Fight for the Future

by Chogan Swan

  “You were sandbagging last time?”

  “Well, I did get some exercise... in the dancing anyway.”

  As they came up on the rock, Kest said, “So does someone say, 'ready, set, go?'“

  Ayleana and Amber took off, sprinting up the hill.

  Ask a stupid question...

  Kest sprinted after them.

  The most important thing about running uphill is that it sucks. Daniel had taught Kest this fundamental truth when Kest was twelve and old enough to go with him on his PT regimen. On an uphill run, there’s no wind in your face, no giddy rush of speed or obstacles to finesse with vaulting. It's just an effing slog through a miasma of pain. Embracing this truth is the only path to winning. Since—In war—winning is the difference between life and death, embracing the pain is embracing life. At least, that was the gospel according to Daniel.

  Kest was embracing life. He’d managed to make up the loss from his slow start, but Amber churned up the incline with magnificent power. To pass her, he’d have to swing wide enough to avoid her. He knew better than to think she’d give him a free pass.

  The ground below his feet was picking up color, which meant the sun had begun to emerge above the horizon behind him. Kest looked up, surveying the way ahead before returning his attention to making sure his feet landed without stumbling on the steep slope. He dragged the zipper of the field jacket down to cool his body. When he reached the place he’d picked out with his survey, he veered right and pushed harder. Soon he pulled even with Amber and then ahead. After that, it was a simple matter of keeping track of her position by sound and maintaining the pace. In his mind, he made Ayleana the mechanical rabbit to his greyhound—a goal he could strive for, but never reach. At the top, he walked in a circle to cool down. Amber arrived a few steps behind him.

  Ayleana took off her jacket and handed it to Amber. The breeze and chill at the summit didn’t seem to bother Ayleana. Kest took the collapsible bottle of Go Juice out of the pocket and took a few swallows as they waited for Tiana and Jonah.

  “Well that was fun,” Amber said.

  “I’ll make sure I remember your idea of what’s fun,” Kest said, still working on getting his heart rate down.

  “I don’t meet humans who can beat me at running very often. That’s the fun part.”

  “I don’t usually race anyone but myself.”

  “How do you know if you won or lost?”

  “If I’m racing—” Kest tapped his watch. “If it’s just moving through space, I always win.”

  “Nice.” Amber zipped her jacket.

  When Jonah and Tiana reached the top, Jonah took a sip from the tube of his hydration pack then pulled a compact spotting scope from the pack’s storage pocket. He set its tripod on a large rock and pointed it west. “Come see, Kest,” he said.

  Kest leaned into the rock to bring his eye to the eyepiece. In the distance, he spotted a water tower next to a large body of water. A commercial wind turbine spun below the tower. An electronic range finder built into the scope read twenty-one miles. “That must be the Gulf of California,” he said. “So we crossed the border into Mexico.”

  “Yes, about twenty-five miles ago,” Jonah said. “You saw the tower in the middle of the scope?”

  “Water tower? Yeah.”

  Jonah went to the other side of the rock and turned the scope. He pointed it east, using the sightline on top to make sure he wasn’t pointing directly into the rising sun, then sighted in on something a few degrees north. “Take a look now.”

  In the center of the scope, Kest could just make out the top of an odd-shaped spire lying close to the horizon.

  “So the two are connected? What am I looking at?”

  “If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a visit worth? Let’s go. We’ll show you.”

  “How did we cross the border without being stopped?”

  “We have our own treaty with Mexico. We were in communication with them about our trip here. It’s our border with them, and, so far, the UN’s recognition of the United Tribes as a nation has kept the US government from interfering. We’re trying to be good neighbors to everyone.”

  Kest scratched his chin, wondering what the rest of the day would show him.

  “Come on, sis,” Ayleana said. “It’s our turn. Race me back to the bus? Hey!”

  Tiana was already flying down the hill. Ayleana took off in pursuit. The three humans stood and watched, marveling. From where they stood, the finish—which came in mere seconds—looked like a tie, but Tiana may have allowed it.

  “How beautiful,” breathed Jonah. “How different from what one would expect. Yet men can look on such marvels in the universe and not be moved to acknowledge a logos rather than drone on about time and mere chance.”

  “Acta vila!” Kest said.

  “Exactly,” said Jonah.

  Chapter 15 — Sun

  Kest adjusted his passenger-side sun visor... again as Ayleana brought the tank around an easterly bend in the road and throttled up to cruising speed. They were almost back to the border. Daniels had his head poked into the cab section so he could fill Ayleana in on the driving quirks and the construction details of the ambulance. It was armored, built on a heavy-duty, 4WD pickup chassis and ran on bio-diesel from waste vegetable oil. Kest had begun thinking of it as ‘the tank’ about halfway through Daniels’s detailing of its armor and armament.

  “Border station in a half-mile,” said Amber’s voice from the headphones Ayleana wore loose on her neck rather than on her ears. “They know we’re coming through, but we should probably be neighborly and stop to say ‘shap kaij’. They don’t get many visitors here.”

  “Not my first rodeo, Amber,” Ayleana said with a teasing lilt.

  Amber laughed.

  Ayleana rolled her window down as she coasted the tank to a halt and put it in park. She greeted the crossing guards by name in their dialect of O’odham.

  Kest could follow what she said, He’d had three crib languages and, though he didn’t speak it often, this dialect was one. He still remembered his father teaching him words while Kest sat in his lap.

  Ayleana introduced him, and when the guard heard the ‘Tashquinth’ in his name, he asked who Kest's parents were.

  “Arizonac Tashquinth and Yasmin Avsar,” Kest said, figuring his identity was safe enough here.

  Though the guard’s face didn’t change, Kest could tell his parent’s names meant something to him. “Welcome back,” was all he said before turning to walk to the other guards. He spoke to the other guards who all turned to stare at Kest. When Ayleana pulled out of the station, the guards saluted the ambulance as they departed.

  Ayleana turned to look at Kest, “Now that’s something I didn’t know about you.”

  “My parent’s names?”

  “No, that they were made a story that warriors tell by the fire.”

  “That’s news to me too, but you still know more about me than I do about you.”

  “I’m working on it, and it’s complicated. Don’t forget, I don’t remember my whole story either.”

  Kest looked out the window, resting his eyes on the mountains. Strange... he wondered what surprises the fireside version of his parent’s story held.

  Ayleana turned right onto a new asphalt road and headed east.

  Daniels tapped him on the shoulder and pointed ten degrees north of the rising sun. “Put on the sunglasses stored in the visor. You’ll see something there in a few minutes.”

  Kest opened the visor case and put the sunglasses on. The glare disappeared, and the colors jumped out. “These are great. I’m in love.”

  Daniel’s laughed. “You can keep them. I have a dozen pairs. It’s amazing how thousands of years of optical science and a symbiont’s understanding of the human eye can improve something that seems simple.”

  Kest looked at the brand name on the frames. “Really?”

  “The frames are made by them, the lenses... not. The frames are
camouflage in case they fall into enemy hands.” Daniels lowered his voice. “Don’t lose them.”

  Kest nodded and looked where Daniels had pointed. A far-off vertical structure—at this distance, a speck on the horizon—appeared and vanished as the tank dipped in and out of the nap of the earth.

  After a long dip into a valley, the structure became close enough for Kest to see well. “Is it a solar tower?”

  As though in answer, the tower became limned with a halo of bright light.

  Ayleana laughed. “You get points for guessing before that happened.”

  “Are you taking a page from that salt-water farm in Australia?”

  “Are you that guy that guesses all his presents before he opens them?” said Amber from the back.

  “That’s just part of the puzzle though,” Ayleana said. “You’ll see the bigger picture soon, but I'll leave room for Jonah to wax enthusiastic.”

  “I’m just glad he’s already stepped up to bat,” Jonah said. “But yes, Kest, the foundation for this project is built on resources this area has in abundance—salt water, sunshine and wind. But what we are building on that is what I find more interesting.”

  As Jonah spoke, Ayleana brought the tank over a rise in the road and Kest saw the rest of the project’s ‘foundation’.

  The most noticeable item was a vast field of mirrors, though the reflective surfaces faced away from him toward the still rising sun. Across from the mirrors were rows of greenhouses. Wind turbines—looking like tops spinning upside down on poles—stood sentry, strategically placed to protect the greenhouses from wind and provide power. Long pools of water stood in rows around the greenhouses and the central tower.

  Ayleana pulled off the road and parked. “Is this a good spot, Jonah?”

  “This is fine, Aylie.” Jonah ducked into the rear. The van’s back doors thumped into their retaining latches as they opened.

  Kest opened the passenger door and stepped down from the cab to join Jonah, Tiana and Amber at the front. Daniels resumed his perch on the roof. Ayleana came to stand next to Kest.

  Jonah pointed to the tower. “The mirror field directs the sun’s rays onto the solar tower and drives a steam-powered generator as well as running a heat desalination process. The tanks next to the tower store the excess heat for later use. We store the salty water before processing in the pools on that side and use it for aquaculture, evaporative cooling for the greenhouses and a saltwater swimming pool. The pool on the far side is for brine from the desalination. Some people use that for medicinal soaking and high-buoyancy recreation. The evaporative pools further down use dew point water collection for more fresh water. We collect the salt when the pools finish drying. The salt is another thing we export.”

  “The greenhouses seem tall,” Kest said.

  “The vertical space works well for the crops.”

  Kest could see workers inside the greenhouses, planting, tending, harvesting. The one-story parking shelter on the east side of the project didn’t seem large enough to hold all the vehicles the workers would need to commute. ”Some of your staff must live on-site,” he said. “Where do they stay?”

  Ayleana smiled and pointed to the chain link fence that blocked the ground sloping down to the mirror field. Kest looked at the ground once more. It looked like pebbles, sand and cacti. To the left, a two-story, sand-colored adobe wall curved out of the hillside. The ground on the other side of the fence looked different.

  “Camouflaged roofing?” he said.

  “Ready for a closer look?” she said.

  “Lead on.”

  Daniels swung down from the roof. “Good, I’m ready for breakfast.”

  “You’re always ready for breakfast,” Amber said, adding a sniff.

  “Damn right.”

  Chapter 16 — Lunch

  Kest took the last bite of his Chicken Parmesan served over zucchini zoodles and sighed with contentment. It had been a long morning since breakfast, which had been delicious, but served cold. The conversations swirling through the cafeteria were in various tongues: Spanish, Apache, Navajo, O’odham, even English here and there. He’d been all over the project grounds, crawled and walked through infrastructure and seen the different living arrangements from bunkhouses to family suites.

  Tiana had stepped away to handle a few chores, but now she came into the cafeteria and sat across from him. Ayleana sat on his right and Jonah and Amber were on his left.

  “Did you enjoy your meal, Kest,” Tiana said.

  “It was delicious,” he said, looking up at her and grinning. “But you could already smell the answer to that by sampling my endorphins I’m guessing.”

  She smiled back at him. “You are also ready to ask questions, but I’m guessing not just the little ones about what you’ve seen, but the big picture ones. So, go ahead. Ask away.”

  Kest wiped his mouth with the napkin. “I’ve been puzzling over the design of this facility. Given SST’s focus on peaceful resolutions and working together, I’m a bit surprised how focused you are on security. In particular, that the whole facility is hardened to withstand an EMP event that would shut down most of the rest of the country—”

  “FUCK!” Amber exploded.

  “Pay up,” Ayleana said, holding out her hand.

  “One of these days, I will win a bet against you,” Amber growled.

  Jonah laughed. “You should ask for odds of at least twenty to one, you know.”

  “Next time I will.” Amber took a roll of bills out of her pocket and counted out a stack of hundreds. She stopped at ten of them.

  Kest looked at Ayleana, raising his eyebrow. She shrugged with a faint smile.

  “Kest,” said Tiana, “How did you figure that out?”

  “Well,” Kest said. “Everything is aggressively energy efficient, and you use simple tools rather than powered machinery everywhere outside the central complex. The morning meal is served cold and you use direct solar heat exchange for cooking lunch. Though photovoltaic panels are on the roof of the bermed adobe living quarters, I saw metal grids over those. All the windows have metal grids too, and I assume they are in the walls. Huge grounding stakes surround every structure. I don’t know enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures, but their existence is obvious. Your generators are deep underground, so the grids protecting those are no doubt in the concrete. Everything that generates or uses electricity is isolated. Which makes me think everything electrical is inside a Faraday cage.”

  He rubbed his hand over his head and frowned. “It makes me think you know something that almost nobody else is doing anything about.”

  Tiana leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Our intelligence department tells almost ninety percent of individuals with a net worth over one billion have taken precautions like this. Some have combined forces to build larger facilities. None are publicizing their precautions.” She waved her hand to indicate their surroundings. “This isn’t our only protected facility. All our critical operations are protected like this.”

  Kest shook his head in frustration. “SST has made so much headway making models that show ways to work together and build social systems that would take us out of this downward spiral. Why aren’t any of them being used on a large scale?”

  Jonah frowned. “Kest, that question has plagued many people in SST from the beginning. To be honest, I suspected SST would be rejected by the parties and the powers despite the benefits of the science to society, but I still thought we should build it.”

  Jonah leaned forward. ”My thoughts are that it’s because the people who hold political power and wealth are well-served by conflict. The scenarios for rational choice and ‘the highest good for all’ don’t apply to them. The models that fit the behavior of the wealthy are more like the ones Tiana’s people developed to understand their enemies in the parasite wars.”

  Jonah shrugged. “They are more concerned that their slaves—that’s how they see people—stay distracted, fighting over their difference
s. That way they won't notice they are being led by the nose through a system that funnels wealth and power to the rich.”

  He shook his head. “They don’t fear terrorist or foreign EMP attacks as much as they fear that people will wake up. I believe they would rather crash the grids around the world themselves rather than see that happen. That’s why they focus on amassing more power and sheltering it. Their game is flawed. They don’t control the entire world, but they are set on it anyhow. Maybe they see it as the only choice they have. But, EMP devices may not be the only things that blow up if the world comes to that.”

  “So this could happen any time, you think?” Kest said, feeling his stomach sink.

  “Well, they have no reason to ‘pull the plug’ as long as their money keeps flowing. To make an EMP event less likely, we conceal the cooperation and alliances we develop.”

  Kest closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to find his way through all the new ideas. “So what do you have in mind for me? What can I do for you?” He opened his eyes.

  “That is something for you and Aylie to work out,” Jonah said. “She pitched the idea to us, we liked it, but I wouldn’t dream of stepping on her toes. This trip has just been to get to know you and assure you that Aylie has our support for what she has in mind. It will be up to the two of you to work out the details. We’ve made suggestions, but she’ll fill you in.”

  Jonah stood. “Kest,” he stuck out his hand. “It has been a unique and great pleasure to meet you.”

  Kest stood and shook Jonah’s hand.

  “Tiana and I will be here till tomorrow, and you’ll have time to talk with Aylie. The two of you can let us know if you agree on something, and—if you do—what that is.”

  Tiana and Amber stood. “Don’t forget to explain and present my offer,” Amber said, looking at Ayleana.

  “Forget?” Ayleana said. “Are you forgetting to whom you’re talking?”

  “Neglect then.” Amber narrowed her eyes.

  Though the words were combative, Kest sensed affection and trust behind the exchange. Despite Amber's recent loss of what was a big chunk of money to Kest.