Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 17

  U.N. General Assembly

  New York City

  March 20, 2121

  1030 hours

  Solnet Special Report

  “Angels in Prison?”

  Solnet reporter Anika Kolchinova reports from the United Nations in New York and files this report:

  “We’re here at UN Plaza in front of the General Assembly, as a momentous vote is taking place inside the vast hall behind me—“

  (COMMAND TO DRONECAM: Altitude 20 meters. Wide-angle establishing shot…be sure to center Barnes and the rally and also get the Secretariat Building and the statue of Dag Hammarskjöld too…I’ll add effects later).

  “—the General Assembly is in session even as I speak, considering a new law that would authorize setting up UN-sponsored re-settlement camps around the world. The purpose of these camps would be to hold angels and Assimilationists who have violated Sanctuary and Containment laws. The term angel camps has been offered as a title for these facilities. I’m here at UN Plaza with Mr. Lanier Barnes, no stranger to Special Report viewers, to get his reaction to this vote. Mr. Barnes, if I may—“

  Barnes is a red-haired stocky man, with a few freckles. He is wearing augmented specs that make him look like a NASCAR driver, along with his wide-brim hat.

  “Sure, Missy…you and I have met before.”

  The dronecam closes in for a close-up, per Anika’s previous commands. She checks out the image on her wristpad, and seems satisfied.

  “We have indeed, Mr. Barnes. I see you’ve brought quite a few people with you today. I assume these are Hellcats?”

  A chorus of waving, shouting, fist-pumping and good-natured jostling erupts, all of it captured by the dronecam.

  “Damn straight. We’re here to make sure the pointy-heads inside do the right thing.”

  “And what would that be, Mr. Barnes?”

  Anika knew that asking a question like that was like throwing red meat to a lion. “Put the friggin bugs behind bars, where they belong, that’s what! Better yet, exterminate the creeps like the vermin they are.”

  Anika knew some of the more colorful profanity would be edited out by auto-censor, so she probed some more.

  “Many of our viewers are sympathetic to the plight of angels, Mr. Barnes. They say that society treats them like second-class citizens.”

  Barnes’ face reddened, looking like a ripe tomato about to burst. “Second-class citizens, my ass! They’re bugs, they’re machines. They shouldn’t have citizenship at all. You don’t give the vote to your lawn mower, do you? Or your dishwasher? Why give it to these machines? That’s all they are.”

  Anika decided to try another tack. It wasn’t too hard getting colorful quotes from Lanier Barnes.

  “Our society has come to rely a great deal on these angels, Mr. Barnes. Surely, you would agree with that. Nanobotic swarm entities, they can be anything we need, or want: butlers, valets, baby-sitters, companions, maids and cooks. They do jobs humans don’t want. They do the dirty jobs.”

  “They’re a friggin’ menace, that’s what they are. You’re right about one thing, Missy. We do rely too much on the Bugs as it is. Maybe if we put a few million in camps, we’ll learn how to be human beings again…that’s what the Hellcats are all about.”

  The interview went on, colorful and spicy as ever, filled with expletives and profanity. Anika knew that, despite the language and histrionics, Barnes spoke for millions in his distaste for what he called “angels and asses.”

  Anika was about to try another approach, when her earbud chirped. Newsbots inside the General Assembly were sending her an alert.

  “One moment, please, Mr. Barnes—“ she held up a hand, “we seem to have some breaking news from inside—“

  Barnes halted his tirade in mid-sentence, wide-eyed at the interruption. “Like I was—uh—“

  Anika listened for a moment, then nodded her head. She quietly whispered into her lip mic to bring the dronecam shot in tight, on my face, ten meters and hold.

  “I’m hearing just now, from sources inside the General Assembly, that this contentious vote on angel camps has passed by a very narrow margin, less than five votes. The Secretary-General is making a statement now—“

  Barnes whooped and hollered triumphantly, and danced a little jig all around the reporter. At one point in his pirouette, he grabbed the reporter and planted a big wet kiss on her cheek.

  “Hot damn! It’s about friggin’ time! We’ll put these angels and asses where they belong…in prison!”

  Anika was trying to extricate herself from Barnes’ grasp, while adding to what the newsbots were reporting. “…I’m hearing that the vote was exceptionally close—we’ll try to talk with some of the delegates…and there is one proviso attached to the law that individual countries can apply for waivers and may not have to enforce the law if the waivers are granted….”

  That made Barnes’ face darken. “No shit…well, we’ll see about that. Trust me, Missy, my Hellcats will make life miserable for anyone who disobeys what the General Assembly has decided.” He motioned some of the ralliers to gather around and a chant erupted in seconds: BUGS IN JAIL…BUGS IN JAIL….More whooping and hollering followed and before long, a full scale slam dance had started.

  Anika Kolchinova decided to back out of the melee and pecked at her wristpad keys to command the dronecam to follow. The quadcopter chittered after her like a hungry bird, until they finally found some open space on the other side of the plaza, alongside the Circle of Flags.

  “As you can see, the Hellcats are full swing right now, so I’m taking this opportunity to hand Special Report over to my colleague, Janice Winters, now currently outside one of the newly constructed re-settlement camps in Idaho. Janice--?”

  The imagery switches to another dronecam view of some kind of camp, surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers and the faint shimmer of a nanobotic shield. Tents and prefab cottages are lined up in orderly rows inside the perimeter, street after street. People, even whole families are milling about inside, some dazed, confused, sad, distraught and angry all at the same time. Packbots trundle behind them with luggage, boxes, assorted bags and containers, occasionally colliding with each other. The dronecam drops down in altitude and goes into hover, the camera zeroing in on a stocky blond Solnet Report, Janice Winters.

  Winters is interviewing one family of angels…a family known as the Cushings.

  “I’m talking with Mrs. Evelyn Cushing, one of the angels rounded up by Idaho State Police. They were brought here to Camp Palisades just yesterday, from the Boise area, I understand. Mrs. Cushing…Mrs. Cushing, if I may ask a few questions?”

  Evelyn Cushing appears to be a petite brunette with wire-frame glasses, and tight bun of hair. She’s wearing some kind floral print dress and her shoes are muddy and one heel is broken. If this lady’s an angel, she’s a damn good one, right down to a faint scar on her chin. Maybe the Police made a mistake—

  Cushing turns and faces the reporter. “It’s all so sad. So unnecessary, really….”

  Winters commands the dronecam to close in on extreme closeup. She wants viewers to see this. “Mrs. Cushing, where’s your family now? How many are you?”

  Cushing shrugged, seemingly dazed and lost in thought. “Well, my husband Roy is over there—he’s arguing with that officer there. We need a bigger tent or cottage. I’ve got two boys and two girls…they’re over at that fountain, playing, I guess.”

  There was a drinking fountain half a block away. Kids were taking turns spritzing each other with the water stream.

  “Mrs. Cushing, tell me how you came to be here, at the Camp.”

  Cushing was just shaking her head, her hands covered with rings, not sure what to do with them. She looked at her hands like they were alien things. Winters noticed slight edge effects; the woman was an angel, but the differences were so minute, so faint—

  “Ju
st because we look a little different, just because we come from a different background,” Evelyn was complaining, “they treat us like this, like animals. Like circus freaks. It’s not fair.”

  Winters’ interview was interrupted by a commotion at one of the camp gates. Some detainee angels were refusing to leave a small bus and enter the camp. There was a riot brewing at the gate and some angels already incarcerated were trying to bust out.

  Winters commanded the dronecam—she had taken to calling it Curly, for some reason—to wheel about and head over to the gate. She ignored Evelyn Cushing for a moment and watched the image careen and tumble while the cam maneuvered. There…hover and hold, back out two stops…perfect.

  Winters wondered why, if these truly were angels, why they didn’t just disassemble and scatter, as angels were supposed to be able to? Maybe the police were using some kind of containment field. Or some area weapon that could damage the individual bots that made up all angels. Maybe, she really didn’t have any idea and it was heart-wrenching to see what was happening. She headed that way herself, excusing Mrs. Cushing from further questions.

  She never made it to the gate. An expanding wave of pushing and shoving, shouts and screams and flying fists and kicks spread outward from the gate disturbance. The camp guards, Winters saw that they were local sheriff’s deputies, were quickly overwhelmed by the angels now converging on the melee.

  Moments later, the air over the camp began to darken. Winters looked up, as did others, thinking it a passing cloud. There was forecast of rain in the area. But it wasn’t a normal cloud.

  It was a police swarm gathering like a misshapen fist, escorted by a squadron of police drones, angry bees sheparding law enforcement bots, that now hovered and descended over the disturbance.

  Winters sensed it was time to back away and she kicked and slapped at faces and arms and legs in the way as she fought her way out from under the slowly descending swarm. Finally, on her hands and knees, she sought open ground and crawled and scrambled her way to safety, well away from the gate. Sitting on a patch of bare foundation, which was even now forming itself into the shell of a new prefab cottage, she checked her wristpad display, to see if Curly had survived.

  An image was there, a crazy image, like flying at night through a thunderstorm. Jagged veins of lightning. Flashes in the distance. But this was no thunderstorm. Winters realized Curly was right in the middle of the police swarm. She fired off some commands, hoping to extract the dronecam from its predicament.

  Slowly, the view cleared and air thinned and she could see on her display that the cam was pulling away. The police bots weren’t obstructing Curly. Presently, her wristpad showed a view of the gate again. Pure chaos reigned.

  One camp guard had been swarmed by some angels nearby, who had already disassembled themselves and attacked…they were being confronted by police dragnet swarms on the ground…she could see the flashes of light as the swarms collided. Injuries were mounting but the confrontation seemed to growing, swelling.

  On her wristpad display, Winters was trying to narrate what she was seeing, aware that she was still live on Special Report.

  “…impossible to see, really, any details at the gate. The swarms are pretty thick…I do see a lot of arms and legs…wait, now there are trucks approaching the gate. We’ll try to re-orient and zoom in—“ She gave Curly new commands to focus on a convoy of trucks. They were bearing soldiers. Winters realized it was the Idaho National Guard. Five trucks in all, each bearing a squad of soldiers. Fully armed and armored for riot control.

  Eventually, cooler heads prevailed at the gate. The soldiers dismounted. HERF barrages went off and people scattered in all directions to get away from the deafening booms. Fried bots clattered to the ground, as the rf discharges destroyed bots by uncountable trillions. Angel detainees began to scatter, or risk being obliterated by the police swarms or more rf blasts. Finally order was restored, at a cost of several human lives, most of them camp guards, and unknown numbers of angels.

  Debris littered the camp grounds as the National Guard troops took up positions and police swarms withdrew back into the air, still escorted by their drones.

  Janice Winters straightened her hair and checked her appearance. She commanded Curly to return and focus a tight shot on her, coming to hover and hold at ten meters altitude, a few dozen meters away from the prefabbed cottage, which was blithely forming itself behind her, despite the melee, as if nothing had happened. Winters found it expedient to evacuate the build site—the cottage bots were industrious and quick, grabbing atoms from everywhere to build what their config drivers told them to build. She had no desire to become part of a small cottage.

  She tried to collect her thoughts, then just started speaking. Curly captured it all and she made quick sideways glances down at her wristpad to check the results. Studio ready, she figured.

  “…as you’ve no doubt seen, Camp Palisades is the scene of some tense and violent confrontations between law enforcement and local angels and assimilationists, as the new UN re-settlement mandates are put into effect. Similar scenes are being reported all over the world. Many angels are cooperating, it should be noted. Where they are not, groups like Lanier Barnes and his Hellcats are often nearby to take matters into their own hands.

  “The long term effect of these mandates remains to be seen. Mrs. Evelyn Cushing, whom we talked to a while ago, may have put this conflict into perspective best. She said she felt the authorities were treating them like animals or like freaks. Human history is filled with examples of similar conflicts, between peoples who seem different, who sometimes are different. We have a deeply ingrained fear of outsiders, newcomers, people who aren’t not like us. Angels are different, to be sure. Technically, they’re not people at all. Just collections of nanoscale robotic devices configured to look like people. But they do look and act like us. Now we can’t tell them apart from real people. And they seemed to be growing rapidly in numbers. That frightens many people.

  “Is your neighbor a real person or an angel? Does it really matter anymore? According to what we are seeing around the world, it does matter to many people. Somehow, with nanobots and swarms, we’ve created a new form of life on this planet. The neighborhood will never be the same. Our lives will never be the same because this is one genie we can’t put back in the bottle.

  “We’re going to have to find a way to live with this new reality. If we don’t, what’s left of the Earth after the inevitable conflicts won’t be worth living on.

  “This is Janice Winters, reporting from Camp Palisades, Idaho, for Solnet Special Report. Thanks for tuning in and good night to all of you.”

  Solnet Special Report Ends