“And that’s all there is to it?” the gravelly voice in Rahila’s earpiece chortled.

“That’s right, Mr. Preston.  I’m glad I could help.”

“And I’m glad,” he said earnestly, “that you were there to take my call. I was just about to throw this thing through the window. Thank you for making my day.”

After tapping her earpiece to end the call, Rahila typed a brief comment into the incident report, closed the dialog, and clicked over to her queue window. Where a few minutes earlier there had been details about the next few callers, now there was nothing.

“That’s odd,” she muttered, “what happened to—?”

Her curiosity abruptly turned to fear when a message window popped up, telling her to report to her supervisor’s office.

She stared at it for a few breathless moments before forcing herself to calmly rise and cross the cubicle farm towards her supervisor’s glass-faced office.  A few coworkers glanced up as she passed, caught her eye, and quickly returned to their duties.

Following company protocol, she carefully tapped three times on the empty doorframe and waited to be permitted entrance.

The severe woman behind the desk closed her eyes briefly, but did not look up. “Sit down, Rahila.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

There were two reasons for being asked to report to a supervisor’s office during a work-shift, but only one for having your queue cleared. Rahila nervously stared straight ahead while wracking her brain for the reason she was being fired.

“I’m really disappointed in you,” her supervisor said quietly, fingers primly laced behind her keyboard.

Rahila slumped, and remembered how much time she’d just spent with Preston, far more than was allotted if she was ever to meet her call quota. “You’re right,” she said, “and I really don’t have any excuse for taking so long to—.”

“This isn’t about your job performance.” The words were flat, devoid of the irritation Rahila had expected. “It is about your moral character.”

“My moral—?”

“I have learned that you lied to get this job, that you misrepresented yourself.”

“But everything on my resume, everything on my work history is true.” she pleaded. “I didn’t claim to have done anything that I hadn’t done. All of the facts are correct. I even supplied more references than was required, just to be certain that enough could be contacted to confirm my background.”

“I wasn’t referring to your application. It was something you said during the interview.”

“The interview? But—?”

“Tell me, Rahila, why did you not inform your interviewer that you were single?”

“I wasn’t asked.”

“Perhaps not in those precise words, but you were asked whether you had a satisfactory family relationship. It amounts to the same thing.”

A chill flew up Rahila’s back. She knew she had paled. “I answered the questions that I was asked, ma’am, and I did so truthfully. I have a very satisfactory relationship with my brothers and sisters. I visit them frequently, and spend a great deal of time with my nephews and nieces.”

“But not with your parents?”

“My—? What are you accusing me of?”

“You are not married, are you.” The question in her words was belied by her accusatory tone.

Had the problem been simply a matter of job performance, she might have been able to beg a chance to improve during a probation period. As it was, there was nothing she could do. Framing her evasion as a lie meant she could be terminated for cause, and that meant finding a job in some other call center would be nearly impossible now.

Living hand-to-mouth, as she did, also meant that she couldn’t afford to keep her apartment for more than another month, so she made an all-out effort to land another job. But once you’ve been fired for cause, any hope of getting a glowing background check might as well have been pushed off a cliff. Which is how she ended up outside of a charitable women’s assistance center and homeless sanctuary, carrying what few things she’d decided were essential to survival.

“Well,” she confided to the night, “At least it’s a place to sleep.”

As much as the outside of the center fit comfortably into the downtown mix of modern and traditional architecture, Rahila got a decidedly different feeling once she stepped inside. Instead of the subtly non-secular design ethic that usually permeated public institutions, the building’s interior nearly screamed of the religious iconography held sacred by the organization that had run such centers for over a hundred years, and suggested a morality that, thankfully, was not native to her country. Yet, it was that very foreignness that had drawn her here, because the people who subscribed to the morality espoused by the church that funded the center did not adhere to the strict social stratification to which her own culture had become captive.

When her turn came to be admitted, Rahila was led to a small table in a room midway down the central corridor. The man who had called her name mispronounced it badly, but she didn’t think it wise to correct him. Once he was seated opposite her, he introduced himself as Fred Green, and skimmed through her application questionnaire.

“It says here,” he said at length, “that you have several siblings. I’m curious. Why haven’t any of them opened their homes to you?”

“Oh, they’re all friendly enough, and they don’t mind a visit now and then, but they’re also under tremendous pressure to conform. Having me in their homes would open them to all sorts of accusations about their moral judgment, and that could cost them their jobs. They have their children to consider, and would prefer not to take such risks. As a result, I’m pretty much on my own.”

“I don’t understand. Why would their judgment be questioned?”

She stared at him as if he were a backward child. “Because I am a single woman.”

Green drew a blank. “So?”

“If I may ask, sir, have you been in my country for very long?”

“Not really. I was assigned to this station shortly after I volunteered.”

“I see. Well, it is still highly unusual for a mature woman such as myself to be unmarried in my country.”

Green smiled contentedly. “But then, that’s why we’re here. Our mission is to provide safe sanctuary to any woman who needs it, regardless of her marital situation.”

“And I am grateful for that. My former employer was not so open-minded.”

“Speaking of which,” Green said, raising a forefinger, “our objective in offering sanctuary to destitute women is to help them find work. Being productive in God’s eyes in very important to us.”

“It is not God’s eyes that I am concerned about, Mr. Green,” she said with enforced calm. “It was not God who fired me, after all.”

Green subtly winced. His brow furrowed briefly, and then he shifted the subject. “We… can also offer assistance in reconnecting shattered families. You didn’t mention your parents earlier. How do they feel about you?”

“My parents? I don’t see how this is relevant to my having a place to sleep tonight.”

“We believe that it is. When you walked though our door, it was as if God had led you to seek us out. Our mission is to help you, but in order to do that we need to understand your situation. Your life, indeed your soul, is sacred to us.”

Rahila pressed back against her chair. “Sacred,” she said.

“Indeed, yes! We believe that all life is sacred. That’s why we’re so very concerned when a pregnant woman is put in danger, why we go out of our way to be certain that she is well cared for. Her baby is a precious gift from God, and it is our duty to protect it.”

“Yes,” she said, casting about for a way to ease the tension, “I have read many good things about your work here. That was why I came.”

“Now then,” he said, “about your accommodations. We do what we can to create a sense of community among our guests, so we like to place women with children on one wing so that the children can play together. You’ve noted that you have no children with you. Are they being cared for by relatives?”

“I have no children, sir. I have never been married.”

Green considered that briefly, but said nothing. He wrote a few more notations on her paperwork, rose, and invited her to take a brief tour of the facility. While they walked, he pointed out several members of the staff, and explained the center’s rules. When they were finished, he showed her the room she’d be using, told her a bit about her immediate neighbors, and left her to settle in.

Relieved that she at least had a place to stay for the moment, Rahila showered, and changed into clean clothes. Feeling calmer, she walked to the activity area where three of the women residents were chatting while a group of children played together. A uniformed member of the staff, one of the attendants, stood near the far wall. One of the three women looked up and smiled. “Come,” she said, “sit.”

“Thank you,” Rahila said amiably as she reached a vacant chair. “Which of them is yours?”

“Sanjit is the one in red. Is your child with you?”

She smiled politely. “I’m afraid I have no children. I am alone here.”

“No children? But certainly you’re old enough to have had one. Is there a medical reason, perhaps?”

Rahila shook her head. “No. I suppose I could have had children if my life had been different. But I haven’t.”

“Perhaps you still can. You’re healthy, and you certainly look young enough.”

“Thank you. I’m forty-two, actually. My mother looked younger than her years as well. As to having children, though, I guess my karma has flowed along other channels. Still, there are compensations. I do get to enjoy my nephews and nieces when I visit with siblings.”

The women glanced nervously at one another. The one to Rahila’s right self-consciously tugged at her sleeves to cover the bruises on her wrists. “And where is your husband?” she asked. “Is he the reason that you are here?”

“I’m here,” Rahila said, ignoring the first question, “because I lost my job and could no longer afford the rent.”

“I understand. It often takes two salaries to make ends meet these days.”

The attendant, who had been watching the children earlier, took a few steps closer, and appeared to now be listening to the women’s conversation.

“It does for my brother and his wife,” Rahila admitted. “But there is only one income in my household.”

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, leaning forward slightly, “has your husband taken ill?”

Trapped in the conversational cage, Rahila sighed in resignation. “No. I’m not married.”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the attendant said, much closer now. “Did you just say that you were forty-two?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re single,” he pressed, “and you’re forty-two?”

Rahila gritted her teeth. She’d encountered discrimination over this before, but that was from her countrymen. “Yes,” she said, rising to face him.

“Well, then,” he said with a self-satisfied grin, “I guess I’ll have to report this to the director.”

Two of the women spoke at once. “Report what?”

“Yes,” Rahila said, hardening her stance, “report what?”

“That you should not have been admitted in the first place,” he said haughtily.

“And why might that be?”

“Because you’re over-age. We only accept single women under forty, women who are still of childbearing age. Beyond that, a woman would have to be married, and the victim of abuse.”

“Is that so. Funny, but I don’t recall reading anything about such restrictions on your website. Did you just make that up?”

“Certainly not,” he said, outrage flushing his cheeks. “Our mission in your country is purely humanitarian. We do not discriminate!”

“Maybe not on the basis of social standing or dietary restrictions,” she said, her eyes narrowing, “but what you just said smacks of discrimination based on age and marital status. Or is it just me that you want to get rid of?”

“Just you? Why, in heaven’s name, would I want to do that? Look. We came to your country with one goal in mind: to save the souls of women in distress. This center, and others like it across your country, is the physical manifestation of our commitment to that mission. I will not have you, or anyone else, accuse this organization or the church that runs it of insincerity. We’re doing serious work here.”

“Are you.” Rahila’s voice was flat, unemotional, controlled.

A few people, attracted by the commotion, stepped in from the hallway and drifted closer.

“It’s God’s work,” the attendant said in a harsh staccato.

Sanjit, frightened by the man’s voice, dropped the ball he was holding and ran to his mother.

“And that,” Rahila said sharply, “is precisely the problem. You’re not here to help me, or these women, or anyone else in my country. You’re here to help yourself. You set these shelters up to attract the disempowered so you can fill their heads with your self-righteous morality, oblivious to the simple fact that my people have their own beliefs, their own culture, and as I know all too well, their own problems.”

“Now see here!” he thundered.

Several more people entered the room, including Green.

“Your bullying tactics can only demand obedience,” she shot back, just as forcefully, “they do not produce allies, and they certainly do not save souls.”

Green pushed through the gathering crowd.

“I wasn’t trying to—.”

Rahila cut him off. “What you thought you were doing is irrelevant. It is what you did that I take issue with. I may have lost my job and my home, but have not lost my dignity. But apparently, dignity is something your sanctimonious religious principles do not recognize in people of other faiths. I have read the history of your religion, and it does not speak well of your God. I was willing to put that aside because of the good works that have been done in its name here, but now that I have experienced the attitude of its adherents at close range, I can no longer do so. I came here in need, in the hope that your order could be of help, but now I understand the price that is asked, I will not attempt to challenge your decision. Good day, sir!”

Green rushed after her as she left the room in raucous commotion. “What just happened in there,” he asked as they approached the residence wing.

She stopped, and turned to face him. “Your associate asserted that I should not have been allowed in because of my age and marital status. You made no mention of that, nor did the rules posted on your website. Did he speak the truth? Do you have unwritten rules?”

He nodded glumly. “We do. I did not mention it during our interview because you can easily be taken for a younger woman, and I wanted to help you. I did not think it would be a problem.”

“Okay. I thank you for the effort, but the existence of those rules, and the attitude that they represent, denigrate whatever honor your work here may have gained you. But I cannot stay. I would rather take my chances with people who are openly hostile, than with those who hide their abominable attitude behind a righteous façade. Now, if you don’t mind, I would like to collect my things and be done with this place.”

“I see,” he said quietly. “I would like to say one more thing before you go, though.”

“And that is?”

“Thank you. I have tried to help others in the past by ignoring the rules, and even bending them at times, but I always felt that there was value to what we were doing here.”

“And now?”

“Well, now I’m no longer so sure. It has been my personal, secret spiritual perspective that when there was a lesson I needed desperately to learn, someone would appear to show me the way. So, in a way, I’m glad of what just happened, because I think you are that person. But I’ll have to meditate on it, to know for sure. My wish for you is that you be well, and that you find the sanctuary that was meant for you, wherever it is, and whoever may welcome you.”

Rahila smiled weakly. “Thank you.”

THE END

Copyright 2012 by P. Orin Zack

“Steam Cycle”
(Part 7 of a series)
by P. Orin Zack
(12/2/2011)

Peter Epas gazed blankly at the desert horizon while the sunbaked highway rolled back unnoticed beneath him. The mental schematics he’d busied himself with for the first few hours of the trip had given way to the hypnotic interplay of rubber against deteriorating pavement and the steady whine of the bike’s low-slung steam engine. His sightline had just drifted down to the leading tip of his shadow when the screech of a raptor overhead startled him back to wobble-wheeled alertness.

It had been first light when he headed south out of Parker that morning. Elspeth, the mechanical engineer he apprenticed under, had topped off her bike’s biopropane canister at the repair shop last night after locking up.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” she’d asked while tightening the engine mounts for the umpteenth time.

A wordless glance was all the reply he gave. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from you,” he added a few beats later, “it’s to never second-guess myself.”

Rising, she opened the cash drawer and counted out two piles of bills. The first, which sported heavily saturated pictures of dead actors, were Angels, the money issued in Los Angeles after the Dollar cratered. The oddly faded notes in the second pile were from Phoenix, and they were the reason he was headed there.

Peter thought about that second pile as he rolled on through the dusty afternoon, and wondered how the people behind them would react to his proposal. “When we first encountered your money,” he told a hypothetical banker, “it hadn’t yet started to fade. As far as we knew, it was no different from the Angels that filtered in after the Dollar crapped out.”

He frowned. “All right. How about this…” But his thoughts were abruptly shattered when the bike lurched from the impact of a wall of air at his back.

Struggling to regain his balance, he glanced over his shoulder at the noisy truck overtaking him, and, heart racing, he swerved onto the shoulder to give it a wide berth. When it swept past, he winced at the acrid smell of its exhaust.

“Yuck!” he yelled between coughs. “What kind of crap are you burning, anyway?”

As the truck dwindled ahead and he drifted back towards the center of the roadway, he ticked off a hypothetical repair order. With quality diesel being increasingly hard to come by, he figured the trucker had his rig converted to run on whatever was available, but whoever had done it was a hack. Of far more interest to Peter, however, was the fact that none of the cars and trucks he’d seen all day had the signature whine of the breed of engine powering his bike, and that brought him back to the morning’s schematics.

As engaging as that was, however, a more visceral matter soon began gnawing at his stomach, so he pulled off at the next exit to prowl for food. Back home in Parker, the majority of the restaurants he’d known as a child had closed for one of two reasons. Either their corporate supply chains had snapped, or the people who ran them left town in search of a less fragile lifestyle. Reading the epithet left on the signboard of one reminded him of Elspeth’s recent musing that the crash had forced the economy into an odd rebalancing that favored mid-size cities with food processing industries over both Metropolis and Mayberry. He rode dispiritedly past several more shuttered fast food shops before spotting the lit interior of an independent restaurant called Nate’s. He banked into the parking lot, and rolled into a spot just outside the front window. After shutting the valve on the fuel canister, he set the kickstand, unstrapped his pack from the rear fender mount, and strode towards the door.

While Peter was reaching for the handle, two men at a front table turned to look at the bike. One of them, a swarthy man in a blue work shirt, rose and started towards the door. “Hey kid!”

Unaware that he was being addressed, Peter smilingly approached the young woman behind the counter. He had just opened his mouth when she nodded towards the man crossing the floor towards them. “Is that your party?”

“My…?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” the man said, extending a hand in greeting, “and guess that you’re new in town. Welcome to Phoenix. The name’s Enrique Perez. Can I buy you a drink?”

Peter glanced back at the woman. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding, “Enrique’s a regular. I think it’s your ride he’s after, though.”

“My…?”

Enrique nodded pleasantly. “She’s right. What kind of engine is that, anyway? I’ve never heard anything like it.”

“I’m not surprised,” Peter said as they reached the table, and he set his pack down. “It’s a variation on the Schoell cycle. They were only just breaking into the market when everything fell apart.”

“A what?” Enrique’s tablemate asked, the glow of intense curiosity animating the lean man’s deeply lined face.

“Oh, sorry. This is Armand. He’s a business associate.”

“Glad to meet you, sir. I’m Peter Epas. My bike is powered by a propane-powered closed-cycle steam engine. Just the thing for cruising the desert.”

“Speaking of deserts, how about that drink I offered you? What would you like? Nate’s carbonates their homegrown Arizona goji juice. Pretty good stuff.”

Peter glanced back at the cashier, who raised a glass of the red soda and grinned. “Okay,” he said, reaching for his wallet, “but I really would prefer to buy my own—.”

“And you will, just not with money,” Enrique said, signaling the cashier for a glass. “Like I said, I’m interested in that bike engine of yours.”

“All right, all right. What do you want to know?”

“Well, for one thing, where’d you get it?”

“Get it? “ Peter said defensively. “That steam-spinner’s a custom job… my boss’s design. It’s, uh, hers, actually. We built it in her shop, back in Parker.”

“I see,” Armand said slowly, crossing his arms. “And how much do you know about its construction?”

“Well, technically, I’m still her apprentice, but—.”

“I appreciate your modesty, Peter, but what I really want to know is whether you can build one yourself, here in Phoenix, given the right supplies and equipment.”

Enrique gave his associate a quizzical look.

“I could,” Peter said, lost in thought. “I mean, yes, sir. I believe I could build another engine like that. Well, assuming you could provide the tools and all. I don’t have enough money to buy—.”

“Hey!” A balding man at the table behind Armand suddenly shouted, slamming his glass on the table.

Peter followed the man’s sightline through the window, to his bike, where a guy in a dark hoodie was fingering the bright red engine.

“Christ, Silver,” baldy said, rising, “don’t you ever give up?” His chair tipped backward, but was caught by a passing waitress.

Baldy was halfway to the door by the time Peter got to his feet. By then, Silver had flipped the kickstand up and set his foot on the near pedal. Enrique trailed Peter through the door, while Armand and some other patrons turned to watch.

Silver pedaled hard while struggling against the bike’s unfamiliar heft. He glanced over his shoulder just as baldy cleared the walkway, with Peter a second behind.

“Stop!” Peter screamed.

The two men exchanged glances as they raced towards the accelerating bike. But just as they were about to catch it, Silver found his balance, switched gears, swerved onto the road, and sped away.

“Damn!” Peter said, catching his breath, “Elspeth’s going to kill me.”

“And I’m going to kill Larry Silver,” baldy said as he came up beside him, “if I ever catch him again.”

“You know who he is, then?”

“Hard not to. That cretin’s been stealing any new tech that comes into town for a while now. Works for a local cartel that’s itching to push out the leadership of the Citizen’s Board. I’m Fred Larson, by the way. I think you’ll want to join the SO, the Social Order working group, and help us get your bike back.”

“Thanks, Fred. Oh, I’m Peter Epas. Is that working group the Phoenix area police force?”

“It’s not that formal,” Enrique said, joining them. “The SO is a collaborative effort. You’ve just been robbed, so you’re welcome to join the team that does something about it. It’s expected, really, a citizen’s duty.”

As the three men approached the entrance, Peter noticed that Fred’s table had been slid up against Enrique’s, and the woman who’d greeted him earlier was distributing pens and paper. “What’s all that about?”

“Standard procedure,” Larson said, holding the door open for the others. “The first thing the SO does is collect what everyone knows about the incident. Like your friend here said, it’s a collaborative effort.”

Peter grinned as he took his seat. “And it’s a lot faster than old-style police methods, from what I hear. You folks are even faster than the group who do this sort of thing back in Parker.  How do we proceed?”

“Well, for starters,” Larson said, taking his seat, “I think we ought to find out more about that bike of yours.”

“It’s… not mine, really. Elspeth loaned it to me for this trip.”

“Must have been important to her,” Armand said. “What did you come all this way for, anyway?”

“To speak with a banker,” Peter said. He pulled out the Phoenix notes and laid them on the table. “We got these a while back, and they’ve started to fade.”

“So they have. In fact, it looks like they’re about to lose some tail-feathers. That’ll drop them to seventy-five percent of face value. It’s high time these notes were refreshed. I can see the urgency of your visit.”

“You don’t understand. It’s kind of a long way to go just to keep the money from devaluing. I came here to ask about opening a branch in Parker so we could refresh them locally. But that’s not important right now. I’ve really got to get my boss’s bike back.”

“Yes, the bike,” Larson said. “Or more to the point, that engine. I doubt Larry Silver has a clue what he’s stolen. But if he figures out how to start it up, how far could he get?”

“And how fast?” Enrique added. “Someone might have to chase him.”

“It can’t outrun a car the way it’s geared right now, if that’s what you’re worried about. And the fuel canister’s nearly empty. Well, the one that’s mounted, anyway. I have a spare in my pack for the return trip.”

“Good,” Larson said. “And that brings us to the reason I think Larry was interested in your bike, the technology in that engine.”

“You said it was a Schoell cycle?” Armand asked.

“A variation, but yeah. My boss used it as her starting point because it’s closed cycle, so you don’t have to top the water off all the time. But she made some improvements to the cooling system. That engine can run quite a bit hotter than the original design, assuming the rest of the engine can take the stress.”

“Mmm-hmm. Then I suspect it could be scaled up for heavier duty use. There’s clearly a lot of money to be made with that. If it can be replicated.”

Larson shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to see the cartel that Silver reports to get their hands on a hopped-up version of that thing. We’d never catch them. Good. I think we have enough to go on, now. So, Peter, will you be joining the SO team to find that creep and get it back?”

“Of course. But I also need to speak with the people who print up your Phoenix notes, and see if they’ll let me open a refresh shop in Parker.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that,” Armond said, chuckling.

“Why not?”

“I’m an investor. I staked them for their startup costs. Trust me, you’re a shoo-in.”

THE END

Copyright 2012 by P. Orin Zack

“The Phoenix Narrative”
(Part 6 of a series)
by P. Orin Zack
(11/11/2011)

As Beth coasted down a curving stretch of Arizona 95, she gently squeezed the handgrips on her bicycle, engaging the home-built regenerating brakes. She hesitated briefly, smiled, and leaned into a right turn onto Parker Dam Road.

A few years earlier, before the economy cratered and governments around the world fell apart, she might have driven the ninety-miles back from Lingman without a second thought. Even now, with gasoline so hard to come by, she’d made the trip out in an afternoon, thanks to the damaged baby steam engine rattling around in her saddle basket. But the ride back had taken considerably longer because Norwyn Rosset, the cretin she’d gone to thank for his part in bringing the world to its knees, had kicked the overtaxed machine from it’s mountings after it succumbed to the stress of pushing them both up a hill.

Parker Dam had been a touchstone to her even before she’d moved to Parker to escape the rat race her engineering degree had sucked her into. Towards the end of the corporatists’ reign, new hires out of school were like a drug to penny-pinching managers eager to consign their senior, and more expensive, employees to the growing ranks of the unemployed. But like many of her cohort, she’d taken strength from the global Occupation movement and chose to strike out on her own rather than help her moneyed masters further drive down the value of human labor.

After parking her bike on the untraveled roadway high atop the curving concrete dam, Beth turned her back to Lake Havasu and drifted towards the southern railing. She took a deep breath, and cast the anger she’d worked up against Rosset to the gentle breeze, imagining it drifting down over the Colorado River, where it was absorbed and cleansed by the flowing water. Then her gaze lifted, across the rocky horizon, and up into the early evening sky. She smiled as she envisioned herself soaring low over the river, down past Lake Moovalva and Headgate Rock Dam in the steam-powered ultralight of her imagination.

“Someday,” she told the river, “I’m going to skim your length not much higher than this. Someday.” But first, she reminded herself, she needed to get back to Parker. Dusk was falling, and she knew that pedal-powered headlights were neither as dependable nor as bright as steam-powered ones.

Rather than returning to Arizona 95, she continued across the dam and rode the last leg home on the California side of the river. But before re-crossing to Parker, she stopped at a bakery she favored to pick up a treat for Peter.

“Elspeth!” chirped the craggy proprietress as she opened the door. “I didn’t hear the unmistakable sound of your handiwork. Something wrong with your steamer?”

She nodded and glanced back towards her bike. “Yeah, Roz. That jerk I tracked down in Lingman kicked it free after it gave out on the way back here.”

“I trust you didn’t cart him the rest of the way home, then.”

“No. Last I saw him, he’d taken my bike and was trying to pedal it back to civilization. Didn’t make it, though. Well, at least I don’t think he did. In any case, he took my pistol before ditching the bike and setting out cross-country on foot.”

“You think he might’ve shot himself?”

“Not likely. I still have the bullet.”

Roz grabbed a small sack and started to fill it with scones. “That’s too bad. Weren’t you planning to barter it for something?”

“Yeah. But I’ll be okay. The repair shop’s doing better, now that Peter’s helping out. Which reminds me, that’s what I stopped in for, to get a treat for him. I hadn’t expected to go missing for this long.”

She made a face when Beth held out some money. “Put those Angels back, dear. The treats are on me this time.”

It was nearly closing time when Beth rolled up in front of her repair shop, but the lights were still on, and she could hear her protégé arguing with someone inside.

“You heard me, kid,” the customer thundered, “I don’t want any of those stinking Phoenix notes. Give me my change in L.A. Angels or I swear to God I’ll torch this place!”

Beth grabbed the scones and opened the door.

“Elspeth!” Peter said, surprised.

The customer wheeled to face her. “Where the hell have you been? I came to pick up my cultivator and this idiot here tried to make change with defective money.” He waved the notes at her and slammed them on the counter. “These!”

Beth put her bag down and glanced at the contested money. They were the colorful Phoenix notes that she’d gotten from some customers passing through on their way to the coast. “Look, Frank,” she said, “if you’re happier with money starring dead actors and designed by a convicted counterfeiter, fine. I think I’ve got enough here to cover your change. But please, don’t take your anger out on Peter. He is the one who repaired your John Deere knock-off, after all.”

Frank snatched the bills out of her hand and glared angrily at the teenager. “Fine. But don’t expect me to come back any time soon. Next time I need something fixed, I’ll take it to an American patriot, not some goddam Indian scam artist!”

Peter winced at the remark, but held his peace as Frank stormed out into the night. When he turned to look at Beth, she was grinning happily and offering him a scone. “Thanks,” he said, taking it. “You were gone a long time. Did you run into some kind of trouble in Lingman?”

She nodded, and picked up one of the Phoenix notes that Frank had refused. “It was worth it, though. Before that jerk made off with my bike, he told me about a scheme he’d heard about for keeping money in circulation. Of course, from his perspective, that was a horrible thing to do, because his kind would rather hoard it. But I do know why the background pattern on these things faded.”

“Oh?”

“Mmm-hmm. The cagey folks in Phoenix printed their money with a number of different ink blends, each one crafted to fade after a different period of time. According to Rosset, as each component of the design fades, the exchange value drops.”

Peter touched the faded screening beside the heavily saturated phoenix design. “By how much?”

“That was the last bit he heard about before the big telecoms went bust and their networks shut down. These bills have already lost ten percent of their value. When the phoenix loses its tail, they’ll fall to three-quarters of the face value, and so on.”

Peter touched the printed phoenix’s tail and checked for ink marks. “Clever. But what’s the point?”

“When you’re paid with this kind of money, what you’re supposed to do is take it to the bank. They exchange it for fresh, unfaded bills. The ones that are turned in are then stripped and reprinted for the next go-round. So the only people who need to worry are the ones who sit on their cash instead of spending it, and you can tell who they are because the money gives them away.”

He took another bite of scone. “So how did they end up in Parker?”

“Travelers,” Beth said as she counted the till. “Some people from Phoenix came through town a few months ago. They needed supplies and repairs, and this was what they had for money. Of course, they didn’t bother to tell me about the little trick they do.”

“Dollars must be pretty much worthless everywhere by now, I guess.”

“Well, sure. There’s nothing to back them up any more. Not like the L.A. Angels, which are based on the value of an hour’s labor, or the Phoenix notes, which are based on the value of a standard basket of locally grown food. But it does present us with a problem.”

He looked up. “Oh?”

“Mmm-hmm. Do we honor the narrative that adjusts the value of a Phoenix, or do we continue to accept it at face value?”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “Frank didn’t want to do either one.”

“I know. And that’s why we need to call a town meeting.”

+—+—+

“Okay, okay!” the facilitator shrilled, her hands spread for order. “The only way we’re going to make any sense out of this is if we give one another a chance to speak.” It had taken a few days to get the town meeting scheduled, but only a few moments for it to succumb to chaos. “Elspeth,” she said calmly, “you requested this meeting, and it appears that you’re the only one with an explanation for what’s happening to the money from Phoenix.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“Hearsay,” someone shouted from across the room. “Where’s your proof?”

Peter hopped onto a chair and was about to yell back when Beth tapped him on the leg and he relented.

The facilitator shot the man a dirty look before continuing. “That’s as good a place to start as any, I guess,” she said amiably. “Beth?”

“It’s like this,” she said, “I spoke to a man named Norwyn Rosset last week in Lingman. He’s one of the people responsible for the fall of the Dollar, and with it, the US government. I’d gotten a lead on his whereabouts from the folks that came through from Phoenix a few months back. It seems that Rosset had been hiding out in Lingman, but then he got stranded when the few people still living there ditched town on him.”

“Then let him speak!” someone called out.

“Yeah,” another voice chimed in, “where’s Rosset?”

Beth shook her head in frustration. “He’s not here. I tried to bring him back with me, but he stole my bike and disappeared. I found it later, but he’d taken my gun and set off on foot.”

“So what you’re saying,” the facilitator said, “is that you’re our sole source for this explanation, barring other visitors from Phoenix. Is that correct?”

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

“In that case,” the founder of the local credit union said, “all we can do is judge Beth’s explanation on its merits, since we don’t have anything official to back it up. The way I see it, we’ve got three choices. One, we decide to not recognize Phoenix money at all here, two, we accept Elspeth’s explanation and let these notes devalue themselves to nothing, or three, we ignore the explanation and use them at their face vale.”

“Rubbish,” a voice rumbled. “All we need to do is send someone to Phoenix. Then we’ll know whether this cockamamie scheme holds any water.” It was the grossly overweight bully who had been the branch manager of a now-defunct bank.

“Great idea, Tom,” Beth shot back. “You hobble right over there, and we’ll just not spend any Phoenix money until you return.”

The raucous laughter that followed was cut short by a resounding crash as the double doors burst open and the young tech who’d set up the town’s open-source cell towers rushed in clutching a phone. “It’s fire and rescue,” he said breathlessly, eyes wide. “Roz’s bakery’s in flames and she’s trapped inside.”

“Oh my god!” Beth breathed, color draining from her face. “Frank.”

“What?”

“Francis Stoneway. He threatened to burn down my shop when Peter offered him Phoenix money as change. Those travelers stopped at Roz’s, too, and Frank likes donuts!”

The young man held up a finger while listening intently to the phone. “They’re going in after her,” he said, glancing around the crowd. Then he winced, and asked the caller, “what was that?”

The crowd drew closer. A few people clasped hands.

He swallowed, and lowered the phone. “They were… they were just inside when the roof fell on her.”

Beth collapsed into a chair and cried.

Several people conferred with the tech for a few minutes. He made calls to some of the other working groups, passing instructions from those present. Even though Parker no longer had a formal police force, Frank would nevertheless be found and brought in for questioning.

“Okay people,” the facilitator said a few minutes later, “we still have to decide what to do about the Phoenix money that‘s circulating here in Parker.” She paused for a moment and glanced nervously around the room. “Even if Frank wasn’t responsible for that fire, he, or someone else who refuses to accept the Phoenix money, might do something stupid.”

“Damn right,” Tom shouted. “I say we just refuse to honor the crap!”

“Do you,” Beth asked sarcastically, rising to her feet. “So tell me, exactly how much Phoenix money have you accepted?”

“Not one bit. I know real money when I see it.”

“That’s a laugh,” she said, pulling an Angel out of her wallet and holding it up. “And what exactly makes these things real for you? Is it the pictures of dead actors, or the fact that they were designed by a convicted counterfeiter?”

“What’s important,” he said angrily, “is that it’s backed by gold.”

“Gold? Can’t you even read? It says right on the back that Angels embody the hard work and good faith of the people who labor for the betterment of Los Angeles.“

“I think we’re getting sidetracked here,” the facilitator said. “It’s ludicrous to argue about which city’s money is real and which one isn’t. What makes any money real is people’s willingness to use it. Our problem is what to do about the fact that at least one person here in Parker is in violent opposition to using it.”

“Excuse me,” Peter said tentatively, “can I say something?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it seems to me that if the people in Parker refuse to accept the Phoenix money, we’d be alienating an awful lot of people who ought to be our allies.”

“Allies?” Tom shot back. “What the hell do we need them for?”

“Well, for one thing,” someone replied, “they buy a lot of what we make here.”

“Besides,” Peter went on, “if we accept the money but reject the explanation for the fading ink, there’s no reason for us to accept the labor conversion for Angels either. The only way we can survive as a community is if we agree on some common principles. I say we accept the Phoenix narrative, and talk with the people there about setting up a printing operation in Parker so we can refresh any of their money that’s spent here, and extend the territory where it’s accepted.”

Beth looked at him agape. “I thought you came to work for me because you wanted to build things. And now you want to be a banker?”

“Of course not,” he laughed. “What I want to do is build the printing press.”

THE END

(The story continues in “Steam Cycle“)

Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

“Like I explained in my anonymized email, I can’t let you find out who I am, and there will never be a way to corroborate what I’m about to say.”

Robert scowled at the digital puppet on his screen, an amalgam of Avatar-style facial mimicry and open-source voice processing that looked and sounded enough like Richard Nixon to be distracting. “And yet you expect me to believe you?”

Faux-Nixon nodded. “I like the irony.”

“Well, okay. I’ll hear you out, but only because the little you’ve alluded to is so damaging to so many people, not only in several world governments, but in a string of multinationals a mile long.”

“And if you believe me?”

Robert smiled uneasily. “Even if I believe you,” he said, “then there’s still nothing I can do about it. You say you can’t provide any documents to support your story, so there’d be nothing to release.”

“Our transcript, perhaps?”

“Laughably ineffective. They’ve so conditioned people to reject conspiracy theories that it can be framed as just another circus sideshow. You’ll have believers, of course, just like there have been people who have believed in dozens of unproven explanations in the past, but so what?”

The man wearing the face-camera visibly drooped. His faux-Nixon persona was still for a good half-minute before jerking back to life. “I’ll let you worry about that later. As I said, I was sworn to secrecy, and threatened with several kinds of retribution if I ever spoke about that meeting.”

“And yet,” Robert interrupted, “you’ve contacted our group and demanded to be heard. Why shouldn’t I think you’re about to plant a story for one of the clandestine intelligence agencies?”

The Nixon puppet smiled. “You should. At least then you’ll have included their actions in your understanding of what happens in the world. But enough of this… those agencies do monitor Internet traffic after all. Encrypted video chats only pique their interest.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“To begin with, the Obama administration inherited a problem. The advanced weapons test conducted in the fall of 2001, which was gussied-up as a false-flag attack, was a masterpiece of misdirection and a cornucopia for what Eisenhower wanted to call the military-industrial-congressional complex, none of which were privy to the whole truth. It was blamed on an organization ginned up by the intelligence community around a CIA asset who also happened to be a business associate of the former president’s family. With all other air traffic in the US grounded, Osama bin Laden’s extended family were escorted out of the country, and the man himself became an absentee specter to focus the wrath of the citizenry.”

“And the problem?” Robert prompted.

“The problem was that even though he died of renal failure in 2002, the intelligence apparatus continued to milk the fear they had sown by releasing fabricated videos from him, and kept the fiction of his existence alive until the former president left office.”

Robert held up a hand. “So those videos suspected of being fakes really were?”

Faux-Nixon sighed. “Of course they were. Wasn’t it obvious? And that was part of the problem. The charade couldn’t be kept up indefinitely.”

“All right. Just for the sake of argument, I’ll take that to be the case. But even so, why didn’t they just blow the cover off the charade right then and there? Why continue with the war on terror if the face of the enemy was as contrived as yours is now?”

“How the hell should I know? I wasn’t part of that. All I know is what happened at the meeting I attended. And by that time, they’d strung the sham along for a good year or so.”

“The meeting, then,” Robert said, his breath quickening.

“Yes. The meeting. In my work as a business strategy consultant, I help my clients to resolve problems that crop up with the narratives that they create in the course of promoting their products and services. Well, I was contacted by the representative of what I was told was a group of people both in and out of government who wanted help with an existing narrative. It’s not an unusual request. Often, as a result of acquisitions and takeovers, companies end up with narratives that don’t fit their image. At that point, they can either pursue a rebranding effort, or just drop it cold. But this was different. The brand was a person, and unlike McDonald’s, they couldn’t just hire a different actor to put behind the whiteface.”

“Wait a minute. Isn’t that exactly what they did, though? I mean the person in some of those alleged bin Laden videos wasn’t even a good match.”

“Not like Sir Paul McCartney was, no. So that left two choices. Either expose the farce, which would risk alienating not only the people but the business interests that were complicit in the crime and beneficiaries of its results, or… they could stage a conclusion to the narrative to cement the whole thing in the past.”

Robert rocked back in his chair, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You claim that you were brought in to help the government arrange an elaborate hoax to plaster over the fact that their cover story about bin Laden was wearing thin?”

“It was worse than wearing thin,” faux-Nixon said dismissively. “It had become a liability. By that time, the only acts he could reasonably be connected with were a few embassy bombings from back in the 90s. The intelligence teams were spending a lot of money keeping up the fiction that he was still directing terrorist activities in a way that didn’t raise eyebrows even among the people he was supposedly directing. That entire web of subterfuge had to be dismantled without exposing the truth. And the only way to carry that off was to stage a hit on a drugged patsy and dispose of the hard evidence in a way that could never be found.”

“Uh-huh. Hence the burial at sea.”

“That’s right. Everyone involved had to believe that they were doing their patriotic duty, that they were following legal orders, and that they were even honoring the memory of the missing man, or it would collapse of its own weight. If the closing narrative is to succeed, it will have to hold up under scrutiny of the people who were involved. They can each testify to the truth of the part they participated in, yet nobody can verify that it was really bin Laden that was executed and quickly disposed of.”

Robert crossed his arms and pursed his lips.

“Is something wrong?” faux-Nixon asked.

“I’m not sure. But if I’m going to suspect the motivation of the people you say called you in on this, I also have to suspect your own motivation for insisting on being heard out.”

“My…?”

“That’s right, your motivation. If you’re as good at this as you say you are, I can’t overlook the possibility that planting this story may play some part in your overall scheme.”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe this. I’m risking my neck to expose the biggest scandal in centuries, and you think it’s just a ploy? What could I possibly have to gain from that?”

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet, Steven, but I was pretty sure you’d try.”

“Steven…?” Faux-Nixon’s face froze momentarily in a deer-in-the-headlights expression. “But if you know my name, then you must be…”

“In the pay of your clients. Did you really think you were the only person they called in on this?  That door you hear opening is a black-ops team. You were the last loose end that had to be tied up. Enjoy your next few breaths. They’re all you’ll get.”

THE END

Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

Drake was wrong. The astronomer’s formula for the number of detectable civilizations in the galaxy was flawed. Not that it mattered now. Not since the people of his planet committed autogenocide. But then, their search for extraterrestrial life had lasted only about fifty years; hardly long enough to make a difference, even if they hadn’t blinded themselves to the very signs they were looking for.

Irran slipped the silvery disc out of its sleeve and held it up to the mid-day sun. When it had been recorded, the walls of the Great Hall surrounding him supported a vaulted ceiling. The building’s designers had drawn their inspiration from millennia of the planet’s cultural histories. But that was before the conflagration, which happened while Irran’s team was still speeding alongside space on their one-way First Contact mission. Now, the remains of those walls stood watch over the rubble of the Hall’s destruction.

“Is that the one?” Kharlin asked, carefully picking her way through the debris. She was the expedition’s linguist, and had been instrumental in developing the translations that had led them from zones of destruction large enough to be seen from space, where the conflagration had been fought out, to this, the seat of Earth’s final attempt at a global government, where contentious leaders had set in motion the events that put an end to humanity.

“I think so,” he said. “How are the others holding up?”

She glanced back towards the overgrown formal gardens in front of the building, where they’d set the landing craft down. “Wendl is still sleeping off the sedatives. I don’t think he’s ever going to get over it. The rest are scouting for cultural artifacts that might shed some additional light on the background of the people at the core of this mess. As long as they’re distracted from thinking about the monsters who ordered their own people to carry out those orders, I think they can cope well enough.”

Irran nodded gravely.

“Even so, I’m concerned about how they’ll react when we get that disc translated. Even if they only tangentially identify with the people who made those choices, it could put them in the same state you fell into when you felt the world through that military commander’s eyes. We all thought you were going to lose it for a while. It’s a good thing I remembered that story you told me about your brother. Still, that commander at least knew what war was like. I seriously doubt that anyone here had any sense of what they’d unleashed.”

He turned the disc over and blew the dust off it. “You’re probably right. But I’d still like to give them the chance to be here when we view the translation. It’s a personal choice, and, as dangerous as it may be, nobody should make it for them.”

While Kharlin’s translator was busy analyzing the disc, the team finished categorizing and imaging the artifacts they decided to include in their final report. Having traveled so far and so long, only to have the whole point of their mission rendered irrelevant, the team had fallen into depression. Before setting out, each of them had accepted the finality of their farewells, but the sacrifice they’d made was in exchange for the adventure of a lifetime, the opportunity to stand face-to-face with people of another world. Not this. Never this.

After re-entering normal space-time at the fringes of the system’s cometary cloud, they had scanned the broadcast frequencies for signals, but found none. Clutching for an explanation, they posited that there might simply have been a rapid shift in technology, and looked for signs of transmissions using different methods. They all knew it was impossible to prove a negative, but there it was. A shadow fell over them as they flew past the outer planets, dreading the possibility that they had traded their futures for naught.

Wendl was the team’s botanist and climatologist. His eyes had sparkled in anticipation of learning how the plant life on Earth solved the problem of converting its sun’s light into energy, even though the range of frequencies was shifted, and the mix of gasses in the atmosphere and minerals in the soil was so very different from those back home. As they’d passed the only planet in the system massive enough to make its star wobble noticeably, he marveled at the stable storm systems that gave the gas giant such a distinctive look, and noted how little their size and position had changed while they’d been in transit. Then, on the approach to Earth, he yelped in horror when he realized that the circular storm straddling much of the narrower of the two great oceans was not an ephemeral cyclone, but was instead a stable, high-energy system, like the spots on the gas giant.

“But that can’t be!” he’d told Irran anxiously. “Currents in the ocean and the atmosphere would keep storms in motion. The only way this could happen is if…”

“What?”

“Well, if the gyre in that ocean had stopped. But to do that you’d have to decimate the ice caps and denude the polar regions of glaciers! It would take massive amounts of fresh water to drastically change the salinity of the water. But how…?”

There wasn’t anyone to ask, but once Kharlin’s translator was working, they found everything they needed to know from the news records. The truly mind-wrenching part was that the people of Earth were unable to acknowledge what they had unleashed because they couldn’t agree on what to call it. And they couldn’t agree on what to call it because naming it would have given it reality, a reality that flew in the face of pre-conceived notions drawn from religious texts created before the very idea of science had arisen in that culture.

Wendl sat for days staring at the eye of that storm. It consumed him. He wouldn’t speak. He didn’t touch his food. It was as if that dense ring of clouds told him everything he needed to know about the planet, and about the people we had come so far to meet. By the time we achieved orbit, he was too weak to walk. All he could think of doing was making some readings to confirm his worst fears. Once he’d done that, he just fell to pieces. The best the team’s doctor could do was to keep him drugged, and to surround him with the comforting images and sounds of home. But now, even that was wearing thin.

The animals, which had scattered at their arrival, were venturing closer at night now, and the team were comparing notes about them over tea after dinner. The bravest of them was a cat, one with patches of different colored fur. After offering it several kinds of food to learn what it liked and to earn its trust, the group decided to adopt the animal. Inevitably, it needed a name, and the one that stuck was Rumbly, because of its prodigious purr.

Irran was idly petting the cat a few days later when Kharlin approached. “It’s finished,” she said excitedly. “The translation’s complete.”

He slowly raised his gaze. “I’m not so sure I want to hear it, to be perfectly honest.”

Kharlin nodded, and gently sank to a crouch on the other side of the cat. “Why not?”

“I’ve been thinking about Wendl… and about that storm. It’s like the people here had all taken part in a ritual suicide.”

She winced. “Surely not all of them. After all, it was the leaders who gave the orders in the end. Most of the people probably didn’t have a clue what was about to happen.”

“Sure,” he said, nodding, “but how did those people get to be leaders? One way or another, it had to be with the cooperation of the masses, even if it’s only that they didn’t object strongly enough.”

“I see where you’re coming from with that, but there’s no reason to believe that the people on this planet understood reality the same way we do. You saw all the religious iconography at the other sites. It was as prevalent in the self-proclaimed secular cultures as it was in the overtly religious ones. The only difference I noticed was whether it was expressed as a regional monoculture or as a patchwork of interpenetrating enclaves. I think the people here were so caught up in their competing narratives that they never looked behind the set dressing to see what reality was all about.”

Rumbly yawned at length. After a moment, she rose, looked at Irran briefly, and wandered off.

“Like that cat,” he said, watching it creep up on an unsuspecting bit of fluff. “It was content to sit here as long as I was petting it, but lost interest in my company soon after I stopped. People are like that, too. All that’s different is what it takes to keep their interest.”

“Mmmm. You said you were thinking about Wendl?”

“The only thing that kept him together as long as he did was his preoccupation with that storm.”

She looked away and muttered, “the Eye of God.”

“The what?”

“That’s what they all started calling it near the end. While the climatologists were screaming bloody murder over the implications, the various sects were using it to trumpet the alleged truth of their respective end-of-the-world narratives, the business interests were trying to figure out how to make a profit out of it, a dozen militaries wanted to use it as a weapon, and everyone else was doing their best to make believe it hadn’t happened.”

Irran laughed humorlessly. “Kind of hard to ignore something that big.”

“That didn’t stop them from trying.”

“Yeah. And I’m worried that our group may fall into the same trap if we don’t do something about it.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“I think we ought to gather the team and pay our respects to the former residents of this world by laying out their narrative as best we can. It’s the closest we’ll come to a proper funeral.”

Kharlin gaped in disbelief. “Surely you’re joking, Irran. Do you honestly believe they deserve a eulogy? And even if they did, what would you say? They had dozens of competing narratives, so whichever one you chose would be a disservice to the others. And then there’s the problem of integrity. Once the people in power realized that they could manipulate narratives, they fabricated stories from whole cloth to provide cover for the wars they wanted to wage, the desecration of the environment, and a whole raft of other horrible things they did.”

“Well, then, we could craft our own narrative. It’s not like—.”

She crossed her arms in frustration. “Think about Wendl. Do you realize that early in their 21^st century, the leaders of their one remaining superpower demanded that climatologists dumb down their findings?”

“They what?”

“They ordered their scientists to eliminate all of the subtlety and nuance of reality in a vain attempt to convince the moronic pawns of powerful interests that there even was a climate problem? And it didn’t stop there, either. The same tactic was used to shackle scientists in other fields as well. They didn’t want narratives. All they wanted was to appease their critics and retain power. What praise could you possibly offer about a people like that?”

Irran swallowed hard and looked away. “Couldn’t we,” he said in a controlled voice, “at least honor the intent of this place? After all, they did build it in an attempt to bring all those embattled factions together in common purpose. It’s on that fallen façade out there — ‘the spirit of compromise’.”

“Common purpose, perhaps, but not with anything approaching a shared set of principles. They couldn’t even agree to use the same words to mean the same thing!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said dismissively. “We’ve been through that. Like their inability to agree on what to call what was happening to their climate.”

“No,” Kharlin said flatly. “I mean they meant different things when they said the same words. And in point of fact, that was the core of their undoing. That’s what killed them all.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that the people in this hall gave the order to blow up the planet, to kill all of the people and most of the animals, because of a misunderstanding… a language problem?”

“That’s right. And it started with that façade. Their so-called ‘spirit of compromise’ was nothing of the sort.”

“They dedicated this place to an idea they didn’t even agree on?”

“Uh-huh. To one side, it meant engaging in negotiation with the understanding that each side would cede ground on some issues. To the other, it meant the exact opposite: that their position was sacrosanct, and the most they’d agree to was a delay in achieving it.”

Irran rose and took a few steps towards the entrance. “Maybe Wendl’s the lucky one here. If he dies without ever learning the truth about this, he’ll at least have an easy death. The rest of us… well, it’s one thing to discover that the people you’ve traded your future to visit have all died. It’s another to learn that their leaders murdered them all out of arrogance. We’re stuck here now. Even if we survive, there’s no way to escape that truth, nowhere to run to, no place to hide. The psychic damage we face is inescapable. I can’t, in good conscience, either tell the rest of the team what you’ve learned or withhold it from them.”

Kharlin rose and joined him. “We have to do something.  They need to have some kind of closure, even if it’s contrived. But then what? Where do we go? What do we do?”

“How about this. We gather Rumbly and the team and take the landing craft back into orbit. I know we can’t go home, but we also don’t have to stay down here. If we only ground to get resources, we can live aboard ship for a good long time.”

“All right, but what about getting closure?”

“I was coming to that. It will be a good deal easier to speak in generalities from orbit than it would be down here. We don’t have to talk about the biological weapons that intentionally disrupted their DNA, how the targeting strategies failed to limit the affected populations, or even how the ecosystems unraveled from its effects. Instead, we can wrap up the entire collapse of mankind as the closing act of a planetary drama that they all unknowingly played a part in, and could only appreciate from the vantage point of intercarnate existence.”

“Well, sure, except for the fact that none of the belief systems we’ve reconstructed shared that view of reality with us.”

Irran grinned. “Come on, Kharlin. We both know that you don’t have to believe in co-incarnation to experience it. Besides, after participating in a meta-narrative on that scale, mankind ought to at least have benefit of an audience. Besides, as far as I’m concerned, orbit is the best place to see the beauty of any world.”

THE END

Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

Alexandra took another sip of Kona, tickled the mousepad to highlight a few words, and turned the laptop towards the more casually dressed woman across the small table from her in the noisy coffee shop. “Is this a typo in your Abstract? Did you spell it that way on purpose, or did you intend to characterize your findings as an ‘allergic reaction’?”

Faye chuckled and shook her head. “Well, I suppose you could describe it that way, but it’s not really the same sort of thing that happens when an oyster makes a pearl to keep a speck of sand from itching.”

The two had been close friends since they roomed together at college, but this was the first time Faye needed a professional favor. The juxtaposition of their divergent interests, with Faye being a science geek and her former roommate being a linguist, had sparked a lot of humor between them over the years, most of which was incomprehensible to either one’s co-workers. So when Faye finally completed the research project that had swallowed her life for the past few years, she decided to ask Alexandra to help polish her paper before submitting the results.

“Are you sure it’s even a word? Your spell-checker’s called it out, too.”

Faye bit her lip. “I know, Alex. And that’s the most complete dictionary module I could find for my field. But it’s the only thing that accurately describes what happened.”

“Okay,” Alexandra said after a long pause, “let’s take a different tack. How well do you know the journal’s editorial guidelines? Are they sticklers for using accepted terminology? I mean, if they’re likely to reject your paper because they don’t like your choice of words, maybe there’s some other way to describe whatever it was that happened.”

“Like what?” She glanced nervously around the shop, at a knot of customers by the counter who were chatting excitedly with one another, at the guy at the next table who was staring intently at whatever was on his screen, and at the woman by the door who was so caught up in a phone call that she didn’t realize she was splashing coffee on someone. “I’ve had my head into this problem for so long I’m not sure I could explain it to any of these people.”

Alexandra reached across the table and covered her friend’s twitching hand. “Then explain it to me… in plain language. Forget about the paper for now. Don’t bother going into detail about the science, or about the technology, or about anything else that might get in the way of explaining whatever it was that had so entranced you for three years that you lost track of your friends. I know it was important to you. Make it important to me.”

Faye sat back and closed her eyes.  “I’ll try,” she whispered. After a few minutes, she leaned forward again and gazed right through Alexandra as if she was looking at something a million miles away. “Imagine,” she said softly, “that we were thousands of light-years from here, cruising through the planetary system of some star. People couldn’t survive such a trip, so imagine that we’re the brains of a robot spacecraft sent to explore the planets in this system.”

“Good opening gambit,” Alexandra said, smiling. “I’m with you. Go on.”

“Thanks. So here’s our problem. We’ve only ever seen the results of life arising on one planet. That doesn’t tell us much about what might happen elsewhere, especially if conditions are different. But there are some things we can guess. For instance, if there’s a nova or supernova close enough to affect the planet, but not close enough to destroy it, we can predict the sort of stress that the planet will be placed under. And unless physics and chemistry are different there, we can also model those stresses in a lab. That’s what my experiment was about, stressing the simulated environment on a hypothetical planet to see how it reacts.”

“I can see why you got caught up in the project, Faye. Those are pretty big questions. Before you continue, though, I’m going to have to beg a bathroom break. I’ve had way too much caffeine today, and I’m feeling the results of it. Could you order us a round of something unleaded while I’m gone?”

Alexandra had gone to the counter and was about to place their orders when her attention was snatched by a screech of tires, a blaring horn, and the heavy thud of something banging into the door. She turned in time to see a man in the doorway gesture rudely at a driver, who by that time was probably in no position to see the profanity.

“Watch where the hell you’re going, moron!” he yelled, backing unsteadily into the shop.

The woman on the phone lowered it briefly. “You okay?” she asked.

He whirled to look at her, squinting into the glare from the window, and sneered. “Jerk driver… can’t even stay off the sidewalk.” His speech was slurred, and she flinched from the smell.

Another customer stood up and started to offer assistance, but the guy pushed him aside and stumbled towards the counter. When Alexandra tried to step out of his way, he grabbed her wrist and held it up. “Don’t you raise your hand to me,” he said, his slur giving way to the relative clarity of adrenaline-fueled anger. “I’ve had enough of you self-righteous libocrats telling me how to live my life.” When she tried to pull away, he leaned into her and breathed down her blouse.

“You’re drunk,” she said indignantly, “and I doubt that car jumped the curb. Now let me go and get the hell out of here!”

When she yelped in pain from his tightened grip, the man at the next table snapped his laptop shut, leaped to his feet and lunged at the intruder. While he was grabbing the drunk’s free arm and twisting it behind him, another patron pried the guy’s hand open and got Alexandra clear of him. The two rescuers glanced at one another and nodded. The one with a lock on the intruder pointed him towards the door. “Here’s your choice, dipwad: walk out of here under your own power, or we’ll hold you until the cops arrive and have you charged with assault.”

Alexandra rubbed her arm and thanked both of them. As the drunk made his unsteady way out the door, a round of good-natured chatter swept the shop.

Faye lightly touched her shoulder and asked what all the commotion was about.

“Nothing important,” she said, showing the remains of the red handprint on her wrist, “just some idiot a bit too far into his bourbon.” She grinned at her rescuers. “You could say that these gents here edited him out of our afternoon. Speaking of which, we ought to get back to your paper.”

Faye nodded. “Did you have a chance to get our orders in?”

“Already taken care of.” It was the barista, who had come over with a large iced melon special in each hand. “Oh, and they’re on the house.” He glanced at the two men who had intervened. “Yours, too. That was a great act of community solidarity you two demonstrated just now, and I’d like to reinforce the feeling.”

After the two women returned to their table and luxuriated in about a third of their iced melons, Faye tapped her nails against the table a few times. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“About the editors?”

She shook her head. “No, about the word I might have made up. Allegergic. You took it to be a misspelling of ‘allergic’, and I hadn’t realized that it could actually make sense to refer to it that way. It’s just that the reaction itself is so different from what people think of as an allergic reaction that it would just confuse the issue.”

“And so…?”

“Well, I was thinking that I could frame the effect as if it were a kind of allergic reaction, and then focus on what makes it different from one. That way I could ease into the new word, and my readers would have a way to assimilate it.”

“You know,” Alexandra said, swirling her drink, “you still haven’t explained what sort of reaction it was. I’d have a lot better idea of how to tweak your paper if I knew what it was really about. That reaction, whatever it was, is like the climax of a novel, after all. If you don’t sell that sizzle in your abstract, you’re not going to get as many people interested in digging into the details of your paper. You could think of your abstract like the preview of a new movie. If you don’t hook them and get them into the theater, they’ll never see the film.”

“All right, all right. I get the idea.”

“So what happened? How did your lab planet react to the explosion, and what the heck does that word of yours mean?”

Faye took a long slow drink of iced melon before replying. When she did, she had a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were gazing lovingly at her simulated planet. “I went into this with a whole lot of expectations. I thought about all the chemical reactions that could happen in my ‘soup’, and about the experiments that have been conducted to try to tease out what might have happened right here on Earth. Stir some lightning and some gamma rays into an ocean of primordial stew, and voila, suddenly you have self-replicating molecules, the precursors to RNA, DNA and everything else we know about life here.”

“Mmm-hmm. And you got something entirely different?”

“No, not really. And yet I did. I mean, I got all manner of chemical reactions. Add that much energy to a system, and there’s not much choice in the matter. Chemistry happens. It all went by the book. And yet there was something else I hadn’t expected.”

Alexandra laughed. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you created life.”

“Well, yeah. But that’s not the point.”

“Hold it. Wait. You created life, but that’s not the point? What could possibly top that?”

“When I was in the bathroom,” Faye said with a faint smile, “I heard a commotion out here.”

“Sure,” Alexandra said, puzzled. “That drunk who barged in. What about it?”

“By the time I finished, there was a concerted effort to throw him out underway.”

“Sure, but…”

“How did that happen? Did those two men who pulled him off you stop to discuss it, or did they just act spontaneously?”

The man at the next table turned his head in curiosity.

“They just acted I guess. Is this relevant to your experiment?”

“Weirdly, I think it is. Forget that this is a coffee shop for a minute and think about it as if was a system, like an ecosystem, or the Earth.”

“Or your simulated planet. Okay, I get it. But why?”

“That drunk,” Faye said, glancing at the door, “was a kind of stressor for our little coffeehouse system, just like the simulated nova was for my experiment. Now, you’d expect certain kinds of reaction.”

“Like the woman who interrupted her call to help the guy as soon as he stumbled inside?”

“Yeah. The usual kinds of reaction are as predictable as billiard balls if you know all the particulars. But something else happened here. Two men spontaneously came to your rescue without even thinking about how they’d collaborate. How did that happen?”

Their neighbor grinned in amusement.

Alexandra shrugged. “Heck if I know. Is it important?”

“You bet it is. Their concerted reaction was evidence that one effect of the stress put on our little system here was information. A physical cause triggered a symbolic, or allegorical reaction.”

“An allegorical reaction? I don’t understand.”

“The symbolism is inherent in emergent behavior. Like the seemingly random activities of a colony of ants building an incredibly complex structure. Its everywhere in nature, and yet we’ve overlooked the real importance of it, because one of those emergent behaviors is the integrated living system of our planet: Gaia. That’s what happened in my lab!”

“You created life. You already said that.”

“No. We created a living system. There were no emergent behaviors in our simulated planet before we exposed it to the effects of a nearby nova. That shock pushed the system over some kind of energy threshold. It gave birth to a relative of Gaia in our lab.”

“And you’re saying that was kind of like an allergic reaction?”

“Yes. I mean no. It’s an allegoric reaction, a symbolic one. The reaction was the creation of information, a new state of organization, the reversal of entropy in a manner of speaking.”

Alexandra splayed her palms on the table. “So this new term, this ‘allegergic reaction’, means that the system responded to stress by sneezing out an idea?”

Faye laughed happily. “Exactly. But how do we get this past the editors?”

“Well, you did create life, in a warped kind of way. So how about coming right out and saying it? In the beginning, light created Gaia, and it was good.”

“Come on. Be serious. I can’t do that.”

“Then how about this.” She woke the laptop and typed as she spoke. “The shockwave from the simulated nova added enough of the right kind of energy to thrust the simulated planetary environment across an informational threshold into a more organized state. That higher order of organization expressed itself as a smaller version of Earth’s ordering principle: the newly created biological and chemical replicators began forming interlocking systems. We therefore conclude that the result of our experiment was the birthing of a higher order of life, only the second one of its type known to exist. For now, we’re referring to it as Gaia’s niece.”

Faye raised her cup in a toast. “Now that I can live with.”

The man at the next table raised his own in response. “Glad I could help.”

THE END
Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

Lonnie strode through the encampment of pro-union protesters outside the capitol building in Olympia with a timid smile on his face. A dozen organizations had come together to fight the new governor’s plan to strip the state’s public service unions of their collective bargaining rights, each one proudly identifying itself both in dress and on signs. Gail Kerr, the leader of the teachers’ union, had just concluded a rousing speech, and Lonnie joined in the cheer that followed.

“No class warfare!” he yelled, nodding conspiratorially to the people around him. “No class warfare!” With this good-natured camaraderie returned in kind, he joined in the public grousing against the governor, his party, and the business interests supporting them, yet held his tongue when the mass of protesters took up a chant to oust the man from office.

After the weeks-long occupation of the capitol building in Wisconsin at the beginning of 2011, the Republican Governors Association had shifted the focus of its strategy of destroying the American middle class by driving a stake through the labor movement at its heart to the next state, and then the next. Now it was Washington’s turn, and the former attorney general who’d just won the governorship wasted no time acting on his signature campaign promise. As had happened in other states, non-conforming legislators balked, vowing to deprive those supporting the governor of a quorum, and a swarm of organizations swept in to lay siege to the capital building.

As much as he disliked what the governor was doing, this mission was Lonnie’s big chance to make a name for himself and open the door to the influence and standing that were rightfully his. He may have been a geek, but he was a very special kind of geek, the kind that has been known to wield the power publicly held by the ruling elite. His interest in psychology, neurochemistry and electronics had blended into a frothy concoction that held a special appeal for men with a thirst for power. The governor’s strategist rewarded him with the chance to put his theory into action. The money, he promised, would come later, after he’d proven himself right.

Both sides in the standoff had refined their methods in response to the citizens’ uprisings in Sudan, Egypt and Libya, and the labor protests that had spread like a range fire across the US. The public relations armory traditionally wielded by those in power had been augmented with tactics right out of the CIA’s psy-ops playbook. Meanwhile, the armies of protesters had learned that the Internet they so depended on would either be tainted or unavailable, and fashioned their own edge networks to route around this intentional damage so they could coordinate their actions and reach the rest of the world.

Still, there were limitations to what Lonnie could know about the situation. He mused, while doing his best to blend into the crowd, about what it would be like to directly sense the energy fields that he’d spoken to the governor’s strategist about. In his mind’s eye, Lonnie imagined that he could feel the subtle energy generated by the minds of those around him. The recent discovery that the electrical signals transmitted along neurons also generated an enveloping magnetic field confirmed something he’d suspected for years, a hunch that explained recent political events, but also suggested a plan of action.

What it didn’t do was alert him to a movement in the crowd, just out of his field of vision. Just as he’d finished satisfying himself that everything was going according to plan, he found himself ringed by a contingent of the ad hoc security force that roamed the protest to keep things peaceful. Fearful for his safety, he tried to duck between them and melt into the crowd, but the crowd resolutely refused to cooperate. He felt like a virus beset by white blood cells.

“Is there a problem?” he asked warily.

“That depends,” one of the citizen security squad replied. “We understand that you’ve been seen speaking with the governor’s men. Do you have some sort of ‘in’ with him that we should know about? If you do, the combined leadership would like a word with you.”

Lonnie thought fast. That morning, the governor had ordered mass layoffs, and charged scores of so-called ‘instigators’ with a laundry list of crimes in an effort to blackmail the missing legislators into returning to the state. That could offer him a way out of this. “Yeah,” he said, “you’ve got me there. I did speak with him, but it wasn’t my idea.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. The governor’s man was looking for dirt to use in their blackmail scheme, and threatened my family if I didn’t talk.”

“What did you tell him?”

He looked away briefly to buy time, and then returned the man’s level gaze. “Well, I didn’t throw anyone under the bus, if that’s what you’re thinking. About the only thing I knew for sure was that each of the groups out here has their own agenda, so I told him it would be prudent to try to deflect them from their goals.”

“That’s not exactly an original thought, you know. Besides, it’s been tried, and it doesn’t work.”

“That’s pretty much what the governor’s man said, too. After that, they tossed me back. I guess I wasn’t a juicy enough catch for them. So, will that be all, then?”

The one on the left leaned in a bit. “Not exactly. You did have me there for a bit, but I know for a fact that you—.”

Lonnie bolted. He ducked into the crowd and started making his erratic way towards the capitol building steps, with the citizen security force in pursuit. He lost his footing a few times trying to weave past knots of protesters, yelling, “Make way! Make way!” as he went. Panting, and afraid for his safety, he hurtled through the middle of a gaggle of teenage girls passing around someone’s iPad, accidentally launching it in an arc directly in his line of travel. Frantic calls to catch it roused a contingent of potential rescuers to converge in front of him, blocking his way and sending him to the ground in a noisy pile-up. And yet, in the midst of all this, whoever had managed to catch the errant iPad raised his arm skyward and waved the treasure triumphantly.

When Lonnie finally extricated himself from the tangle and got to his feet, the security team ringed him in a lot closer than they had before, and escorted him to a small group of very anxious looking people, every one of whom he recognized, from the briefing he’d gotten in the Governor’s office, as a leader of one of the assembled groups. The information they’d assembled about these people was pretty extensive, so he guessed there was some sort of on-going surveillance of the organizations targeted by the governor’s new policies. Although she didn’t identify herself, he knew that the woman who stepped forward and crossed her arms was Gail Kerr, the diminutive firebrand leader of the teachers’ union whose speech he’d cheered earlier.

“Judging by the fact that you tried to get away,” she said, “I figure there’s something you’d rather we not know about you. So I’ll be as direct as possible. What’s your name?”

He studied her for a few seconds before answering, and decided to assume she had a keen mind to go with those piercing grey eyes. “Alondo Leighton. And yours?”

“Don’t distract me,” she said coolly. “We’re here to find out what you’re up to, not to socialize. I’m told you’ve had an audience with someone in the governor’s court. Who and why?”

Lonny scanned the faces of the people arrayed before him. Manipulating masses was always simpler when you have the attention of the influencers, and they seemed to have done him the favor of cutting short his plan to nudge random followers towards destruction by giving him a way to apply that leverage more effectively. “Like I told your goons, the big man’s lackey threatened my family for any dirt I could supply about the leadership out here. I told him—.”

She cut him off. “And why would they think you’d know?”

“How the hell should I know? They—.”

“You’re lying,” she said flatly.

“All right, all right,” he said. “So I did some research.”

Kerr shook her head and winced. “Not about that. You’re lying about why you were in the governor’s offices. Nobody threatened you or your family. Nice try, though. I think it’s far more likely that you had something to sell them. They already know everything worth knowing about me, and a good deal about my associates as well. The cut-rate security company running their surveillance net is amateur at best, so we know exactly whom they’re watching. We also know that the governor has no compunctions about threatening people. So whatever it was that you had to offer was a whole other ball of wax.”

Lonnie looked at her blankly. “Was that supposed to be a question?”

“No, but you certainly acted like it was. You’re just dying to spill that secret of yours, aren’t you? What did they offer in exchange? Money? Power?”

His expression hardened. “Recognition.”

Kerr laughed. “For giving them leverage over us? That’s the last thing they’d want to do. If anything, they’d want to make sure you never ratted them out. No, Mr. Leighton, you weren’t going to be recognized for your efforts, not in any way that’s important to you. The most you could ever expect to get would be hush money with some pretty severe restrictions attached to it.”

“Oh, and I suppose the teachers union could make me a better offer?”

“Well,” she said, loosening her stance, “it seems you’ve decided to negotiate. Which means this isn’t about principle for you. What kind of recognition were you after?”

Lonnie’s eyes glazed briefly, as he imagined himself giving a talk about his insight. Shaking himself out of reverie, he said, “I want people to respect me for my ideas. Speaking engagements might be nice, and maybe a book deal.”

The man to her left chuckled weakly. “Dream on,” he said. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get published commercially these days?”

“Tell me something, Mr. Leighton,” Kerr said, ignoring the interruption. “If your secret, whatever it is, could strengthen the governor’s power over us, don’t you think it would be worth more to us, since it would be empowering to thousands of union members?”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. This isn’t only about union members. It would empower all kinds of people.”

“Then help me to understand. What is it that you told the governor’s office?”

Lonnie straightened and took a deep breath. “All right. Do any of you know much about neurochemistry?”

One of the others coughed involuntarily. “Teachers, remember?”

“Good. It turns out that the electrical current coursing through our nerves generates magnetic fields around them, just like it does around electrical wires. Researchers have recently found that other nerves respond to this field at a distance, even though there’s no direct connection.”

The biology teacher shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

“Well, just like a galaxy full of stars has an overall gravitational field, a person has a bio-electrical field.”

“Look,” Kerr said sharply, “if you’re about to start spouting nonsense about auras, you can just forget about it. That claptrap may convince the MBAs and lawyers in the governor’s office, but they’re not—.”

“Did you want to hear me out or not?”

She frowned. “Go on.”

“Here’s the important thing,” Lonnie said. “Based on some new tests, it turns out that this field is stronger, more coherent, in people whose view of the world arises from some strongly-held set of core beliefs or principles. That means it’s stronger for a devout Christian, for instance, than it would be for someone who has no particular views on religion.”

“Oh, hang it up,” a member of the security team muttered.

“Look, this isn’t just about religion. A legislator operating from a moral compass would have a stronger field than one who bases his decisions on whatever facts were presented. My point is that the same thing that holds for galaxies also holds for groups of people. The whole thing about there being strength in numbers isn’t really about numbers. It’s about the people in that group all having the same objective.”

Kerr nodded. “You mean like the crowd here? That we’re stronger when we’re united in common purpose?”

“Exactly. But that common purpose has to be the core of why the people have united. Remember all the anti-war protests after the US invaded Iraq? They weren’t effective because they weren’t all of one mind. Those rallies were coalitions of groups that each had their own agenda, and only came together over one issue that was really only peripheral to their purpose.”

Something must have struck home, because the people he was facing suddenly started looking around.

“That’s right,” he said, “the same thing is true here. What happened in Egypt succeeded because the people gathered in Tahrir Square came together without an agenda. At first, they didn’t know what they were there for, but because they came without agendas, the citizens of Cairo naturally began to align with one another’s fields, and that multiplied their effectiveness.”

“So what you’re saying,” Kerr hazarded, “is that the secret you told the governor’s office was that to defeat us, they only needed to keep us separated.”

“Yes. It’s as simple as ‘divide and conquer’. Anything they could do to reinforce the fact that the people here worked for different unions, came from different backgrounds and had different long-term objectives, would defeat you in the end.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said after looking around again, “if what you say is true, and I have to tell you it strikes me in my gut as core truth, then you’ll get all the recognition you ever wanted if you take a few minutes to figure out how to explain that to the people here without too much technical detail. Are you game?”

Lonnie took a deep breath. His inner conflict had abated. “I think so, now that I’m of one mind about it.”

THE END
Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

“Prices to Pay”
by P. Orin Zack
(7^th of a series)
[02/25/2011]

“I told you,” Phaeron Huxley said angrily as he backed into his partner’s vacant desk, “I’m not going to go hang out in a goddamn forum just to clean up that bastard’s mess!”

Majgda Brourske, the fractured partnership’s overworked office manager, took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, but failed miserably. “That ‘bastard’, as you call him,” she said, still shaking, “was responsible for making this business a success.”

“A success? My god, woman, haven’t you been paying attention? Alluis Benoit single-handedly turned whatever success we had into a laughingstock!” He glanced away disgustedly, and then glared at her in contempt. “That moron crapped all over our customers! And you think I should defend him?”

Both turned as one when the roar of a tractor-trailer rig flooded through the suddenly opened doorway. Ben stood there, backlit by the bright Kansas sky, with one hand on the handle and the other splayed at shoulder-height in greeting. He’d opened his mouth to say something, but never got the chance.

“Ben,” Majgda said, relieved, “I’m glad you—.”

Phaeron rose and shouldered her aside. “Shouldn’t you be talking to the cops just about now? After all, you did steal my ride, totaled it god-knows why, and then fled the state.”

Ben grimaced. “I will. But I wanted to talk to you first.”

“You want to talk? Why? So you can fast-talk your way out of the charges? I’ve seen you in action, buddy-boy, and there’s no way I’m going to get suckered in by another one of your been-there-done-that so-called memories of the future.”

“But they’re real… well, at least they were!”

Majgda shook her head in confusion. “What? What are you two talking about?”

“My motorcycle,” Phaeron said, tapping the side of his head. “You know, the one I rode to work every d—.”

“Not that, the memories.”

“Oh, right,” Phaeron said lightly, “we hired you on afterwards. Dipwad here claimed that the reason he looked me up at the college was because of a memory he had of a business deal we were going to luck into to get our initial funding.”

She swung around towards Ben. “Is that true?”

“About the memories? Yeah, but like I said, that’s over with now. Besides, the last one that had anything to do with this business was about giving our customers upgrade credits for referrals, and that idea worked out just fine.”

Phaeron nodded once, but caught himself. “Hold it right there, Sherlock. If awarding credits for referrals was your last memory of the future, then what about our in-game credit sales? You told me it was a sure thing!”

Ben stepped inside and let the darkened-glass door swing shut behind him. “And it was. You can’t argue with that.”

“I might not,” Majgda said, “but you’d probably get an argument from players who were so hot on upgrading their weapons and treasures that they didn’t notice the new in-game credit purchase icon. Customers don’t like being tricked into buying.”

“Hey, come on,” Ben said defensively, “they did have to click through the change to their contract terms.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Phaeron said, shaking his head in disgust. “I told you that changing the logic from no-sale for insufficient game points to an automatic credit card deduction was a bad idea.”

“Maybe so,” Majgda said lightly. “But you thought it was a pretty sweet deal when I handed you that bonus check.”

He frowned, crossed his arms, and plopped into one of the guest chairs.

“In any case,” Ben said, “I wanted to explain what happened before turning myself in to the police.”

She thought for a moment. “Why? What’s so important?”

“Well, for one, I want you both to know that I feel bad about leaving you in the lurch like that.” He was quiet for a beat, and then added, “Especially when you hear why I did it.”

“Let me guess,” Phaeron said, “another memory?”

He nodded. “It was the hardest one I’d ever tried to live through, too: me crashing a motorcycle on the highway.”

“Crashing…?” Majgda said, astonished. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Did you think I wanted to risk my neck? I was never so scared in my life. But I had to. I had to. I remembered it happening that way, just as clearly as I remembered getting hurt on a swing when I was in grade school. Only that time, I hid.”

“That’s crazy! If you were smart enough to avoid getting hurt when you were a kid, why did you rush right into it this time?”

“Because of what came after. Look, that incident at school taught me to pay attention to my memories of the future. When the events in my life started to catch up with my memories of them, I began to realize that the important parts of those memories were what happened after the crisis. I found that if I could make it through the hard parts, I could get the prize. So I knew I had to crash a motorcycle, because I wanted that reward.”

Phaeron huffed. “Well, that clears everything up then, doesn’t it? You had no choice but to steal my bike just so you could destroy it and get a power-up. Where do you think you live, Ben, inside a videogame? I’m sure the prosecutor’s going to really love that one.”

“If it means anything to you, my memory didn’t play out this time. What was supposed to have happened was that a guy in a Passat stops to see if I’m okay, and then gives me a ride. Then, out on the highway, he gets a cell call that puts me onto my next business deal.”

Majgda looked puzzled. “No cell call?”

He shook his head. “Not even the guy in the VW.”

“None of which solves the problems that you left us with,” Phaeron said caustically. “Did you have some delusion that we were going to be happy to see you?”

“No, but maybe there’s still something I can do to help.”

“Sure there is. Leave. Turn yourself in. Or better yet, get me a new motorcycle. They’re not cheap, you know.”

Ben was still stewing when the phone rang. He glanced quickly at Phaeron and Majgda. “Should I… should I get that? After all, customer service was my responsibility.”

“It was,” Majgda said uncomfortably. “But you did walk out on us.” She nodded to Phaeron. “Go ahead. You’ll be all right.”

Ben relaxed a bit while the company’s software genius put the call on speaker and reeled off the standard greeting. He silently echoed their well-practiced boilerplate, and then shifted his gaze to the speakerphone when Phaeron asked how he could help. There was no voice, just the sound of ragged breathing.

“Hello?” Phaeron said irritably. “Is anyone there?”

After a sob, a very timid female voice said, “I… I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Ma’am, I’d like to help you, but unless you tell me what’s going on, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do. If you’re having some kind of emergency, maybe you’d better call 911.”

“Well…” she said hazily, “the way things are going, it might just come to that.”

Majgda silently encouraged him, and nodded her confidence that he’d be okay.

“What happened?”

“Ohh…” she moaned, “it’s everything. First the mortgage check bounced, and now my home improvement loan’s been kicked up to thirty-five percent. We were just squeaking by as it was, and now everything’s gone to hell.”

“What’s that got to do with us? Are you sure you don’t need to talk to a credit counselor?”

Just as Phaeron was saying ‘credit counselor’, Ben had a visionary flash like the one he’d had in Chicago the day after his crash. That time, he saw the tragic alternate futures of a woman approaching an abortion clinic, and chose to intervene. This time, he glimpsed the futures of their caller. In one of them, after speaking with Phaeron, she flew into a rage and nearly killed her son. In the other, she fell into depression and eventually took her own life. And just like in Chicago, neither of them led from an intervention on his part. But with choices that gruesome, he decided to act.

“Huxley,” he stage-whispered, drawing his finger across his throat. “Let me take over.”

Phaeron stabbed the mute button and glared at him. “Why? Isn’t she in enough trouble as it is?”

Majgda stepped between them. “Stop it, both of you.”

“I just saw where this is headed,” Ben said quickly, “and it ain’t pretty. Look, I know I’ve alienated customers in the past, but I’ve changed. Really. All I know for sure is that no matter what Huxley says, she’s screwed. I don’t know why, but I’ve got to handle this myself.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded and unmuted the call. “Ma’am, ma’am,” he said excitedly, “I’m sorry we had to cut out like that. I think I understand what you’re up against. What I need to know is how it got that way. Now, you said this all started with our game. Is that correct?”

Getting her to focus on the cause of the problem helped her to calm down a bit, so he decided to backtrack some. “I’m sorry ma’am, but in all the excitement, I forgot to get your name. And just to make sure we don’t really get cut off, could you give me a phone number I can call you back on if I have to.”

“Sure. I’m Beth Coney. My son’s name is Arthur. Oh, and you can call me at…”

He mimed to Majgda that she copy down the names and numbers, so he could focus on the call. “Now then, Beth,” he soothed, “how exactly did Arthur playing our game come between you and your mortgage payment?”

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, they figured out what had happened. During that time, Ben alternated between asking relevant questions and engaging Beth in small talk whenever a tinge of anxiety crept into her voice. Majgda watched with increasing interest as Ben continued to walk that fine line. At least twice, she smiled and nodded at a choice he’d made. Meanwhile, Phaeron busied himself tracking down offending bits of code to be changed, and researching other things that surfaced during the discussion.

What they learned from talking to Beth was that the change of terms from game-point based upgrades to game-point-or-paid upgrades had run afoul of the way purchase restrictions were implemented on the phone and with the cell service she had. So when Arthur tried to upgrade something that took more game points than he had collected, instead of blocking the transaction, the app was able to put it through. Arthur thought he was okay, because his mother had set up a purchase block, and so he just kept going. The first she knew of the problem was when the credit card bill arrived, but by then it was already too late. To cover Arthur’s collected overlimit transaction, her credit union had made an electronic payment from Beth’s checking account, and that in turn dropped the balance below what she’d needed to cover the mortgage. Having the interest on her home improvement loan jacked up wasn’t the end of it, either. It was an event cascade of the worst sort.

The problem was what to do about it, especially since it was a systemic issue that had undoubtedly tripped other people up as well. For the moment, though, helping Beth to resolve her problem was their primary objective, and they had begun to approach it as a team, something they hadn’t done for some time.

“Okay,” Ben told her after a wordless exchange with Majgda, “since this was all really our fault, I’d like to try to reset the whole mess. The first thing we’re going to do is reverse the charges that Arthur incurred.”

The speaker let out a small gasp, followed by a whimper.

Majgda bent over the unit and gently said, “Are you all right, Beth?”

Their customer struggled for breath at first, but managed to croak an affirmation. “You’re going to… oh, thank you, thank you. But what about my loans? Isn’t it too late to…?”

A broad grin spread across Ben’s face as the incomplete vision he’d had earlier finally dropped the other shoe, just as it had in Chicago. In a much gentler flash, he saw that what he had just started would open out into a vastly improved life for both Beth and her family.

While Phaeron shook his head and went back to picking through code, Majgda turned her palms up in a silent plea for explanation.

Ben closed his eyes and nodded happily at her, then looked at the speakerphone. “Beth,” he said, “could you give me the details about your checking account and the two loans? I want to speak with your credit union and the lenders about putting you back on track.”

The door opened again while Ben was copying down account numbers. This time it was the police. Majgda hurried to speak with them so they didn’t disturb Ben’s fragile relationship with Beth. “This is about Alluis Benoit, isn’t it,” she said, and glanced back towards him.

“Yes ma’am. He seems to have caused quite a stir in a number of places. Greyhound alerted us early this morning that he’d boarded a bus to Topeka. He has a sister there, and she said he’d taken her car and headed west out I-70. We figured he’d end up back here at some point.”

She turned and studied him for a moment. “He didn’t steal it, did he?”

“Well, she claimed he didn’t, but she is his sister after all, and considering the fact that there was already a charge against him for stealing Mr. Huxley’s motorcycle, we thought we ought to follow up on the possibility. We’d like a word with him, if you don’t mind.”

“He’s busy helping a customer at the moment, but I’ll see if I can take over for him.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Phaeron was smirking at Ben’s turned back when she headed back across the room. “Finally caught up to him, did they?”

Majgda gave him a stern look and motioned for him to get back to whatever he’d been doing. Once he complied, she leaned over to whisper in Ben’s ear.

He straightened, nodded, and swiveled his chair towards the door. “The rest of this is rote,” he said quietly. “I’ve got all the details, now. So if you can chat her up for a while to make sure she’s good, that’d be great. Once she’s calmed down and off the line, start plowing through the fallen dominos and see if you get them all stood back up again. You’re a great admin, by the way. This place would have been toast a long time ago without you.”

She grabbed his wrist as he rose to go. “Listen,” she said, “I’m going to talk to Phaeron, try to get him to drop the charges. His insurance covered the loss, and truth be told, he’s been lusting after a newer one since Christmas. So, in a way, you did him a favor.”

“That’s sweet of you, Majgda,” he said, smiling, “but I’m good either way. My life has changed a lot as a result of that mistake.”

“You don’t have to tell me. What you just did for that woman was so unlike anything I’d have expected you to do before you left, it’s like you’re a totally different person.”

He laughed. “I am. One who isn’t a slave to his past… I mean his future.”

THE END

To be continued…?

Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

“Particle Wave”
by P. Orin Zack
(part 6 of a series)
[2/18/2011]

“Hey,” the man peering over Kaylee’s shoulder breathed, hooking his thumb towards the door, “isn’t that the guy from that video? You know, that math geek who wiped the floor with DC’s finest?”

She stopped exploring the custom-built database he was showing her on his tablet, grinned mischievously, and craned around to peer at his weather-beaten face. “If that’s a new superhero movie, Virgil, I’m there.”

“Get real,” he said. “I’m serious. The thing went viral.” He pulled out his smartphone. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Kaylee glanced towards the door, laughed delightedly, and waved her arm overhead. “Ben!” she called over the din in her newly opened combination coffee shop, lending library and business incubator. “Alluis! Over here!”

Virgil groaned. “Not him. The other guy.”

“That’s Alluis Benoit,” she said as the two men approached. “He and his mentor, an antiques buyer from Denver, kind-of midwived the idea behind this place.”

The video had started streaming, so Virgil held his phone up for Kaylee to see.

“What are you doing?” the uniformed officer in the video demanded.

“Giving him a little respect.”

“Jeez,” the math geek said at the sound of his recorded voice, “it’s everywhere.”

Kaylee blocked the screen with her palm. “I’ll watch it later.”

“Thank you. That video’s been making me a bit self-conscious.”

“Glad to oblige.” She returned Virgil’s tablet and did a quick once-over of Ben’s associate, noting the scuffed shoes and natty jacket. “I’m Kaylee Strumble, and I seem to be at a bit of a disadvantage here, having not seen your video.”

“From what I’ve seen,” he laughed, wiggling the fingers of his left hand, “that puts you into a demographic about the size of right-handed southpaws. I’m Franklin Goertz, and Ben here just skipped out on his part of our deal.”

The chatter in the store suddenly abated and a few people glanced their way.

“Deal?” she asked into the momentary silence.

Ben sighed. “Yeah. I offered to make introductions in exchange for airfare to Topeka so I can get the cops and the court off my tail.”

Curious, she cocked her head.

He waved her off. “Long story. You two ought to talk.”

“About what?”

“Well,” Franklin said, his smile fading, “I’m a statistician for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and—.”

“And I’m messing up your model?” she asked hopefully.

“Um, what? No. Robert told me how you’d freed a whole lot of people from the unemployment line like you were a one-woman business incubator.”

“Hey,” she said defensively, “all I did was get a few people to talk to each other, like I do here.”

“Don’t be coy,” Virgil said. “Look, what this woman did was something an army of job-counseling monkeys, HR flacks and job-shop head-hunters couldn’t do in a million years. She got people to see their hobbies, their obsessions, and their secret ambitions as a valuable part of who they are. Hell, she got me to admit that I wasn’t a half-bad database jockey, and now we’re about to put my latest one to use here.”

Ben glanced around the store, at the barista prepping drinks, and at the counter help turning out meals while chatting up the customers about everything but the Chicago weather. He scanned the shelves of books, and counted the people talking to one another about them. And he craned to see the tables, where food and drink took a back seat to the real reason Kaylee’s patrons were here, to supercharge their lives with one another’s talents, ideas and resources.

“After that incident in the police station,” Franklin said, cracking his neck, “I thought I could crawl back into my cube and wrap myself in numbers again, but something happened. Something changed. And the thing of it was, I didn’t know it at the time. I figured that boring into Dvorkin’s true self like that was just a fluke, an adrenaline-fueled response to a caustic situation. But after that video went viral and a big-name blogger asked me how I squared reaching into someone’s soul like that with the dispassionate view of people I needed to have to do my job, I just broke down. I couldn’t. And that’s important. But I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t…”

He trailed off, and Kaylee had the good sense to give him some space. While he was idling, she waved at Marilyn, the performance artist behind the counter who was busy fixing a chicken salad on rye, and mimed an order of relaxing tea for Franklin. Marilyn had just started to nod, when her attention was snatched by a commotion at the doorway. Kaylee followed her sightline, and found Virgil approaching the source of the disruption.

“Jenkins,” she breathed in annoyance, and started towards the door.

By this time, Virgil had stopped just in front of him and mirrored the smaller man’s cross-armed stance. “Is there some problem I can help you with?”

Kaylee nudged him gently and he stepped aside.

“I thought this place was your doing,” Jenkins said darkly, peering around.

“After you hustled me out for the third time just for doing some research, I decided to try a different approach.”

“So I see.”

Ben, who had drifted closer, recognized him as well. “Hey,” he said indignantly, “aren’t you the jerk who tossed Kaylee out of the Unemployment office?”

Jenkins sneered.

“So.” Kaylee said smiling back at him. “Can I help you find a new career, Mr. Jenkins?”

His eyes widened. “A new career? Do you have any idea the damage that you are doing to the people you’ve lured here?”

The chatter abruptly stopped. Marilyn followed the others towards the entrance, serrated bread knife still in hand. All eyes were on Kaylee.

“Damage?” she repeated with a humorless laugh. “Do you honestly believe that honoring what people accomplish on their own time, and helping them put it to use is hurting them?”

“If they foolishly abandon their job search, and disqualify themselves from getting the UI payments they deserve, then yes, it hurts them.” He looked at the crowd now arrayed behind Kaylee, Virgil and Ben. “I’ve seen a lot of you come in for counseling, to take our classes and speak with the hiring managers we bring in.”

A woman standing a few feet behind Ben harrumphed. “Yeah. And a fat lot of good it does.”

“You just have to keep at it, that’s all.”

“Where do you live, under a rock?” The gravelly challenge came from portly man still seated at one of the tables. “Haven’t you heard that companies actively discriminate against unemployed workers? After all we’re not a protected class, so it’s fair game to crap all over us.”

As a wave of encouragement swept the room, Jenkins raised his hands defensively. “Hey, we’re just trying to help you people! That’s why we encourage you to stay focused, to keep your skills fresh. After all, you’ve got a lot invested in the career paths you’re already on. That’s too valuable a resource to—.”

“Oh, blow it out your ear!” another patron shouted in disgust.

Franklin came up behind Ben and asked what was going on.

“Guy named Jenkins from Unemployment.”

“Yeah, yeah, but what’s his beef with Ms. Strumble?”

“Hell if I know. He hasn’t really said.”

“Jeez,” Franklin muttered irritably. “This is getting to be a habit.” Then he stepped around Ben and cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Mr. Jenkins.”

“Yes?”

“I’m a bit lost here. What exactly is your problem? What are you so upset about? From what I’ve seen so far, this place looks like a pretty good idea.”

He stood mutely for a few seconds before replying. “Looks like? Looks like?? If all that’s important is what it looks like, then we might as well be standing in a Hollywood set. Jobs are real. They’re important. Suckering people into some scheme just because it looks good is fraud!”

Kaylee reddened. “Now just hold on right there. That’s a very serious accusation, and I’ve got a roomful of witnesses here.”

“Ha!” someone called out. “Better than that, it’s on video. And if you don’t back down, it’s gonna be on the Internet in a minute.”

Franklin grimaced, and held both hands up for pause. “Wait, wait wait. Before you do that, let me ask him something.”

“Okay.”

“So, Mr. Jenkins,” he said calmly, “exactly how stable is your own job situation? What would your managers and the bureaucrats they report to think about seeing your face plastered all over the Internet like mine was recently? I mean, think about it: a prized employee of the Department of Employment Security publicly accusing a local business owner of fraud by helping people get off the unemployment rolls. I’m sure the press would just love to sink their teeth into that story.”

He glared nervously at the bevy of smartphones pointed at him. “Um,” he said hesitantly, “well…”

“We’re waiting, Jenkins.” It was the kid who’d first threatened to upload the video.

He shook his head. “But…”

“But what, Jenkins?” This time is was Kaylee.

He slumped. “Look. The whole idea behind unemployment insurance is giving people a little breathing room, giving them enough money to get by while they’re trying to get another job. We can’t have people going off and getting involved in harebrained schemes to turn their hobbies into paying jobs.”

“Why the hell not?” Marilyn asked, unconsciously raising her knife hand in punctuation. “It works. Just look around. This was an abandoned storefront two weeks ago. It was costing the landlord plenty to let it sit vacant, so he agreed to let us set up shop here cheap. Just about everything in here was donated by people who’d collected it for some hobby or other, and wanted to be part of making Kaylee’s idea — which she first demonstrated outside your own office, by the way — of making that idea real.” When she realized she was brandishing a bread knife, she waggled it briefly. “You see this? I’m here making sandwiches because I amuse myself making experimental food. Kaylee thought people would enjoy having something different to chew on while they’re batting ideas around. And she was right. In fact, it turned out that not making it the same way each time actually helps people think about their own problems differently. So I call bullshit.”

Jenkins gritted his teeth. “All right, all right. So maybe some good could come of it. But I still say it’s a bad idea for the vast majority of people.”

“You do, huh,” Franklin said, warming to the subject. “And what experience do you have as a statistician? Is that part of your job description? Or maybe you dabble in stats on the side?”

Ben leaned in conspiratorially. “Got you on that one, does he?”

“Well, maybe I don’t have a degree in statistics, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use other people’s figures to—.”

Franklin crossed his arms. “Whose figures, Mr. Jenkins? State your references. And they’d better be good, because I am a statistician. And I happen to work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So go on. Please. I’m waiting.”

“No,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut, “I was way off base with that. But I still don’t see how diverting people away from the work they do, the work they’ve got experience doing, is going to help.”

“It’s simple,” Marilyn said, “but you’ll never find out unless you actually listen to them. People are happiest doing what they like doing. And even if you have a job doing what you hate, like I did, you’ll still find a way to do what you like, even if it’s in private, like a hobby, or if it’s a secret, and you only do it in your head.”

Jenkins nodded at Franklin. “How do you square it, then? I mean, how do you spend your days thinking about people as if they were nothing more than numbers, and still be able to touch them where they live, to see all of those secret dreams you think are so important?”

He chuckled. “Funny thing. I was asked the same question by a blogger who’d seen the video of me that went viral. It was a standoff in a DC police station, if you’re one of the lucky few that still haven’t seen it. The guy was desperately trying to get people to shake off their roles and see each other as real human beings. Well, when I realized that the police were just reinforcing the pattern that he was trying to break, I struck up a conversation with him. I asked him who he was.”

Kaylee had turned and was gazing into Franklin’s eyes.

“When that blogger asked me how I did it, I really didn’t know. But it started me thinking. And now, thanks to you, I do. To use a metaphor, it’s a bit like light, which, although it can express itself as either a wave or as a particle, is neither. Its reality transcends our experience of it. Those are simply two ways that whatever light really is can interact with the world. It’s the same thing with people. From a distance, or in large numbers, the data we track people with make pretty pointillist patterns that statisticians like me interpret and weave narratives about. Those narratives are the basis for the laws and policies that your world of unemployment insurance is based on. But the people themselves are more like waves. We’re each a bundle of possibilities that can interact with the world in lots of different ways. That, Mr. Jenkins, is what this place is all about. That’s the important truth that Ms. Strumble has plugged into.” He extended his arm towards Jenkins. “And I’d like to thank you for showing it to me.”

Jenkins stared dumbly at the extended hand, unsure how to react.

“Well?” Franklin said amiably. “Either you can accept a new way of looking at the world, or you can’t. Which is it to be?”

Breathing shallowly, Jenkins slowly straightened. His head jerked slightly, as if he were culminating an internal struggle. Then he exhaled and, very calmly, yet very forcefully, said, “No. I… I can’t. It’s not something I can do.”

Franklin lowered his arm.

“That’s okay,” Kaylee said gently. “I understand. But know this: if you ever are ready to take that step, we’ll be here waiting for you. To paraphrase Franklin, we each light the world in our own unique way. There’s probably something you still need to see, and it may only be visible with your special light. When you’ve found it, and you’re ready to share it, come on back, and we can discuss it over some tea.”

Jenkins looked dubious. But just to be on the safe side, he nodded, and said, “We’ll see.”

“Tea!” Marilyn said suddenly, turning back towards the counter. “I was about to make tea for Franklin.”

“For me?” he asked in confusion.

“Well, yeah, and it’s on the house. So what’s your pleasure?”

“I’m a mathematician. Surprise me. Close your eyes and pick one at random.”

THE END

Continued in “Prices to Pay“

Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack

“Toasted Roles”
by P. Orin Zack
(part 5 of a series)
[02/13/2011]

The uniformed officer across the table from Ben turned his outspread hands palms up. “Yeah, I get why you decided to turn yourself in, Mr. Benoit. That part I understand. And I commend you for taking the initiative. But this is not an issue for the D.C. police. You’re charged with stealing that motorcycle in Kansas. They’re the people you ought to be talking to, not me.”

“That may be true, Lieutenant Grimes,” Ben said gingerly, “but when I entered a federal office building earlier today, the security agent there told me that word had been put out to detain me because I had left the state. He warned me off before putting my ID through the system so I’d have a chance to deal with this myself rather than involving Homeland Security, the FBI, or whoever else might be interested in having my neck. That’s why I came in. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

What he hadn’t told the lieutenant was that he had intentionally trashed that motorcycle. But he hadn’t simply seen what was about to happen in enough time to avoid the crash and plowed on regardless; he’d seen it a lifetime ahead. Truth be told, it was simply the latest in a series of precognitive memories that he’d let determine the course of his life, and which had earned him more than one fortune. This time, however, it didn’t work out as he’d remembered it. Instead of being picked up by a businessman with the key to his next fortune, he watched the guy drive blithely past. Ben’s charmed life had run its course. Full stop. And if that Kansas state trooper hadn’t stopped a Greyhound to see him on his way, he never would have met Robert Verdun, he never would have left the state, and he certainly wouldn’t have joined the guy’s one-man mission to change the world.

Grimes shook his head. “Then it’s a federal matter, and still not our business. I really can’t do anything for you, Mr. Benoit.”

“But surely the police in D.C. cooperate with the ones in other states,” Ben pleaded weakly.

“I think you may have missed something important here, Mr. Benoit, so let me spell it out for you. The District of Columbia is not a—.”

The sharp crack of someone’s head hitting a filing cabinet in the crowded station’s lobby stopped Grimes in mid-sentence. He peered through the smoky glass behind Ben for a frozen moment. Seconds later he muttered something, vaulted to his feet and took off. Ben grabbed his chair arm and twisted around in time to see a number of people stepping back from an agitated man with his fist in the air. Bob and his math-geek buddy Franklin, whose building they’d tried to enter earlier, were standing astride the door of the glassed interview room, their conversation now clearly back-burnered. Franklin glanced over his shoulder and drew back as the door flew open and Grimes dashed between them.

Ben rose and called out, “What the hell is going on out there?” By the time he reached the doorway, Grimes had spoken with two other officers, and from the look of it, was coordinating the response. A plainclothesman was kneeling beside the woman who’d fallen into the filing cabinet, making sure she was okay, and a patrolman was calmly ordering bystanders to stand quietly at the perimeter of the room.

But the more he calmed the crowd, the angrier the man became. He glared at the officer directing foot traffic and shook his head in agitation. “That’s right,” he said loudly, looking at the frightened faces surrounding him, “be good little sheep and follow the blue man’s orders. You wouldn’t want to be unruly like the Egyptians who brought down their government, now would you?”

Bob nodded towards the man and spoke rapidly. “He just walked in and started picking fights with people. That woman tried to intercede, and he pushed her away. She tripped over someone else and fell into the filing cabinet.”

“Picking fights?” Ben said. “About what?”

“Well, just listen to him,” Franklin whispered, condescension coloring his voice. “He’s been on about people submitting to authority ever since he got in here. And all these idiot cops seem to want to do is play to his paranoia. That lieutenant of yours orders his men around, and then they do the same to the bystanders. He’s not exactly helping the situation, if you ask me.”

Bob gave him a withering look. “Then tell them, Franklin. If you know something they don’t, go over there and do something about it!”

“Not on your life, Robert. One thing I don’t do is to get involved in things that aren’t my business. You know that.”

“Yeah, well,” Bob said, perturbed, “I also know why you don’t get involved. And it has nothing to do with what’s happening right in front of you.”

Ben looked him a question. “Hmmm?”

“Mathematicians,” he muttered darkly. “Franklin here’s all about theory, about being a dispassionate observer. That’s why he took up being an amateur auctioneer, so he could watch the bidders and figure out what makes them tick. That’s what he did to me when I was at the ChiCon IV auction, and that’s what he’s bloody well doing right now.”

Franklin winced.

“All right, all right,” Ben said, nodding. “So you want to be an observer. Fine. But then you’ve got no excuse for not noticing things, and you’ve already demonstrated that you have.”

Across the room, Lt. Grimes took another step towards the man. And although he raised his hands to signal that he wasn’t armed, the other officers looked like they were itching to take him down. “Okay, now,” he said in an authoritative voice, “I understand that you want to have your say, but you’re going about it the wrong way.”

“The way things look right now,” Ben continued, “I’d say that your observations may be the only chance he has of resolving this mess before it spirals out of control.”

Franklin frowned.

“So here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to tell me exactly what actions the officers should take to defuse the situation, and I’m going to tell Lt. Grimes what you said. I’m not going to claim the idea as my own because we both know I wouldn’t have a prayer of explaining your rationale. You’re going to do this because choosing not to would interfere with that nice quiet life you’ve got planned for yourself.”

“I will not!” He turned to Bob. “Call off your dog, Robert.”

There was a hollow metallic crack as the man slapped his hand against a desk. “I am, am I? Well, one thing I’m certain of is that I have your undivided attention. And judging by the way your itchy-fingered subordinate over there just jumped, his attention seems to be a bit too undivided.”

Grimes motioned his men to relax.

“There,” the man said, pointing excitedly at him, “you see?” He looked around at the bystanders. “He’s even got them trained to chill out on cue. Puppets! And every one of you is doing the exact same thing out in your lives. They seduce you into wearing their prefab roles by getting you to wear labels like ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’! Or you kiss up to someone so you can get a job, like these blue men did, and you live out the little scripts they stuff in your brain.”

Ben grabbed Franklin’s wrist. “What should he do?”

The man turned his back to Grimes so he could address a knot of bystanders cowering near the bathrooms. “They call you ‘consumers’ so you’d forget that you’re really citizens and focus on the role they want you to play. Buy stuff. Go into debt.” He glanced at one of the officers, and smiled. “Turn yourselves into pitiful wage slaves to keep them in luxury so you’d forget what you really are. You’re citizens! You’re why this government was created, and you’re the ones who gives it power over you!”

Franklin gaped at the man, his breath shallow and ragged. “What should he do? I’ll tell you what he should do!”

Ben shook his head. “Don’t tell me. Tell him.”

Bob echoed the sentiment. “Do it.”

“All right, all right.” Franklin squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then lowered his head and struck out towards Grimes, his fists clenched at his side.

“Well, well, well,” said the man, looking directly at Franklin. “What have we here?”

Grimes turned to look and started to warn him off, but Franklin continued on, ignoring the lieutenant’s firm command to go back.

“Who is that man?” The guy pointed across the room.

Franklin raised his head and made eye contact. “Someone who wants to know your name.”

Grimes lowered his voice. “What are you doing?”

Franklin responded in kind. “Giving him a little respect.” Then, looking again at the man, he squared his shoulders and said, “I know where you’re coming from. I really do. And I’d like to know who you are.”

“Well, at last, an actual citizen of this benighted country. I’m Ronald Dvorkin. And you are…?”

“Franklin Goertz. I’m a bit surprised that you bothered coming in here, though. After all, if there’s anyone who’s all gung-ho about the role they’re playing, it’s someone with a job that requires them to wear a uniform.” He gestured at Grimes. “But you haven’t really answered my question, Mr. Dvorkin. You’ve given me your name, but you haven’t told me who you are.”

“Who I am?” Dvorkin’s stance eased.

“Yes. We know that you’re very concerned about people getting so deeply into the roles that they play that they forget who they really are. And, I hope you’ll forgive me for this, but all I know about you right now is that you’re playing the role of someone who’s decided to disrupt people’s hypnotic trance and wake them up. What I don’t know is why. You see, you strike me as a man on a mission. But whose mission is it? Yours… or someone else’s?”

The bystanders were no longer afraid, no longer huddled at the fringes of the room. Some had stepped closer, and a few had even sat down to listen. Lt. Grimes was perplexedly looking around. Even his body language had mellowed.

“Well,” Dvorkin said, nodding, “now that you mention it, I did get the idea from someone else.”

The woman who had fallen into the filing cabinet sat up and cleared her throat. “Now do you see my point?”

“Your…?”

“Yes. When you came in here, you were more interested in talking than listening. You accused several people of being willfully blind the moment you opened the door. I tried to get you to talk to them first, but you’d have none of it. And when you raised your voice in anger, I said I’d hear you out.”

“Placate me. You wanted to placate me.”

“No,” she said, standing, “I wanted to understand you. But that wasn’t what you’d come for.”

“Well, then,” Franklin said, stepping closer, “you were playing something of a role yourself, then, weren’t you? So whose role was it? Who did you get the idea from?”

He frowned and looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Dvorkin. You’ve come all this way to talk to us, at least tell us why. We’ve all got secrets. I’m a closet homophobe, but I try not to let myself be sucked into that role.” He pointed towards Bob and Ben. “That guy over there let his life be ruled by his dreams, for heaven’s sake. Could your secret be any worse?”

His eyes widened and he stared at the two men by the interview room. “Dreams?”

Ben shook his head in irritation. “Memories, but yeah. So what?”

Dvorkin slumped. “So did I. I mean… I didn’t do what they said. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Not obeying.” He rubbed his face and fell into a nearby chair. “It was like hearing voices, except I kept living out the orders every night.”

While Lt. Grimes and his men took over, and a small group of bystanders crowded around to listen, Franklin turned and walked back towards Ben and Bob, his face pale and his arms swinging limply.

Ben extended his hand. “Thank you, Franklin.”

“For what?”

He grinned. “For that fortuitous bit of stagecraft. I think Dvorkin over there has led a bizarre kind of reflection of my own life. I spent years following a crooked path through my memories of the future, and he resolved not to listen to his dreams. It’s weird, though. Neither response really worked out too well.”

“But I thought you’d made two fortunes by doing that?”

Ben nodded. “Sure, but like he said, I was playing a role, rather than living my life. This way may be chancier, but I think it’s a better deal.”

They listened in on Dvorkin’s public confession for a few minutes more, and then Bob poked Franklin in the shoulder. “Which reminds me, you’ve just done something that I’d thought was impossible.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You changed roles. This morning, a team of wild horses couldn’t get you to get personally involved in anything, and now look at you.”

“Mmmhmm. Well, maybe it was the excitement of the moment. In any case, I’m glad I finally had the courage to tell my nasty little secret.”

“What,” Bob asked, “that bit about being a closet homophobe?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, then. It was only a secret to you.”

THE END

The story continues in “Particle Wave“

Copyright 2011 by P. Orin Zack