by P. J. Kelley
Outside the large room, Gwen could hear the sound of gunshots and screaming in the distance. These noises filled everyone with foreboding. Gerard went to the door, and opened it, and had a brief discussion in low tones with a uniformed Homeland Security agent. The content of that discussion would not have cheered her. At the far end of the large complex, several hundred Psychos had managed to topple a fence and had fought their way in. They had taken the security guards by surprise, and now even the members of Homeland Security responsible for filming the game were drafted to try to put down the uprising so the breach could be mended.
Gwen watched as Amiko began reading the names of those chosen for the next group. Joe, the Staten Island crack addict was called to the front, where he stood looking a bit wild-eyed. Marie, the pretty girl who was wearing a bandage on her nose was called up as well. The extremely self-assured young man named Charlie was also summoned. He had already established himself as the resident expert on rehab and the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous to the others over the course of several small orientation sessions since they had all come in two days ago.
George was up next. He had also been to several rehabs. His family had some money. Gwen had seen his father drop him off, and he had been driving a new BMW. George didn’t seem like a bad sort of person, really, and he was appealing in a low rent James Dean kind of way. His problem was dope. He hadn’t yet graduated to shooting it, but he was smoking it and sniffing it so much that it was just a matter of time.
When Gwen’s name was called, she felt a wave of weariness. There had been some moments in the past few days when she had felt a flash of recognition, a sense that there were some elements in the rehab process that could help her. This felt wrong, like a surrender to anarchy. The last thing she glimpsed before being hustled through the door was Amiko’s smiling face.
They were herded into the minibus in no time. Charlie and Joe were immediately arguing over who would drive. George and Marie seemed extremely absent for the moment, as if preoccupied with their own plans. Gwen didn’t really care who was going to drive. Joe kept talking about how he drove for a living, and Charlie appeared offended that his superiority could even be questioned. Somehow, even though The Steelers completely panicked when swarmed by the Pill G Heads at the gate, they made it out with Joe at the wheel and Charlie screaming instructions at him. As the bus lurched forward, the windshield antenna was slightly damaged in the middle as a Psychos jawbone bounced off the magnetic strips running down the center. Also, what looked like some kind of fog lights on the roof were shattered and ripped off. Still, the bus seemed fully functional even after the brief but frenzied battering.
Soon they were cruising down the same strip of highway just traversed by The Celtics. It wasn’t long before they too drove past the swarmed RV. To Gwen, it all seemed like scenes from a nightmare. Joe, George, and Marie were adamant about getting to New York as quickly as possible, so very little discussion of the goals took place. Charlie seemed to be lapsing into some kind of madness, his eyes were glazed and he babbled incoherently about Gerard, and the underlying philosophy of this Provision 3313 as it related to their recoveries. Joe drove like a madman, and had apparently developed a great hatred for Charlie after only a brief association, which he expressed by refusing to acknowledge his existence on any level. Marie and George said nothing, and Gwen was left to stare out the window and wonder to herself how it had all gone so wrong.
As soon as everyone was agreed, Joe jumped off 33 onto 22 and headed for a steel bridge over the Delaware River, using the GPS as his guide. I-80 was out of the way, he said, and likely to be jammed up. This way, they could get on Highway 10 and be in New York in two and a half hours, easily.
Chapter Five- Cowboys and Angels
The third team selected was also hustled off to their minibus 15 minutes after the second Steelers had departed. These unfortunates had a few disadvantages. The Pill G heads were waiting for them, the area before the second gate was littered with bodies, making it more difficult to traverse, and the sight of all the Pill G Heads swarming the minibus completely fractured the nerves of Marie, the gentle heroin addict from New Jersey. She fought to get out of the bus, as it lurched and stalled as the engine suddenly quit, with black smoke pouring out of it,. Although she was restrained, she did manage to open the back emergency exit a little, and that was all it took. Every member of The Cowboys was dragged out of the bus and literally torn apart by the crazed Psychos. Homeland Security had a devil of a time driving the Psychos out so they could clean up what was left and get the bus out of the way for the next group, who were delayed as a result.
Of course, these deaths were noteworthy. Each member of The Cowboys had been somebody’s baby once, and the needless human tragedy was an unforgivable waste.
Marie’s presence on the bus had been ill fated in several respects, though realistically, even if she hadn’t panicked The Cowboys would have been doomed anyway. Homeland Security Forces were under strict orders not to intervene when the bus stalled, even if they had not still been distracted by the Psycho attack. Her presence was doubly unfortunate because she did not even belong on that bus. At the best of times, bureaucracy does not run smoothly, so of course The Machine must be expected to skip beats when greatly stressed. It must not come as too great of surprise, then, to hear that Marie had been placed on the wrong bus. She had actually been meant to be a Steeler, not a Cowboy, but the fact that she looked like and shared a first name with the Pennsylvania Marie from the overall group had resulted in the sort of bureaucratic oversight which still occurs even in the computer age. Nobody caught it until well after the fact, which was understandable in view of the fact that the rehab staff and security had an unexpected and unwelcome ingress of Psychos right at the time they were dispatching the teams. The resulting tumult insured that the badly mangled body of the poor Marie from New Jersey was mistaken for the Pennsylvania Marie until it no longer mattered.
The Angels had the advantage of watching all the other minibuses leave on big screen TVs, and found the lesson of The Cowboys particularly poignant. They blasted out of the gate on a mission, and, two miles from the rehab, removed all electronic monitoring devices from the minibus, including the Lo-Jack. They were assisted in this by the presence of Dwight, the polite young hoodlum from Philadelphia, who seemed preternaturally knowledgeable about vehicular security systems. They then blasted off for points unknown, and while their adventures were many and worth recording, their experiences have no bearing on this story any more. It is worth noting, though, just for the human interest value, that Navni, a member of The Angels, exhibited no sign of alcoholic dementia at any time.
They might not have pulled their escape off so easily, had not the rehab staff and Homeland Security been far too busy gunning down the several hundred Psychos that had crowded in through a faulty fence to efficiently track their charges. Even Gerard and Amiko entered the fray, as soon as the last team had departed. Although the chaos created a gap in coverage of the actual teams involved in the show, On the Road to Recovery, the resulting confusion did benefit at least one player, a member of The Steelers. It is an ill wind that blows no one any good, at least from the hypothetical God perspective.
Ah yes, the hypothetical God perspective. It seems such a glib way of putting it. Most of you know the background of the events I’m describing, having suffered through them. Still, I should try to explain it a little better, for the children, as politicians used to say when there were any. They were cynically appealing to the most infantile of voter intellects, though, and I am quite serious.
The hardest part of this is to explain what happened to the children here. They ask the simplest and at the same time most difficult questions. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out how to make them understand, but in the end, I’ve decided to write it out so maybe they could read about it when they are older and figure it out for themselves to some extent.
The problem is, I only understand parts of the story mys
elf. Still, it’s worth trying, and like all the remaining survivors cooped up in here, I have plenty of time, at least until we don’t. Anyway, let me start with when things starting getting really bad, around the time this computer virus started causing meltdowns in various nuclear reactors around the world. Most of you older people have already lived through most of these events, but please bear with me while I try to explain them to children present and future.
Stuff started getting strange towards the end of 2012, and started getting stranger as 2013 wore on. There wasn’t just one cause of course. It was more of a perfect storm of reasons, as if several unrelated factors conspired to provide a proof of the law of unintended consequences. One important ingredient in the mix was continued fallout from the Japanese nuclear disaster wreaking a strange kind of havoc on the biosphere.
Human cancer caused by the fallout increased dramatically, as you might imagine. It was simply epic how many people developed all variations of the often fatal disease, a veritable modern Black Death. The radiation alone, however, was not the sole cause of the dramatic events. Life extension and prolongation had been a serious if underpublicized branch of scientific research for decades, but the wave of cancer related deaths gave a great stimulus to the efforts. The work became more risky, more ruthless, as researchers and their funders watched their loved ones die, or even as the scientists slowly faded away themselves. Nothing adds meaning to one’s work like the added threat of losing a personally precious life through failure.
Human nature is such that if the life in jeopardy is one’s own or one’s offspring, certain survival genes kick in, as is only natural. That school of thought that seeks to alter mankind’s nature confuses the issue with moral judgments, which are often oblivious to the power of harnessing Humanity’s natural traits for a useful purpose. The cause of “The Common Good” is a banner often waved by the manipulating sociopath, while the naturally exclusionary emotion of Love is scorned as being “selfish.” How can one be expected to love all people commonly and still call it Love?
The cancer spread regardless as the fallout continued to rain down, no matter what motivated the people trying to cure it. The earth was also experiencing some macro effects, as it gradually lost rotational velocity and its magnetic field diminished and shifted. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis became increasingly frequent, and jaundiced viewers of network news grew inured to the sight of natural disasters and the resulting helpless refugees. There was increasingly the smack of desperation in the air.
The world economy, developed over millennia and thus imparted at least some underlying structural stability, began to deteriorate as the complexities of the emerging New World Order altered its underlying dynamics, an unprecedented structural change. It could have been remedied faster, possibly, but the political landscape was changing rapidly as well, part and parcel to the whole process, but nevertheless making the situation incomprehensibly arcane to all but the most erudite of initiates. These few watched as what little influence they had was neutered by a veritable explosion of Populist movements across the globe, as desperate people tore up preexisting political structures in an attempt to create rapid improvements, as food prices skyrocketed, and as people sickened and died.
Panic was saturating the entire globe, like an incandescent bulb filling with gasoline in one of those prison movies, just waiting for a spark to engulf the world in flames. The tools, talent, and even the will were present for what seemed like an inevitable and dramatic decrease in population size, as a wave of History seemed ready to yet again pound civilization into the surf, when a miracle occurred. A cure was discovered, not just a cure for cancer, but a cure for Death.
Science and technology, the long suffering whipping boys for all recent social ills, emerged from the dugout with a bases loaded grand slam in the ninth to win the World Series. Science kicked a 70 yard field goal in sudden death to win the Super Bowl. Technology hit a buzzer beater to win Game 7 in triple overtime. In short, the boys and girls in the white lab coats completely redeemed themselves. It had not been lost on the general populace that Nuclear Fallout and Pole Shift were two phenomena that Science had either failed to anticipate or to prevent, but the Life Pill, as it was dubbed, silenced all critics. The Life Pill lived up to its billing. If the Pill was taken daily, the biological process known as Death simply ceased occurring.
Having illicitly eaten of The Tree of Knowledge, Mankind had now licitly, it seemed, eaten of The Tree of Life itself.
This achievement was properly heralded. Millions of people with fatal illnesses, such as cancer and old age, simply went on this cheap and cost effective pill and literally stopped dying. True, there were some side effects. People on the pill became essentially infertile, existing in a state that could best be described as stasis. No one knew how long this stasis would last, but no one was asking too many questions. The pill stopped the bleeding, ending the brutal reign of Death. Nobody asked too many questions about the primary research either, not even the FDA, which rushed through an approval under the most extreme political pressure. The Pill was, and still is, the greatest technical accomplishment in history, if viewed solely as the answer to a technical problem.
It essentially worked by redefining the electrochemistry of the brain using commonplace elements found in abundance in the Earth’s crust, such as zinc and iridium. One of the basic causes of cellular death was found to be the loss of cellular magnetism, so introducing electro-conductors in the right proportions directly into cells greatly amplified the natural pulsing of the induced magnetic field which exists all around us because of our body’s interaction with the Earth’s core. These analog waves had always been present, but had finally been harvested for health benefits.
Once on the Life Pill, humans began to operate more on electrical pulses, and that seemed to remove much of the stress and workload from the other organs. The Pill also served as vasodilators, or histamines for cells, creating avenues for cellular excretion of former metabolites which had amassed in the cells and become toxic, such as oxidized iron. Rust finally slept. It all seemed perfect, really, too good to be true. The problem is though, as the old saw goes, if something seems too good to be true, often as not, it usually is.
Most of the most haunting and inexplicable events of Life might be more understandable if they could be viewed from the God’s Perspective. Lest someone with an atheistic bent close their minds at this point, consider video game design. There is usually an all-powerful “God” character the designer creates to manipulate the game with. Within the context of his own game, the designer becomes God. What would the perspective of an immortal being living outside of time be in Reality, the largest video game imaginable? Even if one does not believe, one could still entertain the notion purely as an intellectual exercise, couldn’t one?
How might God perceive any single event? Oftentimes, a memory we might view as unmitigatedly positive or negative could be both, or contains elements of both. Some say they did the best they could with what they had, as if to excuse all subsequent failures, though anyone, including Hitler could make that same boast. We might just as easily say we did the worst we could with what we had. It just seems more fair, and honest, to say that we did what we did with what we had. This seems closer to God’s perspective than trying to rationalize our actions, if one can even venture to guess the mind of God, if indeed God has a mind in the conventional sense.
Essentially, all stories contain elements of spin doctoring. It’s impossible to avoid, since no one is perfectly objective. Bearing that in mind, let’s try to consider some of the events of 2013 from the perspective of a few years later. From the smaller story we might begin to understand the larger one, and though this seems a faint hope, it’s about the best hope there is at this point.
The Life Pill worked, you see, no doubt about it. It worked really well. Nobody on it ever died, unless they suffered a horrible brain trauma, but the guy who invented the original Pill, a Professor Gaultier, supposedly
went mad when the Government confiscated his patent rights, or at least this was the official version of events at the time. This doesn’t seem like a problem, since the manufacturing process was laid out in a pretty elaborate synthesis in the patent, but in this case, Gaultier reportedly omitted some odd alchemical seeming fine tweaks to the formula when he wrote it up. The Government Life Pill, or Pill G, still worked, but it had one really major side effect. After a few months, whoever took the Pill became completely psychotic, an irrational and unthinking beast, too overcome by rage to form a comprehensible thought. You took Pill G long enough and you got fried, no ifs, ands, or buts. The original Life Pill, Pill Alpha, was now deemed too precious for the common herd because though stockpiles existed, they were now finite, as the inventor had pulled a major disappearing act right after the patent confiscation, or robbery, as he termed it. Seems like Gaultier thought he deserved a little gratitude and respect for curing Death and getting neither he just bailed, apparently, an action he was roundly vilified for in the Press.
In some ways, as you might imagine, this created some problems worse than before The Life Pill existed. People were naturally upset if they were deemed unworthy of Pill Alpha, since many who were deemed worthy seemed worthier by virtue of political pull. A truly revolutionary atmosphere existed, the most dangerous state of mankind. People literally wanted change, whether it led to a constructive goal or not. Kings and queens have lost their heads, literally, at such times, when blind animal violence and anger trumped all sensibility. Just because somebody has it coming doesn’t mean it is always practical or smart to give it to them, but people were gearing up to burn down the plantation.