A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  I held a candle to the page with the hole from his heart, and there was nothing of wonder on it, nothing magic.

  Out there, in the rest of the country, people shouted their slogans and were rendered speechless. We farmed under lights we’d made and hoarded knowledge because there was no way to share it. We kept electricity on Earth. When we died, we were meant to pass the knowledge on our skin forward, not lose it on a battleground.

  When I went to sleep at night, I could smell the towns around ours being burned: smoke full of story, secrets drifting overhead, but we took no action. We had a tiny world of our own, and that world was filled with our rituals and ceremonies, with our history, with our books made of the people we’d loved. We thought, for a time, that it was enough to save ourselves.

  This was not the Needle’s plan.

  * * *

  —

  What is anyone’s plan? The idea that the world will remain viable, that there will be no clouds of poison, no blight, no famine, is an optimistic one. The idea that one’s children will survive even birth? Also optimistic. And yet.

  * * *

  —

  When I was sixteen, one of our books got out into the world, the pages thin and the text intricate, and someone made up a story about it. There was a whisper that we were making books out of babies, converting them into the thinnest paper, tattooing their soft skin and turning it into a history of lies. These weren’t even babies that had been born, the story went, but babies we’d preempted from birth, to turn into pocket bibles of revolution.

  The soldiers charged the Librarians with resisting the arrest of everything. We were, they said, worshipping idols and insisting on sentences. All of the Librarians were taken but the Needle, who was so old by now that they decided she’d die on the road.

  The men insisted that the babies were everywhere, that they’d been born to women in their seventies, and nothing the Needle said could dissuade them. They’d inherited knowledge too and believed it as firmly as we believed ours.

  “Who had a baby?” she shouted at them. “How can you think this is a town full of baby killers, if there’s no one of an age to give birth to them?”

  Our Librarians were put into a wagon, some screaming, some shouting slogans other than the ones allotted us. The Needle and the children of the town were left behind, all of us hidden for our entire lives.

  “It’s time to change the color of the ink,” the Needle said, when they were gone. “Sometimes bloodstains are the only writing you get to leave behind. Many of my people left nothing but red.” She looked at me, her eyes narrowed. “We’ll leave more than bloodstains. We’ll leave char.”

  The Needle took us back down into her bunker, hobbling on the stairs.

  “What are you willing to die for, Enry?” the Needle asked me. “You don’t always get to choose, but this time, you do. You, boy, you’re the one I’m talking to.”

  I didn’t know.

  “Open that door,” she said.

  I unbarred it. It was a room full of vials and metal, as secret as the rooms full of books, but different from them. Maybe not different. This was a room full of things that could catch fire or slice strangers.

  “There is nothing holy,” the Needle said, “about tradition. No tradition. Not mine, not theirs. Anyone who’s ever thought so has ruined things all over again.”

  “But,” I said, “we made the library. We have to protect it.”

  “We made the library because they tried to crush knowledge. We will fight because they tried to crush us,” said the Needle. She trembled, but not with fear.

  “I’m ready to burn, Enry Sharp,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  We loaded all the books of the Library of the Low into rolling carts, and we took the elevator, using power we normally saved. We rose up from the inside of the earth, beneath a stolen University, and when we came to the surface, we were a small army of young Librarians, and one old woman carrying a knife made of a melted medallion.

  We marched.

  The Needle once told me that we couldn’t fix everything with love, even though some of the books said we could. Some of the poems said it was the answer. Some of the anatomical diagrams of hearts showed them full of certainty. I thought about my father’s heart and the missing words inside it.

  We marched for our parents, with them beneath our arms. We carried their skin and hair. We carried their words. We marched down a dirt road, and on both sides there were places consumed by smoke.

  “Holy,” we said.

  High above us there was a swallow spinning, and below us seeds were still germinating and we were walking in boots we’d inherited, carrying daggers forged of our parents’ wedding rings and jewelry.

  “There aren’t enough of us,” I said to the Needle, as we arrived in the City. Walls of windows, broken. Buildings crumbling, but behind them I could see movement.

  “There are,” she said, and unbowed her lace collar. I could see words beginning to be revealed there, round and round her throat. The Needle’s eyes were blacker than her ink, and her skin shone silver.

  We stood in the center of the road and looked at the house, white columns built on the backs of Americans. Graffiti on its sides and trees from which bodies had hung. Some people had thought this was a beautiful place.

  I opened a book in each of my hands, the book of Silas Sharp, and the book of Yoon Hyelie Sharp. Beside me, the rest of the Librarians opened the books of their parents, and the ones whose parents had been taken readied their implements.

  The doors began to open and there were soldiers coming for us. We saw men standing there, old as the Needle. The Needle stood at the head of our formation, tall and unbound, her shirt open, and in her hand she held a torch.

  We all knew that we were about to die. There was nothing in us that was stronger than the guards here, and there were only a few of us to begin with. There were good ways to die, and this was one of them.

  “READ AFTER BURNING!” we screamed, and we set fire to our dead.

  I set fire to the book of Silas, and out of it rose my father, and I set fire to the book of Yoon, and out of it rose my mother.

  The Needle set fire to herself and we closed our eyes at the light she made, the way her body blazed and hissed, words made of magic, words made of the Needle’s own rage and reading.

  This was the Needle’s analysis of civilization, and this was her love, given form. This was what magic looked like at this point in the history of the world, a surge of stories transmitted in smoke.

  I had never seen my parents together until I saw their books. I watched their skin insist on change and the spells contained within their volumes spitting fire. What can you see in firelight? More than you can see in the dark. I watched my mother’s sword and my father’s pen stand at attention, and then I watched them switch instruments.

  I felt my own living skin warming in the light of the people I’d come from, the library that had raised me thus far, the stories that had been altered to show something other than quiet.

  The Needle rose over us, a cloud of words, and she rushed at the men who’d decided America belonged to them. With her rushed the rest of the Librarians, resurrected to revolution, brought back to life with the magic of burned libraries and belief.

  The old men stood, looking up, five of them, skinny, pale, and blinded, as the words of my people circled them, closed in on them, and redlined them out of the story. I watched as the Needle edited. I watched my daddy and my mother making a study of this part of our history, shredding them into fire and then into ash.

  These are the parts of our story that, while alive, are also at rest. The lies entwined with lives, the magic used for shrinking the span of knowledge rather than encouraging it to grow.

  My hands were open, and in them were flames. I kept my hands open as
I fought. My hands were full of story.

  Our knives were used too, bloodied on the living, but the living soldiers were surrounded by the words of the dead, and we were stronger than we thought we were. An army of children, but we’d been raised on something better than this.

  I was the one watching when the Needle finished them, her hair flying up in the wind, each strand a sentence. I watched her words rush into their throats, filling them with stories they were not a part of. There was char, and an old white house on fire, and smoke filled with forgotten things.

  I didn’t know the world before the end of the world, but I knew it when it began again, out of dust and dark, out of whispers and bones.

  There were twelve children, and then there was rain.

  Was any of this magic? Not more so than the magic made in spring, and not more so than the spinning of the seasons. It is crucial to remember that none of this is certain, that even when joy is proximate, sorrow might be walking beside it. Indeed, it is crucial to remember how to extend your hand to someone different from your own self.

  Magic is unpredictable. That’s for you to remember. Kindness is too. It is all part of the same continuum, just as you and I are part of the same line. It would be years yet before I met the man I would love, and years before you would be born to a child of a child of his, crying in the arms of the midwife, fingers spread. This would not be the only revolution. There’s never just one. This is how it begins.

  “Enry,” my father said as his smoke faded. By then it was dawn, and we were standing on the lawn of this building built to show what glory looked like from a distance.

  “Henry,” my mother said, as her embers died down.

  The two of them looked around, and I could see their tattoos glowing like birds might, if the world was a world where birds lived, or like whales might, deep in the sea and looking for love, calling out in song to others of their kind. Not everything was gone. Some things were invisible, and other things had been in hiding and were coming out again.

  * * *

  —

  “What does this word mean?” you ask me, and you touch a word on my skin, red ink, because after the world began again, we used red instead of black, to say that we had blood flowing and that nothing was fixed in forever.

  “What do you think it means?” I ask. The meanings change along with the words. The text on my skin is a new story daily, and here is what I know.

  I wake up every morning, and the world has changed overnight. I can feel my father’s blood and my mother’s magic, and I can feel the Needle, her body blowing apart.

  When do things change entirely, you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible?

  It is possible now.

  You’re built to open your fists, and show me your palms, and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You’re built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry, and you are a child of my family, and my family was made by the world.

  Here we stand in the dark now, and I’m old and you’re holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We’re looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes, and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn’t be able to parse them.

  Now look at your own hands and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happen when you clench your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight.

  MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including the novels Magonia and Aerie and, most recently, The Mere Wife, a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf, to be followed by a new verse translation of Beowulf in 2019, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Nebula awards and included in many Year’s Best anthologies, including three times in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Headley is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  CHAPTER 5: DISRUPTION AND CONTINUITY

  [EXCERPTED]

  MALKA OLDER

  […] almost unrecognizable. Nonetheless, some futurists trace a consistent national identity. Somewhat ironically, considering the degree of upheaval, this identity will be based on the fundamental principles on which the country was founded, democracy and federalism. In the chaos of the previous half century, these principles, while still referenced, became so confused and obscured by more specific concerns that they were in many ways warped beyond all recognition. However, their resurgence after an utter breakdown, even in very different forms, reimagined through new digital and social technologies, shows that they will remain strong undercurrents in the narrative that the people of the erstwhile United States continue to tell themselves.

  The mainstream histories and futures written of this period will, of course, deal primarily with the bickering and petty struggles of a political class that, while shrunken in impact, will still manage to claim relevance at least to the lazy-minded and easily impressed. Most focus on the oscillating ascensions of [redacted] and [redacted], as well as the antics of [redacted] and their impact on the geopolitical […].

  Although it would be impossible to deny that the official political leadership does have an impact on individual lives as well as on world events, it is also undeniable that other, less visible structures have substantial impact—and therefore, under most definitions, power—as well. Indeed, Rieger and Asmundsdottir’s (2028) persuasive argument that the formal political trappings receive attention by far disproportionate to their effects […] may seem radical, but it offers us a much more complete view of the forces transforming society. This approach is particularly appropriate for this period, in which one can argue that informal processes began to more aggressively claim public space for themselves, demanding awareness, engagement, and voice.

  In some ways these activists can be seen as creating a different form of federalism, one that takes distribution of attention and importance, rather than geographic distribution, as a basis for apportioning representation […].

  […] perhaps because of the distinctly democratic aesthetic of these groups, there will be a consciously collective self-characterization by many of those fighting to flip the power balance. This can be another barrier to effective description of these processes, as they tend to lack clearly defined leader-figures for stories to revolve around and audiences to fixate on.

  Rather than questioning the human need for individual heroes, we have chosen to look first at the collectivities and the way they functioned, and then select representative […].

  Of these, the story of Zenaida Gonzales, better known as @zengo, offers a good example. We do not know for sure if Zenaida Gonzales is her real name, although she will be fairly consistent with its use across a number of platforms and avatars. There is new evidence*1 that in some cases she may use a male-mapping name and avatar, but it is unclear whether this is an indication of genderfluidity or an attempt to reach an audience who would not hear her as a woman; at the moment the consensus is to use female pronouns.*2

  It should be noted as well that part of the reason @zengo is better known than some of her companions may be because of the comparatively rich details about her life. The fact that many of those details may be invented does not seem to affect the fascination with them. To take just one axis of this phenomenon, futurists and historians have been shown to write more about online personalities with a “real name” attached to their handle, even when that real name has been proven false.*3

  And there is little from @zengo’s purported biography that we can prove true […]. Her early stories are mundane: unverifiable incidents she encounters (such as the famous So I’m walking home from work thread) or critical (if informal) analysis of popular media. The most political element to the first category, perhaps, is the degree to
which these incidents are invisible to “history” in all its forms, making them impossible to verify or trace; they already express a project of observing and reporting on that which is otherwise unseen or considered unworthy of notice. In addition, the overall lack of outside reference points, too consistent to be random, suggests in itself an early caution, an unwillingness to allow that rapidly ballooning audience to connect with her real life.

  Despite her resistance to selfebrity culture, research has been able to determine some hints as to @zengo’s non-virtual existence. Linguistic analysis confirms the Hispanophone heritage implied by her handle and suggests considerable time spent on both coasts. From details in her posts, it is almost certain that she will attend university in Chicago (or is attending as we write or as you read, since her age has not been determined).

  What is certain is that in tandem with the collapse of the United States, @zengo will become something of a bard, a foundational novelist, a folksinger of the new environment, taking to Twitter, Instagram, Shoutdown, CrickIt, and others to tell the stories of the new nation and create it as she does so. Her stories, in interaction with those of other narrators and activists, will describe the boundaries of this turbulent experience, bear witness, and finally begin to function, consciously and by design, as templates for building something better.

  Most scholars agree that the primary trigger for @zengo’s activism was an event of environmental injustice, probably one she experienced directly, although it is possible that she will empathize with family members caught up in it or engage in the response to the event so deeply that she begins to experience it on a personal level. However, there will be so many incidents matching that description that even cross-referencing with the areas she is known to frequent does not enable us to identify specifically which disaster. On the other hand, there is general agreement that once @zengo’s activism was triggered, it transferred with unusual ease to other areas. It appears she spends significant time researching different issues before leaping into the fray, adding credence to theories that she will be, at least at some point, an academic of some kind. Eventually her focus coalesces around new forms of government as mechanisms for addressing the multitude of other issues that attract her interest and sympathy.