The Remaking

by J. T. O'Connell

  This was a rare building in Megora. The Council usually opposed leaving any reminder of the old society behind. The Remaking was meant to be exclusively forward-looking.

  Sela only knew about a handful of these buildings. And each had to get special exemption to be permitted to remain.

  She wondered just what the owners of this place had done to protect it. Probably, someone reasonably important liked visiting this rustic eatery, and decided to shove it under the radar, protect it from the grand schemes that swept so much of Detroit away. Not everyone liked monolithic buildings whose sole purpose was to inspire awe and worship of the Provisional Council and their grand schemes.

  Desmond held the door open for Sela, and then followed her inside. Plenty of windows and open doors flooded naturalighting through the dining room, adding to the quiet buzzing of the bulbs overhead. Several of the walls had been removed to connect rooms into one broad dining room.

  Little tables were stashed all around, with a few in the center. Half a dozen people sat in pairs all over.

  A waiter about fifty years old carried a tray of breakfasts over to a table. He smiled at them in passing and said, “Pick out a table, and we’ll be with you shortly.”

  Desmond led the way through the room, and out onto a side-patio that was screened in, with waist-high walls.

  The view wasn’t that impressive. An island in the middle of the road had scrubby grass trying to survive on minimal sun exposure. A few small trees fared little better. Besides that, only the bleak and bare exoskeletons of enormous buildings stretched as far as the eye could see. Pedestrians and bicyclists moved past the patio.

  Desmond drew out a seat and bade Sela to sit in it, so she did, trying to remember the last time someone had done that for her. It hadn’t happened in the Tower of Hope. When she was younger? She couldn’t remember.

  Desmond pulled off his jacket and spread it on the back of his chair. Underneath, he was wearing a faded, green-and-white striped polo. For so thin a person, Desmond still had upper arms toned from hard labor.

  As he sat down, a waitress approached, much younger than the host, although she looked like she could be his daughter. She introduced herself and took their orders; milk and a toasted bagel for Sela, and oatmeal with brown sugar and coffee for Desmond.

  Once the waitress left the patio, Desmond asked, "You have made your decision then?"

  Sela nodded, "I don't want to join until I know more about your group and your plan."

  "But you might join," he squinted.

  "If I like what I find out, maybe." Sela didn't want him to jump the gun.

  Desmond smiled broadly, "Good, good. It's good of you to be careful."

  She halfway frowned.

  "Oh, I wasn't testing you." Desmond leaned forward over the table. "It's just reassuring that you're very careful in how you approach everything."

  "Yes, I am," Sela agreed, speaking with reservation.

  "Caution is very important," Desmond began, still leaning forward, speaking quietly. "It's not the most important thing in this business, but you can't get anything done without it."

  He paused while the waitress dropped off their food, and then resumed when she went back inside the house. "It's not just keeping yourself from getting caught." He pushed his spoon into the oatmeal. "The more careful you are, the more methodical, the more you can actually do."

  Sela cut a slice off her bagel and tasted it. The cream cheese wasn't the best she'd ever had. It never was, in Megora.

  Desmond went on, "The larger your network, the more awareness you have about everything going on, the faster your response to new situations. The only way to be effective is to outpace your enemy's ability to process."

  Sela shook her head, "I don't understand what you mean." In truth, it all made sense but it was all abstract concepts. She wanted to know the actual plan.

  “Well, I mean… Look around,” Desmond gestured toward the street, all the people striding by on their way to wherever they were going. “The Council is micromanaging everything under the sun. Knowledge and Decisions; those two things have become the primary enemy of the Remaking.”

  Sela scrunched her face and shook her head again. Now she really was lost.

  “See, every decision you make takes a certain amount of knowledge and effort on your part; when to get up in the morning, where to eat lunch, what sort of job you do. You make those choices for you.”

  Sela chuckled grimly, “Only to a certain extent, Desmond.”

  He smiled and squeezed a fist together, “Exactly! A lot of regular choices are being compelled by the Council. They’ll say, ‘Oh, all of this is bad for you, so you can only choose this.’” He shifted his hands across the table, corralling in a little section of placemat.

  “But the problem for us is, they don’t have all the knowledge you and I have about our own lives. They don’t even have one tenth of one percent of the knowledge we have about our lives!”

  “Such as what, for instance?” Sela asked.

  “Such as what temperature you like to set for your apartment, how much exercising you want to do, what medical care you get.”

  “That’s true,” Sela mused. The healthcare system in Megora was particularly deplorable, at least for the common folks. The facilities in the Tower of Hope had been nothing short of miraculous.

  She added, “But I already know all that Desmond.” She leaned in and spoke more quietly, worried someone inside might overhear. “You don’t have to sell me on how deplorable the Provisional Council is.”

  A vision of her mother, comatose on a hospital bed, hooked up to those miraculous machines to keep her alive. It had been some type of poison, radioactive poison.

  Sela pushed the thoughts away, trying to expunge the anguish within, for at least as long as breakfast lasted.

  Desmond ate a spoonful of the oatmeal and then said, “Here’s the thing, Sela; it doesn’t just harm us. It hurts them. It makes them incredibly vulnerable.”

  Sela blinked. “How? How could that possibly hurt the Council? Giving them too much power?”

  “In essence, yes.” Desmond smiled wryly. “They aren’t just taking away more of your right to choose. They are assuming the responsibility of making those choices for you."

  "Yeah, but then they mess it all up! They don't care what I want or," Sela glanced out to Megora, "what anyone out there wants. They tell us what we should want."

  "And you end up with a lot of people unhappy and dissatisfied. You end up with black markets." Desmond said.

  "And the rich have all the money," Sela finished. "And they keep the rest of us from getting money."

  "Well, close but it's a little more detailed than that," Desmond said. "We can talk about that later. The point here is that the Council bogs themselves down in a hopeless task. The only way to efficiently make these decisions is to leave them in the hands of the marketplace; let everyone make their own choices within a framework of fair and just laws. That is the point; efficiency."

  "Efficiency," Sela repeated the word as a question.

  Their waitress came back out with a pot to refill Desmond's coffee. Sela realized she had hardly touched her milk, and it was now warming.

  "Efficiency is very important. You see," Desmond glanced to make sure the waitress had fully left the patio, "the Remaking assumes so much authority, the Council cannot hope to hold on to it forever."

  "So you think they Council is going to collapse?"

  Desmond shook his head, swallowing another spoonful of oatmeal, "No, but it will be forced to prioritize in order to stay above all the crises it's creating. And that's where we come in."

  Sela closed her eyes and took a breath. She didn't understand what he was talking about, didn't follow what he was getting at. "I… What you're saying…" she began, unable to even construct a proper question.

  "Efficiency, Sela." Desmond licked his lips and then wiped them with a napkin. "The Council already had to leave huge portions of the Remaking of
f the table. They simply cannot get the people required to do the work they want to do."

  "Ookaay," she said slowly. "So, we have black markets because the government knows they can't stop it?"

  "Oh, they can stop it, but the problem is so many people use the black markets." Desmond raised a quizzical eyebrow, "You think they can't stop ghosting completely? Of course they can't, because too many people want to get around the system, too many programmers will take money to do the hacks. Besides, the Council doesn't just have to solve ghosting. It has to manage agricultural production, transportation, communication, security, inter-city commerce, and fight battles with those still on the outside."

  "Like Sovereign City?" Sela asked, perking up.

  "Sovereign City and a few hideouts out there in America. Other parts of the world have to deal with other problems. The Muslim world refuses to be ruled by a world government, for instance. They see the Remaking as overruling Allah, since they think Sharia should rule the world. South America has much more turmoil than we have here. And Australia is essentially still free and fighting an actual war."

  Desmond beamed as he spoke, still careful to keep his voice down so only the pair of them could hear. He was excited though, thrilled to be part of something so meaningful and important. He didn't just understand the situation and live with it. He was setting himself to change it, as best he could.

  And considering what Sela thought of the government, she found that admirable. More so than her own habit of hiding her emotions and trying to eke out a living.

  "Going back to what you were saying earlier—"

  "About efficiency?"

  "About efficiency," Sela acknowledged. "You say the Council can't do a good job of making these decisions."

  "Right," Desmond nodded.

  Pausing, Sela took a slow sip of her milk and then set it down, thinking for a while. "You actually think they want to do a good job?"

  Desmond leaned back and rubbed a hand over his chin. "That's hard to say." He thought for a few breaths and then sighed, "At worst, it's a mixed bag. Many just love the power, sure. But there are people calling the shots who truly believe in the Remaking."

  "And yet, you're saying they're too stupid to understand what you mean about efficiency?"

  "To refresh an old quote, it's very hard for a man to understand a truth when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it. Look," he leaned forward again, "at the core of this, it really doesn't matter who is pure at heart and who is not."

  Sela's father flickered through her mind, and she felt her heart clench for a split second. Desmond couldn't know though. He couldn't! Could he?

  "We can't judge anyone's intentions. That's for the next life. We have to judge their actions, and more importantly, we have to make sure that our actions are virtuous, that we bring justice where we can."

  The sparks in Desmond's eyes were not just excitement. There was wisdom in what he was saying. She wondered, how has he come to learn all this?

  "They just don't know what's going on, do they?" Sela wondered out loud. She had lived in the Tower of Hope. Many of the Council never left that building, or if they did, it was to go to other supercities or other buildings exclusive to the elite. She knew how things worked, had a vague notion of it anyway.

  Efficiency had never crossed her mind though. It just seemed like a pack of control freaks trying to manipulate what other people did with themselves. Efficiency?

  That was a serious concern, now that she thought about it. How could the Council know how many socks to give each family, unless they knew every detail of life for those in that family?

  Maybe someone somewhere has a peanut allergy. But if the government is responsible for the foods kids eat, either the allergic kids will die, or the foods that can cause allergic reactions will be banned. Was that why you had to go to the black market to get peanut butter?

  If you just gave people the right to declare what they needed, and the government would have to provide it, everyone would empty the warehouses immediately. There would be permanent shortages of everything, because no production could ever keep up with unlimited demand.

  The Council was going halfway. They let the people make choices with their own money in the marketplace, but kept tight reigns on production, consumption, and distribution. Regulation, subsidies, taxes, agencies meant to oversee what everyone did to make sure it was in compliance with Council mandates…

  The government was such a massive organization, Sela could hardly wrap her mind around it. It drove regular people crazy trying to comply with the Remaking.

  But it had never occurred to Sela that the Council might not be a unified body, that it might have conflicting views and interests, and even conflicting departments that set contradictory rules. It might be trying to do so much that it cannot do any of it effectively.

  Efficiency.

  Sela felt a warmth of realization settle in. It was either the toasted bagel, which altogether was decent, or it was a new gleam of confidence that Desmond wasn't part of the average Unmaker group.

  Sela smiled vaguely and asked, "How do we use it to our advantage?"

  "The inefficiency?" Desmond asked. When she nodded, he leaned forward and began to scrape the last remnants of oatmeal into a final spoonful. "We help people get what they need without the Council getting in the way. We poke at the seams where the Council is just about to lose control. We give any personal liberty we can back to the people."

  He smiled broadly this time, "Since they've got so many rules causing so many problems, we solve those problems by being mischievous, by sneaking around the rules."

  That didn't sound at all like the sort of answer an Unmaker would give. A year earlier, the Agency of Vision claimed to have caught a small cell that had been planning to bomb the Tower of Hope. Like that would ever work… Even if it wasn't true, Sela still remembered how foolish that had sounded, on every level.

  It was a huge citadel, and built for endurance. Sela didn't know anything about explosives, but she guessed it would take a small nuclear weapon to destroy the Tower. And besides, most of the agencies and all of the Guides were controlled out of different buildings, because the power brokers at the top couldn't abide rubbing elbows with the commoners who undertook the mundane task of implementing minutiae of their will.

  The Tower of Hope was exclusive to the highest echelons; for their residences, for their entertainment, for the enjoyment of luxury. Numerous levels held purely aesthetic eccentricities, such as a massive arboretum that consumed half a dozen levels, easily an eighth of a mile across.

  Bombing the Council's personal playground would do nothing but ratchet up the pressure on Unmakers. It was a fantasy, more than a practical step toward ending Council control.

  Who knows, Sela thought. Maybe the whole plot had been a lie concocted by the Agency of Vision. And maybe not.

  Desmond wasn't talking about anything like that. There was something… else in what he was saying. She couldn't quite grasp what it was. He had given her a lot to think about.

  That would have to come later though.

  As they finished up, Desmond paid the bill, leaving another abnormally-large tip. He was smiling again. She thought of his joke from the night before and rolled her eyes when he looked at her.

  Desmond laughed and said, "Next time, I'll let you pay, if you want."

  Sela adopted her best devilish smile, "Oh, I don't know. This has worked out pretty well for me so far."

  Desmond laughed again. They said goodbye to the waitress, and thanked her father for the good breakfast.

  Stepping out and down the porch steps, Desmond offered, "I tell you what, Sela, I'm on my way to go meet some of the people I work with. You're welcome to come along and meet them. I think it might make you more comfortable."

  Sela breathed in the air and smelled the ozone billowing out of a vent that exchanged air with the magtrain tunnels. The acrid air bit at her nostrils.

  Megora was functioning.
But then, most alcoholics could function. That didn't make it the best way to live.

  It made sense, to fight the Remaking the way Desmond described. The Council had taken on the task of caring for everyone. Why should everyone in Megora have to slink around in the darkness to try to make ends meet, just because the Remaking was way more than the Council could handle?

  "Yeah, I think I'll come along," Sela answered. To herself she added, if they're all like you, Desmond, the Remaking won't know what hit it…

  Chapter 6

  The jostling magtrain car carried them through the darkness. Desmond was quiet and reserved. Sela kept an eye on the other passengers, aware that he was doing the same.

  She wondered if people would think they were a couple. It really didn’t matter what they thought. In fact, that might be better; all those strangers dismissing them from memory as another pair of lovers going their merry way.

  There were many people who informed to the Guides, offering up the tiny scraps of whatever they saw. Sometimes, the Council authorized the Guides to dispense cash rewards, if a tidbit turned out to be useful. Some few others, and you could sometimes tell who, actually believed in the Remaking and wanted to help along its dance of insanity.

  Time was already moving on toward midday. Most of Megora was at work. The trains were half-empty. As they rode, Sela thought about Desmond's resolve. He was admirable in many ways. He was different from Unmakers.

  Sela had always thought Unmakers were groups of people trying to collect enough followers and people to storm the government, take the whole thing over by force. It just tasted bad in her mind.

  The Council ruled through the Guides and their army of bureaucrats. What was to stop any other armed force from doing essentially the same thing, once they got rid of the establishment?

  And what if the Council from every other supercity decided to take Megora back? What then? One lonely, rotting-new supercity couldn't hope to win in a fight against the whole worldwide Provisional Council.