arrangements to pick up a Goldstein ex-patriot and squeeze him for more information before we take any action, just to be safe, of course. I think I have one marked already. Picked him off in a transit checkpoint. Already had a savant get him to self reveal.”

  “What are you waiting for, then?”

  “Green light, then?” Axel asked.

  “No. Interview your anti-pat. Tell me what you find out. If they don’t have a retaliatory capability then I’ll give you the green light.”

  “Excellent. Thank you, sir.”

  “Just don’t screw this up or it’s your ass. I’ll hang it all on you, Axel. And I want the Chinks to let me know it’s okay, too.”

  “I wouldn’t expect it any other way.”

  Mellon drained his brandy. Morgenthau quickly refilled it and the two stared out at the White House lawn while the last sliver of sun was dropping below the tree tops to the west.

  Chapter Seven

  “Hey, Peter Kowalski!” shouted a female voice from behind Devin. He ignored it. “Peter Kowalski! Hey, Polish black dude!”

  Devin suddenly recognized the voice and remembered that Kowalski was an alias from earlier. He turned to look for Ramielle the Gaia-cab driver. “Kowalski, over here!” came the voice again, this time to his left from the street. He scanned through a multitude of unfamiliar faces. “Kowalski! Kowalski! Over here! It’s me, Ramielle!” Devin finally locked on to her black opal eyes that were peering out from the passenger window of her electro. “Get in!” she ordered.

  Devin complied and the whiney electo accelerated down Mugabe Boulevard dodging rickshaws, mopeds, and soot huffing public buses along the way. He buckled the waist and shoulder restraints and pulled the basal skull fracture inhibitors down over his head. The flimsy car creaked and squealed as it weaved through the traffic. It felt as if the slightest pothole would crumble the flimsy car into dust.

  “So, how are you, Ramielle?” Devin asked.

  “Not good,” Ramielle replied. “I’ve been driving by your hotel all morning hoping to spot you. I’m not making any money today.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve done a bad thing, Peter,” she said in a sober tone. “I don’t know if I can make it right but I had to try.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I don’t know you from Adam.”

  “Okay?”

  “So I really shouldn’t give a damn what happens to you.”

  “All right.”

  “But I have a code that I live by.”

  “Really?” Devin asked sarcastically.

  “Hold on, I gotta get off this street. Too much traffic and I can’t talk while I’m dodging potholes.”

  Ramielle maneuvered the electro across two lanes of traffic and into a double turn lane, just missing getting broadsided by a bus by no more than an arm’s length. The dome light in the cab flashed violently red and “1.7 VIOLATION” appeared on the windshield in orange font.

  She tapped the wheel with her thumbs until the green arrow illuminated on her dash permitting her to make the turn. They drove fifty meters or so down the quiet side street and parked alongside the stone buttress of a nineteenth century church.

  “Hang on a second,” she said as she frantically typed into her dashboard keypad.

  While she fiddled with her onboard computer, Devin looked up at the church’s spire. It had a massive crack running down its length all the way to the sidewalk.

  “What happened there?” Devin asked.

  Ramielle glanced up. “The steeple? Lightning got it.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yep. Twice. The first time the Church fixed it. The second time, the city owned it so it couldn’t be repaired.”

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “It’s a religious building and it’s illegal to mix church and state. Listen, I don’t mean to change the subject but I brought you here to warn you.”

  “What if it falls over?” Devin continued.

  “What? The steeple? Well, they can’t demolish it because it’s a protected landmark.”

  “So they can’t repair it and they can’t demolish it?”

  “That’s right. Now stop getting me off track. I have a cheap scrambler in this cab. I’ve got like two minutes or I’m in deep shit.”

  “Okay, go.”

  “So here’s the deal…”

  Dev
in pretended to listen intently but his eyes were fixated on the structure that appeared as if it might topple over at any instant.

  “They are on to you!”

  “Who?” Devin asked, barely attentive.

  “They.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “NaPol.”

  “Impossible.”

  “It’s Possible. Listen to me. When I checked in last night they called me into the manager’s office. They had two men in there and they were definitely nats.”

  “All right, so?”

  “Hello. National Police! Jesus. They didn’t say anything at first. Then my manager shows me my surveillance record and the loops my scrambler built in to cover up our driver cycling racket. I never realized how obvious it looked before it was played back to me. Then he tells me that I’m fired. Fired! I couldn’t believe it. Do you know how hard it is to find a job that pays seventeen hundred bucks per hour? I’ll never get a decent job with unemployment like it is. I’d be stuck on public assistance and unlike you black dudes, Asians don’t get any modifiers.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But you’re still driving, no? So how does this involve me?”

  “It involves you because as I was in tears leaving the manager’s office wondering where I was going to make enough money to feed my cat after I eat his cat food one of the nats stopped me. He grabbed my arm right here, see?” Ramielle rolled up her sleeve revealing a hand-sized bruise on her upper arm. Devin admired the sharp definition of her triceps muscle. “He told me to sit back down. Then he had my manager play more video. This time they showed the cab video and guess who’s face was on it?”

  Devin felt as if ice cold water had been poured down the back of his neck.

  “It was you, Peter, even though I know that’s not your name. They wanted to know who you were. I was scared. I don’t want to eat cat food so I told them everything I knew about you. They checked your multi-card entries and figured it was randomizing aliases. They asked where I took you. They’ve probably already been to Rigoberto and interviewed him too.”

  “Well what should I do, then?”

  “Peter, or whatever your name is, I don’t care what your story is. I don’t really want to know. Live and let live, I say. As for me, I try to live by a code. I know that’s old fashioned but that’s the one thing my dad taught me before he blew his brains out. You’ve got to have a code. Don’t do unto others as you wouldn’t have them do unto you. He called it the Silver Rule. That was his code and now it’s my code, too. But I went and did something to you that was no good. I gave you up and that was wrong. I violated my code. So now I’m making it right the best I can. I’m letting you know. You’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to get your face changed or something. They will be all over you in no time.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “He was a Em addict and a loser. But he was right about that one thing and it’s never done me wrong. I was weak because the nats were going to take my job and my job is all I have— my job and my cat. I’m sorry, but being on assistance is no kind of life. Plus you’ve got to submit to counseling and attitude adjustment meds and twenty-four-seven surveillance. I don’t like being monitored. I don’t want a bunch of perverts at NaPol watching me all the time.” Ramielle started to weep.

  “It’s okay. I’m not upset with you. I appreciate you telling me this but…”

  “Then you are a dumbass! You have no idea what I’ve done. Listen to me! They are coming to get you.”

  “I haven’t done anything too major. If they want to pay me a visit then let them pay me a visit. Maybe I’ll have to pay a fine or do some community service or something. It’s not like I’m a violent offender or anything. I haven’t hurt anyone.”

  “Haven’t hurt anyone? What does hurting anyone have to do with anything? Are you a moron? You broke the law! You broke the law and they enforce the law. And they make all kinds of new laws every day. So many that you can’t even keep track of them. You can’t drink this or eat that or go there or read that. Pay more for this. Pay less for that. Wear this. Can’t wear that. Live here, not there. Drive this, not that. You can be fined for not having a damn flag sticker on your electro, now. It’s a misdemeanor for not standing during the anthem. Some asshole nat’ll pulse you if you step out of a crosswalk. You can’t even grow your own vegetable garden without a license from the The Department of Urban Agriculture.

  So you didn’t hurt anyone, you say? What does hurting anyone have to do with anything? You broke their law and they don’t like that. They make the law and they love to enforce them. That’s what they do and they like their job and we all better obey or we get our brains hotwired.”

  Devin was at a loss. Ramielle continued, “You’ve broken several big laws from what I can tell. They’ll have a hard on for you. How about you’re undocumented for starters. You can’t just go running around the country from city to city and state to state without a security visa approved by the Department of Internal Migration. That alone could land you in a federal gulag for six months. What about changing money with an unlicensed agent? That’s a serious violation. How about…how about possessing gold? That’s a class one federal offense for Christ’s sake. You’re in deep shit. You’ve got all the markers of an ‘anti-pat’, a real terrorist. You’ve got to get the hell out of here while you still have a chance, before they catch you and torture you and hotwire your brain.”

  Devin felt that Ramielle was getting a bit carried away. Still, she maintained an endearing quality in the midst of her boorishness. He attempted to diffuse her rant. “I got it. I appreciate your help. I forgive you.”

  Ramielle lit a hand rolled cigarette that she produced from her money belt, deeply inhaled the illegal contraband and carefully exhaled the blue smoke through a crack in her window. Then she took a small black widget from her bag, set it on her dashboard and switched it on. It puffed out wisps of odor-masking ozone as it hummed.

  “You’re not listening to me. I don’t want your damn forgiveness,” she said as she calmly took another drag from the lumpy cigarette and again carefully exhaled it through the crack in the window. Then she turned fully towards Devin and grabbed him by the collar. Devin was caught off guard by the force of her grip. “Listen to me you dumbass. They will come to your hotel room. They’ll blast the door off the hinges. There’s a good chance that one of the hothead nats will probably shoot you in the head. Then they’ll plant a gun on you and no one will ever know the difference. Then they’ll tell the media that you were a terrorist and the talking heads will report it that way because they’re a bunch of fascist yes men.

  And if they don’t kill you, they’ll drag you down to the station and interrogate you. Do you understand what ‘hotwire’ means? It means they’ll hook neuro-transmitters up to your brain and get inside your head. They’ll download all your thoughts, all your dark perversions and your hatreds and self-loathing stuff. Then they’ll use that crap to humiliate you and break you down. They are serious bastards. Never screw around with NaPol.”

  “Well then,” Devin calmly replied, his voice muffled by his face being smashed against the pads of the basal skull fracture inhibitors by Ramielle’s powerful grip. “What do you suggest I do?”

  “I already told you, idiot. Don’t let them get to you. Get your face changed. Disappear. They think you’re an ‘anti-pat’ and that’s the worst kind of criminal there is. Worse than, murderer, pedophile, and drug dealer put together.”

  “Why’d you risk taking me to the pawn broker in the first place?”

  “Because I like to get paid. Everyone that wants to eat has a black market gig. They don’t want me, anyway. I’m just some dumbass Asian broad to them. They’re after you, the black, Pollock terrorist.”

  “Are you finished, now?” Devin asked prying her fist off his collar. She triggered the passenger door lock and he slipped out of the electro.

  “Wait,” Ramielle commanded before Devin started down the sidewalk.
“At least do this. At least change hotels. The farther east you get the better. Think seedy. Seedier equals safer. You can disappear in plain view. There’s thousands of Peter Kowalskis on the east side.”

  “Where do you suggest I go?”

  “Try the Red White and Blue Hotel.” Ramielle’s dented Gaia-cab whizzed away leaving Devin alone under the fractured steeple. He headed back to the subway station and took the eastbound train to his hotel.

  #

  Devin passed through the subway gate without incident and found the train less crowded than it was in the morning but it still smelled like piss. He wrapped his arm around the grimy hand pole as the train’s electric motors wound up and accelerated the aluminum tube down through the concrete tunnel. The diode lights dimmed and changed colors.

  Holographic advertisements fluttered in the smudged, plexi-glass windows. Surgically enhanced smiles with glistening eyes hocked weight loss medications, marijuana cigarettes (tobacco was illegal), DNA profiling, one hour lyposuction, holographic pornography, all of it on easy credit supplied by Fedbank and only one click away.

  “Demand creates consumption,” he mused. “Consumption creates production. Production creates employment. Employment creates demand.” It was a limitless, infinite, ‘circular flow’ unbound by the limits of reality; a positive ‘feedback loop’ to utopian prosperity. “What a sham,” Devin thought. He saw it for what it was— a huckster’s perpetual motion machine.

  He laughed. The old cars, the potholed streets, the staggering prices were all making sense to him now. As the serfs consumed every fraction of their incomes before prices rose further, they sucked dry the pool of savings that would have made its way into investment in machines and tools and factories which are the very things that are necessary for producing the consumption goods that people desired. The machines and tools and factories that produced consumption goods were withering and rusting and eroding away.

  Faced with falling living standards, the politicians, cartel executives, and bankers had resorted to the only means of maintaining power they could devise. They created an illusion of wealth by key-stroking money and doling it out in the form of easy credit, bailouts, and welfare.