The Father of the Founding Fathers sits there listening. “The Whiskey Rebellion,” he says. “It’s a catchy name. Who doesn’t like whiskey? Who doesn’t like rebellion?”
Witherspoon’s eyes search their blackness for brain images called up by the patterns of the noise. Might be a wall of sound to anyone else, but The Father can navigate the mess just like he’s pressing down shortcut keys with the letters all rubbed off. “The gimmicks and the diatribes change. New catch phrases and symbols. False heroes, imaginary villains, endless floundering clowns. But the game, the game doesn’t change.” He nods to where he thinks the orderly is still sitting, lost somewhere in the Dream, says to the empty room, “The game is: What are we going to get and who is going to pay?” Witherspoon listens to tangled feeds, digging deeper and deeper and deeper. “You want to know who’s winning? Just look at who’s getting the most and paying the least.”
Witherspoon snaps himself free from the grip of his own thoughts, moves his hands in slow arcs over the surface of the desk. Leans forward to reach way into the corners. “Boy, where is my glass of water?” But then he has it. Takes a sip. Turns to face where the orderly was sitting last Witherspoon heard him. “Federalists say this Whiskey Rebellion is the beginning of the end. That what’s happened in France has spread back here.” He pauses for another sip. “And my Republican friends, they say the Revolution just continues. That the new tyrants are American tyrants. That unless a stand is made, everything that has been won thus far will be rolled right back. Both sides saying that to not see what’s going on is to not be an American, at least not a patriotic one.”
Witherspoon pushes on his knee so he can be standing, finishes the water with one long sip, and holds out the glass for the orderly to take. Lets it go and it drops onto a pillow that has fallen to the floor. Lands and settles noiselessly on the cushion. And so he thinks the kid has it and he still doesn’t know: It’s just him in that room, all alone.
“Back in ancient Greece,” Witherspoon says, and he straightens then, as perpendicular to the floor as he can manage. Face up square to the room, as if addressing some collection of selected men—it’s him, The Father. “Advanced thinkers of the classical world managed to pry open a small fissure in the very fabric of reality. Into it, they placed an organism: democracy. It was the pure and boiled‐down essence of that present and perfect moment. And here we are again, thousands of years later, the latest in a long line of cultures figuring out our own way of living that again.”
He cracks himself from that rigid, scholarly pose. Begins his feeble way toward the bed. “That’s what we did with The Declaration. It’s a masterpiece, the best slogan ever, the kind you can build eons’ worth of civilization on.” Witherspoon seems to be transporting himself, back to that hot meeting room in Philadelphia, all those years ago. The Second Continental Congress and the room pocked with his pupils, men he taught the law now teaching the world what’s about to come next. And maybe it’s what he’s seeing, because it can’t just be darkness. Not all the time. His mind must find things, if only memories, hallucinations to put in the place of his vision all gone.
Witherspoon reaches the bed and sits. Swings one leg up and then the other. Waves a hand to ward off any help from the orderly who’s not there. “The world for me exists in the moment I went blind. Always will.” He lies back flat in the bed. “1779, frozen forever in time.”
Thomas Lynch :: February 13th 1795
Thomas Lynch and his wife sailed away from America right when the Revolution went from talking and signing things to a real goddamned war. Because who wants to be around for something like that? If it’s not your own government demanding money and sons, and requisitioning your livestock and crops, then it’s the enemy army doing the same thing and then burning the whole farm down to boot. Raping women, smashing babies, torturing grown men to death—an army on a rampage through the countryside, not a pretty sight. Whole thing makes Thomas Lynch sick is what it does. Just plain sick. So it was out to live on the ocean just until things settled down.
They were able to follow the war online for a little while, but when word came through that The Death was transmittable through the Internet, they threw all the computer equipment right off the plank. “The Death,” his wife said, watching their laptops and smart‐phones sink into the oceany blackness, “must be real wild.”
It was the first time they’d lived off the grid, the first time long term on the ocean too. It turned out to not be so bad. Instead of checking email, they checked the breezes. For feeds, they had each other’s eyes. Bed was like a water bed even though there was no water in it. On clear nights, they’d climb from the cabin and watch the stars shift above as the Earth and the Milky Way hurtled into new stretches of the universe.
It was a few years before they got their first pangs of curiosity, about what was happening back on the mainland. And so they sailed in toward the shore, found a coastline abandoned, ships left bobbing in the low water, towns like frozen captures of towns deserted, no sign of the war or either army. Thomas Lynch checked some old‐fashioned maps and charts. He looked at a compass and told his wife they were maybe off the coast of one of the Carolinas. They trolled southward until a small refugee camp opened up with cannon fire, forcing them back into the ocean. America sure looked worse than the America they’d grown up in. And that was under British rule.
A year or so later, they went in toward the shore again and there wasn’t any shore. It was just more sea despite what the charts and maps and compass said. Then the continent was suddenly there, not they drew close and it came into view, or like a fog lifted, but it just appeared, the entire coast all at once and only a hundred yards from the bow. High atop the closest crags, a dark‐clad witch stood with arms spread, spells streaming from her fingers, making waving colors of the land that stretched out before her.
And so off they went again, out to sea. In the swelling storms and the glassy windless days. Nothing as far as the sun could shine. Just the two of them and the slaves and all the fish they could eat. This was their own private America. They could make it however they wanted. Imagine it, and then create it, and then live inside it, all right there on the boat. The two of them. And the slaves.
A few months later, they got curious again, maybe even a little homesick. And so they swung an arc in toward the shore, just to see what was happening in everybody else’s America. But all they saw were piles of bodies and nothing else.
The next time they sailed in close, the bodies were still there, but now being loaded onto a flying saucer, which tilted and wobbled, then slipped through a gaseous portal that tore open in the sky. The next time, it was a whole fleet of saucers with spikes and tubes stuck into the ocean and black sludge in the water for weeks after.
“Gosh,” Thomas Lynch said to his wife, “everybody else’s America sure looks like it sucks a big dick.”
His wife smiled. “But, Thomas, do you know what sucked the biggest dick ever?”
He looked at her blankly.
“Martha Washington.”
And you could see it in their smiles, the love it would take to live this way. Back out they sailed, into the endless churning of the sea.
Finally, on their most recent trip in, America looked kind of like the America they’d always imagined it could be, ships clogging the bay with commerce, a bustling port town beyond, church bells pealing so loud you could just see the goofy smile on the guy yanking the rope. But as they drew close, several open fires came into view, burning in the streets. Lynch sailed alongside a schooner and asked what was happening, and the captain told him the people were burning Federalists in effigy. “What’s a Federalist?” Thomas Lynch wanted to know.
“Cabal of trust‐fund babies and merchants that’s taken control of the government.”
“But what about George Washington? Can’t he stop them?”
“Washington is the leader, most powerful Federalist there is.”
So maybe that was it, then, that su
cked the biggest ever. Off they went back to sea, because who wants to live in an America run by Federalists, whatever that is.
But the worst thing they’ve ever seen was just one day ago. Sun beating down on them and not a single fish in the sea. Food stores empty for the third straight day. Thomas Lynch and some of the slaves got a flash of hope when they looked over the side of the boat at the first school of fish in weeks. But it wasn’t any school of fish. No, this was all one fish, changing textures and reflecting bits of daylight when its parts came closest to the surface. For five minutes it swam beneath them. When finally the ocean had gone back to just ocean, a man floated to the top. They fished him out and he was dead alright, dead and drained of blood. They had to try to eat him. Didn’t have any choice. What are they going to do, starve on principle? But when they started cooking him, he cracked and burned like wood, got so hard to chew it was like eating wood chips too. It was some dry meat.
A storm came that night, the swells dropping them into watery caverns and then lifting them up so the endlessness of the ocean could come crushing in. They held hands and decided this is the event they would not survive. But here they are, the next morning and the ocean calm and they’re just as alive as the day they left.
“Sixteen years it’s been.”
A rumbling under the boat gets everybody rushing out of their cabins. Thomas Lynch looks over the side and sees a little bit of that thing that’s not a school of fish. And when he looks up, something huge and fleshy is lashing down toward him and he thinks, Oh is that a fucking tentacle?
Yep. Wraps him up and it’s the last thing he sees: the tentacle, real close up. It’s translucent enough that he can make out where the sun is through the flesh. But that’s about all, a tint of the blue sky, some fluid that must be running through the muscles of the tentacle. Can’t breathe but he doesn’t have time to suffocate. Little pins come piercing from the tissue all around him and he suddenly feels cold, cold and bloodless.
Josiah Bartlett :: May 19th 1795
When Doc Bartlett opens the door, it’s not George Washington standing there as he’d expected. Instead, Lachlan McIntosh has come to see him. “I was made to understand General Washington was coming.”
McIntosh shrugs, steps in, leaves Bartlett there holding the door. “The President has many important things to do.”
“When he hears what I have to say, he’s going to have a different understanding of what’s important.”
They descend the steps to the lab and there it is, the crystal Bartlett’s been studying all these years. It sits on a pedestal in the center of the room, various machines and readers and electronic devices gathered around it. Bartlett presses a button, pulls back on a lever and three pin‐thick beams of light strike the crystal. As McIntosh watches, the crystal begins to glow a deep, fiery red.
“What is it, Doc?”
“The crystal creates a field.”
Bartlett can all but see the military excitement bristling the air around McIntosh’s body. “What’s it do, this field?”
“Not sure ‘do’ is the right word. It emits”
“Emits?”
“Energy,” Bartlett says. “But that’s not all. It has temperature variants that allow it to store tremendous amounts of information.” Bartlett pauses to let what he’s about to say hit full. “The entire old Internet and all of Newnet would both fit inside a piece even a hundredth the size of this one.”
Bartlett begins circling the crystal, a pretty good job of being on the opposite side as the general without making it look like he’s trying to. “We haven’t found any more of these?”
McIntosh shakes his head. “Seems like the Off‐Worlders took the rest.” The general picks at his nails. “We even dug up some Indians. Crystals were all pulled out. Gruesome, really.” McIntosh stares deep into the crystal. “So what do you think the Off‐Worlders were planning to do with a few million of these?”
Instead of an answer, Bartlett slams his hand on a blinking yellow button. A sudden flash from the crystal blinds McIntosh. Doc Bartlett grabs the crystal, lowers his shoulder into the flailing general and through the door. McIntosh, holding his eyes, gets off a wild shot with that pearl‐handled pistol. But the bullet vanishes harmlessly into the wall.
Bartlett bounds down the steps a stride at a time, out onto the side porch, hears behind him the sound of glass breaking. Something whizzes by his ear. He ducks around the side of the building, comes out onto Main Street, where the citizenry is gathering for another burning of a straw John Jay. Across the street, McIntosh is filling up the frame of the front door, still rubbing his eyes. Picks Bartlett out from the crowd and levels his pistol.
A spark, a puff of white smoke, but that’s it—a backfire. The two men’s eyes meet and each smiles. John Jay goes up then, filling the street with swirls of white and black smoke. People yell huzzas and chant anti‐Federalist slogans they’ve all heard chanted on the Dream. By the time the haze clears, Bartlett is in a full sprint, zig‐ging and zagging alleys. Brakes into a clearing and then the woods beyond.
The next day, Doctor Benjamin Rush is sitting at his desk when Bartlett taps on the window and then climbs on in. Rush doesn’t need to ask what’s in the satchel bag. Pretty much common knowledge for those in the know that Doc Bartlett has gone on the run with the crystal. Shady SOC operatives are trolling the streets of every American city looking for any sign of the old Doc.
“So what’s all the commotion about?” Rush asks. “Why don’t you just give them the crystal?”
“We’ve got bigger problems than whether or not the Federalists get a hold of this crystal.”
Rush takes a slow step backward, feeling for a chair with his hand. When he’s found it, he lowers himself down. “Problems like what?”
Doc Bartlett thinks a moment. “I know it’s the same thing that happened to Sherm. After a couple years of chasing it around, everything starts being about the curse. Still, I can’t help but wonder, maybe 1826 is the year the population meets some benchmark, makes it profitable for the Off‐Worlders to return. Another round of The Death. They come and harvest the crystals. Fifty more years go by and they do it again.”
“This is only a theory, right? You don’t have any, like, evidence?”
“Rush, imagine if every person in the US knew that the Off‐Worlders grew these things inside of us… on purpose.” Bartlett leans back on the window sill. “Means they sent The Death. Means the whole Earth, Rush, is just a farm for these crystals. They crop‐dusted us, Ben.” Outside, the noise of another Franklin’s Dream meetup that’s come over from Newnet, chanting about George Washington’s slide toward monarchy. “Country’s already busting seams,” Bartlett says. “Introduce this little nugget of information, the place will fly part.”
There’s a commotion from the floor below them. Some voices. Doors opening and closing. Footsteps that begin up the stairs. Rush keeps looking around strangely. Both doctors have gone quiet to listen. Rush says then, “Well, if you’re going to go for it, you better get out the back.”
“Damn it, Rush.” Bartlett starts back out the window. “Least you can do is stall them for me.” He shimmies down the same drain he shimmied up a few minutes before, takes his horse around to the front so he can tie the bridle to the bridle of the other horses. Slaps a few asses and they start pulling and kicking and it becomes like one animal, not something you could ever ride. Bartlett slips a few side streets and then he and the satchel bag and the crystal are up under a tarp on a wagon headed westward out of Philadelphia.
Couple of nights in a bar outside York. Then farther west. Safe enough for a small bed and breakfast. Stays off Newnet, threw his phone away back before Philly. Been a while since he’s spent so much time in the real. Michigan territory. Kind of nice actually. Quiet. Mellow. Makes him wonder how mad people really are about the Jay Treaty, way away from the Dream and its constant screaming.
Bartlett’s trotting a trail south of Detroit when he has to duck a gro
up of Indians, all in a hurry to be somewhere else. He hears a little later some more hooves clopping behind him, thinks it’s the Indians again, but when he looks back, the twins are there. “Doc Bartlett,” they both say. One of the horses has a brown dot over its left eye. Other than that, the horses are identical too. “Where’s this trail lead?” one of them asks.
Bartlett’s not running away, but he’s keeping his horse moving enough that the twins can’t quite catch up. “You guys here to stop me too?”
“Not stop, no.”
“But it would be nice if you came with us.”
“What’s Jefferson want with the crystal?”
“Potentialities for human improvement.”
Bartlett’s shaking his head. “That’s not going to work, not in this thing we’ve built. The public finds out and they’ll vote to turn it into a weapon, something to use against France, or the Off‐Worlders, or whoever or whatever they’re scared of right then.”
The twins have heeled their horses faster, but so has Doc Bart‐lett. The distance between them remains. “You think they will?” one twin says.
“Come back?”
“The Off‐Worlders?”
Bartlett has reached the crest of a small hill. The twins’ horses, at that moment, are sunk a full shoulder lower. The doctor’s glancing back at them. All eyes tighten as Bartlett spurs full‐throttle into a ticket down the hill’s far side. By the time they all break into a clearing, Bartlett has put some longitudinal space between them. He leaps over a rocky brook, the horse stumbling on the far side, but then it’s up, sprinting into the sage, leaves the twins reigning up and cursing, back on the other side. Doc Bartlett hazards a quick look back then kicks harder, smiling, headed for that big mountain in the distance.
A lone Indian comes looping out of the tree line that waits at the base of the mountain, pulls his horse up alongside Bartlett’s. “Suppose you knew I’d be here,” he tells the doctor.
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