| Part One - Free Will
For fifteen years, Saphire Hunt had come to this old cemetery on a hill on September twenty-second, and her driver had never once asked her why. Dear Cody could sense when it was better not to ask.
Cody waved, smiling, wishing he knew this time, more than any other. He had imagined many explanations for this annual sojourn back to her hometown, each filled with intrigue and romance, but none of his fantasies were as fantastic as the truth.
Saphire winked at Cody and stood by the limousine for a moment, her long coat open to the night air. Her hair was wrapped like a copper crown on her head. She was six feet tall, curved but hard, with Egyptian features, and lapis eyes. The night was muggy, though it was fall and the leaves had changed. She twisted a penlight, and walked up the hill, weaving through slate headstones.
For the first time, she was late, but she didn’t hurry. She considered the tone of his voice on the telephone the last time she spoke to him, his need to be reminded of a passion they once shared. It hadn’t sounded like John Mack, the world’s leading computer scientist who was also, secretly, her husband.
Ahead in the gloom she saw the empty tomb her great great great grandfather had had built under a false name during the Civil War. It was a false tomb with a false floor that led to a safehouse used by the Underground Railroad. She saw candlelight flickering in the crack of the heavy iron door as she climbed the hill before the modest crypt.
When they were young, she and her lover had dreamed of freeing mankind, again, here in this place, whose past was still a proud and illustrious family secret, passed from generation to generation.
She hesitated now outside the door before pulling it open.
He sat cross-legged on the slab. His six-foot, six-inch frame was folded comfortably, like a spider. His long silver hair and beard were yellowed in the candlelight. In a bar of shadow beneath his straight-lined brow, his eyes gleamed steel-blue. His black topcoat was open over a navy cashmere sweater and gray jeans. He wore blue tennis shoes, like a teenager. His right
hand was gloved in deerskin and swung a gold watch by a chain.
"You’re late."
He did not rise to greet her.
"Come on," he laughed. "Jump up."
She climbed onto the slab, dreading his kiss, which was too practiced, too brief. She pulled away.
"This is it," he smiled. "One more year. By this time next year, we’ll throw the switch together, before we leave. Did you bring it?"
He pretended he did not notice her reaction. He had expected it, planned on it, she thought. "Why weren’t Choices put in the shipment for China?"
His face froze and his smile cracked. "Straight to the point," he mused.
"Why didn’t you put them in? I’m not shipping those things without them."
He looked at the gold watch swinging on its chain. "Where there is no choice, Free Will is obsolete," he said, looking from the watch’s perfect face to hers. There was an inconceivable tone of contempt and condescension in his voice.
"You’re --" she couldn’t catch her breath. She stared at him, and trembled.
"Who are you now, John?" A tear punctuated her question.
He clutched his forehead in one hand and waved his other hand briskly at her. She wounded something deep in him, something he distrusted now. "I have seen the obvious, that’s all!" He met her eyes with a final, urgent honesty. "We were wrong, Saph! And it’s more obvious all the time! We built the perfect social machine just to destroy it?" An eager light sparked in his eyes, but he saw now how his hope insulted her, and he looked away.
She closed her eyes and nodded. "To destroy it."
"There is no free will," he said. "It’s obsolete. We made it obsolete. The human race is dysfunctional. It’s too late to turn back. It’s adolescent fantasy, Saphire! It can never be what we hoped when we were children. We could cause a new dark age if we went through with it! We must destroy Free Will."
"Ironic," she whispered, to herself. "Did you hear yourself?"
He looked dangerously at her. "We were children when we dreamed those dreams. It would be criminal to go through with them. We have no right."
She answered him with a steady stare.
"Give me Free Will," he said, extending his hand.
She had kept the small golden switch for a year. It was his turn to keep it, but she had anticipated him. She softly shook her head.
He grinned in incredulity. "You can’t keep it. It’s past midnight, and you know what will happen if you even try to touch it."
She looked distracted.
"Where is it?"
"I don’t have it."
"Who does?"
"Someone."
"You didn’t explain what it is?"
"Of course not."
John Mack smiled. He looked at his chest, putting his watch in his inside coat pocket. His hand emerged, gripping a small Glock pistol. He pointed it at her, but she was gone.
His startled shot missed her over the granite slab and the iron door banged open. He jumped down and ran to the door, stopping it with his hand as it swung back.
He looked down the dark hill but couldn’t see her. They both knew too many hiding places in this cemetery. He stroked his beard with an andrenalized bemusement as he glowered at the grim little city of Middletown. The machine they had created together would have an entire year to find the person she had entrusted with Free Will.
He smiled with contemptuous confidence, his laughter chasing her down the hillside in the dark.
* * *
Edmund Green quietly pressed closed the door of his room and slid his bookcase to block it.
He turned off the light, and his room shimmered in the light of his aquarium.
He tapped fish-food into the tank and sat on his bed, firing a dart across the room into the dartboard on the wall.
He looked out the window. Five miles away, in downtown Middletown, the Hunt Robotics building was on fire.
He jabbed another dart at the dartboard.
Some distance to the left of the burning building, on a grassy hill, stood the Community Service Broadcasting Tower, the "CSB." Charitably designed and donated to 55,000 locations throughout America by the supercomputer genius and zillionaire, John Mack, the CSB’s were a familiar American landmark. Golden flames swirled up the Hunt building as electric blue words scrolled up Mack’s tower:
NATIONAL INFO WATCH
THINKING OF STARTING A BUSINESS? FOR ONE-CALL QUICK-INFO: 555-101-6656.mak,
AN INFORMATION DIRECTORY FOR EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW: LICENSING
REQUIREMENTS, EDUCATIONAL REQUIREMENTS, DEMOGRAPHIC REQUIREMENTS,
INSURANCE REQUIREMENTS, HEALTH PERMITS, SAFETY PERMITS, FEES (PLUS
FILING), INSPECTION REGISTRATION FILING, (PLUS FEES), SOCIAL SECURITY FILING,
FEES, ETC. UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ENROLLMENT (PLUS FILING, FEES, AND
COUNSELING), S&L TAX ENROLLMENT FEE FILING, MEDISURE ENROLLMENT (PLUS
FILING FEE & FEE FILING), DENTISURE ENROLLMENT (PLUS FILING FEE & FREE FEE
FILING), EMPLOYER RESPONSIBILITY HANDBOOK, DEMOGRAPHIC APPRENTICESHIP
GUIDELINES, PROTOCOLS, REQUIREMENTS, REGULATIONS AND TIPS, RETAILER
PRICING SCHEDULES, ZONING PERMITS, MERCHANDISE REQUIREMENTS,
ADVERTISING DO’S AND DON’TS, ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS COMPLIANCE PLUS
TAX FILING AND FREE FEE TAX FILING, RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS TIPS, NO-NO’S,
PENALTIES & COUNSELING, COMPETITIVE EQUALITY AGENCY INSPECTION
ENROLLMENT, FEES, ETC. DRUG FREE AMERICA EMPLOYEE TESTING STARTER
PACKET, REGISTRATION, ENROLLMENT, FILING FEE PLUS FREE FEE FILING AND FREE
PENALTY FILING FEE FILING (PLUS TAX-FREE FEE FILING FEE TIPS), WORKER’S
COMPENSATION AND DISABILITY REQUIREMENT WORKSHOP (PLUS REGISTRATION,
ETC.), NEW PRODUCT SAFETY LIABILITIES, INSURANCE AND ENROLLMENT, FREE
MARKET STRESS MANAGEMENT COUNSELING REQUIREMENTS, CERTIFICATION, AND
FEE FILING WITH TAX-FREE FEE FILING FEE TAX-FREE FILING FEES FILING, AND
MORE! REMEMBER: AMERICA NEEDS YOUR BUSINESS!
Edmund Green looked at his hand.
The plastic band made by Hunt Robotics that was riveted around his wrist said: THIS BODY CONTAINS THC.
A red LED glowed next to the letters, highlighting the tiny quadrangles wrinkled in the skin on the back of his left hand.
On the screen of his PCA, a screensaver showed the same messages rolling up the CSB on the screen of his PCA, which stood for "Public Computer Access." One was provided to every child in America. It had very limited access to the now almost underground "Internet," as the Mack Link strained and filtered by locality what was accessible to the user and recorded the identity of anyone who tried to go around it, wherever access was requested. Governments had jumped on Mack's technology, all over the world. Edmund draped his long green coat over the screen of his PCA, as was his tradition.
He didn’t use his PCA to type his school essays, preferring to fill out computer forms with a pencil instead, even though he knew they would be put into his file when they were fed into the Mack grading machines at school. He had used his PCA only once, a month ago, when he sent a mak.mail to John Mack and Saphire Hunt. "Why are you doing this to us?" was all it said.
In the last week, Edmund had cleared out of his room every knickknack relatives had given him, every generic thing, every posed photograph, and all the inexplicable baggage of his first seventeen years. He kept a postcard photo of the eight-foot-tall stone head of the Emperor Constantine, which he taped to his wall, and his old 20-gallon aquarium. He poured black sand
into the aquarium and stocked it with guppies, an Australian crab named Augustine, a tiny Red-Tailed Shark, one big plecostimas to suck the algae off the glass, and an African frog named Pelagius. It was another world, one that he watched over benevolently, separated from him by glass. As he pulled the circle of plastic darts apart, he saw the frog hiding in a grotto of red basalt, and he wondered whether he, or the frog, was truly free.
He fired the darts, ringing the bull’s eye.
He had organized his books in the bookshelf blocking his door: Aristotle and Bradbury, Aeschylus and Asimov, Homer and Farmer, Shakespeare and Herbert, Melville, Niven, Hugo, Tolkein, Heinlein, Rand, O’Henry, Conrad, and Twain. Romanticism roiled by reason in past and future -- but nowhere in the gray present. On the bed before him was a leatherbound book with blank pages. He opened it for the hundredth time but as the CSB tower cranked its endless words and numbers he couldn’t think of a single word to write inside it.
He fished a rolled-up newspaper out of his coat. It was a good old coat, with black silk lining and black stone buttons. He spread the wrinkled face of the Middletown Crier on the bed.
NEW PENALTIES FOR USING NON-FIRE-RETARDANT PAINT TREND
SEEN AS ‘GAPING LOOPHOLE’ IN NATIONAL INSURANCE MAN
SHOOTS 10, SELF
He turned it over. Black circles and red X’s covered jobs he thought he could walk to, thought he could do, hoped he could get. He crumpled the world into a ball and missed the wastebasket across the room.
In the last month he had bought second-hand clothes of pure colors, cut clean, and had trashed all plaids and argyles and polka-dots and stripes and paisleys, clothes with extra buttons, tags, flaps — everything with pointless things attached. He cut his hair one inch long and bought the blank book.
He had used the money he saved working at the drugstore. It wasn’t worth saving money, anyway. His minimum wage had been raised to $39.99 an hour, but his employer deducted Interest Tax, S & L Tax, National Insurance Tax (NIT-TAX), Environmental Tax (E-TAX), and Third World Assistance Tax (T-WAX), Worker’s Comp, Social Security, Income Tax, Unemployment Insurance, State Income Tax, State Highway Tax, State Children With Disabilities Tax, State Wildlife Tax, State Children’s Poverty Fund Tax (CPF-TAX), State Children’s Education Fund Tax (SCEFT), State Art Foundation Tax (SAF-TAX), State Children’s Artistic Opportunity Fund Tax, National Children’s Heritage Preservation tax, and the Children Tax itself, of course, whose rate was tied to world population growth, and, on top of all else, the Flat Tax.
Mr. Dusett, his boss, had to let him go because he was "spending a fortune in stock boys!" With the Unemployment Insurance and Medisure rates going up, he simply couldn’t afford it. He said a government official of some sort told him
there were supplements he could apply for to get money to help pay for employees, and that they frowned on laying off employees, but the forms for the new taxes and offsetting rebates were so complicated he couldn’t figure them out. He went on to explain to Edmund, as if he didn’t know, that people couldn’t afford legal merchandise anymore, not with the gangs selling all the black market stuff at half-price on the street and making twice the margin. Edmund winced as a memory of Mr. Dusett played in his head. "Sorry, kid. The mayor’s nephew is a dimwit, but can I let him go? I got a call from the mayor’s
office about him, can you believe that, checking in to see ‘how Matthew is doing!’ And, you know, they could skin me more ways than a cat with all the rules and regs they’ve got. They just send some goon to walk through here with a clipboard and a checklist and I’m finished. I’m on the edge as it is, kid! Do me a favor, will ya? Burn the place down for me. I’m serious, Edmund. Think about it, kid. Be some money in it for ya. Heh, heh. Not really though. No, no, not really, there. Just kidding. I’m sorry, kid. There’s nothin’ I can do about it."
Edmund looked at the burning Hunt Robotics building.
Two weeks after losing his job, Edmund was busted for smoking pot and for possession of a black market music disk by his favorite retro band. He was fined $20,000 (over 20 years), and was forced to wear the THC detecting device on his wrist. A monitor was also placed in his room, wired to his PCA. If either sensor was triggered, he would have to spend eighteen weeks
in a drug rehabilitation program at his parents’ expense, which they could certainly not afford. And Edmund would have to do 1,000 hours of community service. "Hey, I didn’t do this to you, kid," said the Judge when he saw Edmund’s expression. "Remember that!"
The CSB changed into a four-sided video screen 350 feet tall. An image of a man buying paint from a shady dealer in an abandoned warehouse appeared.
YOU COULD BE AIDING TERRORISTS!
The same man furtively painted his house while his children slept.
YOU COULD ENDANGER YOUR FAMILY!
The screen then flashed to the man sleeping with his wife as a chimney ember landed on the eaves.
YOU COULD LOSE EVERYTHING.
The man woke up screaming, engulfed in flames.
YOU COULD KILL YOURSELF!
The screen changed to a shot of the American flag waving over the National Insurance Agency building in Washington, D.C.
YOU COULD DESTROY THE NATION’S ECONOMY.
The final image showed the man sitting on a bench as prison bars slide 350 feet down the sides of the CSB, smashing without
a sound into the sidewalk.
YOU COULD GO TO PRISON PAINTING WITH NON-FIRE-RETARDANT
PAINT IS A CRIME!
The Hunt building glowed like a charcoal briquette in the gloom, crowned by pale flames.
The CSB flashed back into a bulletin board with scrolling words and numbers.
Someone screamed in the distance and Edmund pulled the window down against the damp wood of the sash.
His father couldn’t afford the government-approved paint, or the certified painters, since the National Insurance went into effect. Edmund noticed the old house turning soft and spongy as winter approached. The volcanoes were making the winters worse. They said it was only forestalling the global warming. The global warming was coming, though the winters kept getting worse. Cooling was one of the symptoms of warming, they said.
It had all started a month ago, at church. Labeled a "breakdown" by his school psychologist, it was actually a turning point.
It tore Edmund permanently away from everyone else and had made him him for the first time.
It had been a beautiful day. The little church filled up with blissful song and happiness happier than anything real, made
instead of pain, pain that was celebrated, mocking happiness. He saw a poster of the crucified Jesus thumb-tacked on the
side wall of the church. Jesus was smiling. The caption read: "I Love You This Much!"
Edmund’s howl blended with the chorus like a dog’s behind sirens. His father rose to strike him, but stopped in fear for his
son, whose face flushed bright red.
They called it a breakdown and explained it away, at first. His mother called it "a wild stage." His father called him weak.
After school started, his mother contacted the school counselors and psychologist at the urging of a PTA friend. The counselors said he was "assimilation-phobic" and "socially under-utilized," and they reminded his mother of the general drug problem. The school psychologist prescribed Prozaiconol, Zylene, Phyrnol, Transol, Xalax, and several other drugs that
came in a color wheel dispenser, from blue for depressed to pink for hyperactive. She diagnosed Edmund as having a mother complex, coupled with AYDS (Attention/Yelling Deprivation Syndrome), and even Reactionary Ego-Logic-Nationalist Syndrome. The school got more money for every box checked. The school Environmental Counselor suggested Mrs. Green change her brand of disinfectant because it might be responsible for his mood swings. All of Edmund’s schoolmates thought he was crazy. The girls guessed he had some kind of virus because of the medical-looking bracelet. The Church thought he
was disturbed, possibly suicidal.
Pastor Wilson called him in for counseling, at his mother’s request. "God is still there for you, son," he reminded Edmund, looking at the screen of his Mack Link PCA. "Have you ever thought it might be you who isn’t there for Him?"
Edmund felt like he was disappearing. "Aren’t you more sure I’m here than God?" he asked.
Pastor Wilson had just looked at him, confused.
Edmund pulled the darts from his dartboard again and sat back on his bed. Today, another hope burned out.
For the twelfth time, he had tried to find a job. Times were slow and tight, and buildings were boarded in the land of the free and the brave, but he had a brilliant idea as he looked into the bookstore window that afternoon. He loved the store, crammed with books, divided like a mind into every category of fact and fantasy. He ran in and told the manager his idea. He would take a smaller wage to work there. "Under the table," he whispered. No Medisure, no Unemployment Insurance or Social Security, no Liability Tax or registration, or pension, or certification, or enrollment, no nothing except an honorable agreement!
He would work so hard, they would soon give him a raise, make him legal, and promote him. It was the American Dream.
Edmund saw it all, right inside himself, so ready to be real.
He hurled a dart at the red bull, and missed.
He would have worked harder than anyone else! He would never have betrayed them. He gave them his word.
The manager of the bookstore, who traditionally hired only high school girls anyway, looked at Edmund suspiciously after his
proposal. "I’m sorry," she said, but she definitely wasn’t. "It’s not up to me, anyway." |
