by Reed King
Interlude: Dymophosphylase; or, Billy Lou’s Lament
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II. Crunchtown 407 → BCE Tech
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Interlude: The Goat Speaks
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Interlude: The Legend of Tiny Tim
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Interlude: The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
Part III. The Sovereign Nation of Texas → The Dust Bowl
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Interlude: A Short Eulogy
Part IV. Walden → Las Vegas, Libertine
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Interlude: Marjorie’s Story; or, the Whore’s Lament
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Part V. Libertine → I.N.E.P.T.
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part VI. San Francisco, or: The Emerald City
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Appendix A: What Is a Human?
Appendix B: Defining Dissolution
Appendix C: Annie Waller V. Kitty Von Dutch, Katty Von Dench, and Katie Von Dulch
Appendix D: Politics and Natural Disaster: The Unexamined Link
Appendix E: The Android Freedom Fighters, 2050s–2070s
Appendix F: The Rumpelstiltskin Roaches, and Other Lies from the Golden Age of Genetic Engineering
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FKA USA. Copyright © 2019 by Reed King. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
Maps by Rhys Davies
Cover design by Keith Hayes
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: King, Reed, author.
Title: FKA USA: a novel / Reed King.
Description: First edition. | New York, N.Y.: Flatiron Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057863 | ISBN 9781250108890 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250108906 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dystopias—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction
Classification: LCC PS3611.I5843 F53 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057863
eISBN 9781250108906
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at
[email protected].
First Edition: June 2019
1. A kind of cold war had raged between the Real Friends© of the North and Federal Corporation of Crunch Snacks and Pharmaceuticals©, two of the continent’s most powerful countries, since the early ’70s, which culminated in the Trade Embargo of 2076. In Crunch, United, anyone caught with technology manufactured by the Real Friends© of the North was subject to heavy fines and even imprisonment in one of the famously expansive human landfill prisons of New Jersey County.
1. The Commonwealth had seeded the drowned underwater sand ridge known formerly as Cape Cod with more than a billion genetically engineered oysters during the explosive midcentury push to repopulate their country with more than two thousand living species. Like many of the other gentech initiatives undertaken in this era, the attempts to repopulate the waters had some unintended consequences: one gigantic oyster, roughly the size of an early-century vehicle, famously lacquered a child into a human pearl. (Subsequently, the relic was sold to a Chinese trillionaire for an undisclosed sum.)
2. Also from the moles.
3. This is the first solid indication that the ensuing narrative takes place between April and May in 2084; in early April 2084, the Commonwealth took the extraordinary measure of passing retributory sanctions against one of its most steadfast allies, in response to the aggressive maneuvers of Russian war craft off the coast of Massachusetts.
1. Blinking was one of the few human traits engineers coded for the first gen of sentient android anthropomorphic models—SAAMs—even though it was unnecessary back in the day. Newer models, the ones grafted from human skin tissue, did blink, and get itches. Sometimes their feet fell asleep if they stayed in standby mode too long.
2. The Independent Nation of Engineered People-Things, with the unfortunate acronym of I.N.E.P.T., is a Silicon Valley–based group dedicated to the rights of all sentient android models and determined to grant all sentient androids legal recognition as human beings or their equivalents. The test preparatory booklet referenced here was designed to help prepare potential citizens for their naturalization exam. Please note that the latter should not be confused with the controversial exam developed by MIT—and famously funded with a large endowment from pro-Naturalist agitators—ostensibly to test sentience, but in reality designed to establish a strict definition of “humanity” that would exclude both robotic/android and cloned individuals from passing while favorably rewarding bionormatively born humans. The exam was widely discredited after various bionormative humans tried and failed repeatedly to pass it. See Appendix A: “What Is a Human?”
3. This was particularly true for Crunch and its subsidiaries, whose facilities and distribution centers were all centered in the east. Because of Crunch, United’s hostility toward the Real Friends© of the North and even its trade partners, where, by 2084, the vast majority of the country’s sentience and robotic technology was manufactured, building and maintaining the current workforce of androids and robots was a constant struggle.
4. San Francisco had earned the nickname soon after the first Big One, when the continuous coastal flooding had carpeted half of the low-lying areas in a vivid green fungus; the Department of Tourism had for years been attempting to reframe the moniker as a reference to its urban farmlands.
1. Inexplicably, other kinds of sandals were okay.
2. Or, in the case of regional sales associates, presidents, vice presidents, associate presidents, and assistants to the aforementioned, community managers in Perception and Market Comprehension, department supervisors and Human Resource service experts, business-neat attire.
3. At the beginning of its operations at the turn of the twenty-first century, Crunch Enterprises had only a single factory building on the Exxon-Mississippi River just outside of St. Louis, and was exclusively focused on convenience food and dietary supplements. Dymophosphylase was, at that time, one of the active ingredients in the original formulation of CrunchJuz™ Gelcaps, billed as the world’s first energy-intense vitamin-rich Complete Food Replacement pill.
4. Public education was, in the Federal Corporation, limited for the vast majority of employees to a rudimentary elementary-school education and, subsequently, job training; it was widely acknowledged and agreed that crumbs didn’t need to know much, as the vas
t majority of them would end up pressing buttons, hauling shipment crates, or untangling wires for a living. One of the standard questions on a typical Year 7 exam, required for all graduating seniors, went like this: If Pedro makes a salary of 500 Crunchbucks per week, but receives two tardy warnings that same week and is penalized 70 Crunchbucks per offense, how many cartons of Blueberry RealJuz™ will he be able to purchase for 5 Crunchbucks apiece?
1. An expression that no doubt originated from the burning and razing required to build the first Temporary Refuge for Displaced Persons camp on land repossessed from Tennessee.
2. From Clause XIV, Article 27a: “On Unexpected or Premature Retirement from the Corporation.”
3. This is more indication that the account takes place sometime in the early 2080s, during the energy crisis at Crunch, United. The Sovereign Nation of Texas price-gouged their oil, and Crunch, United, had embargoed the Dakotas in 2066, after they tried to finance a Canadian invasion through the border near Buffalo, and the restoration of trade between the two nations was tenuous; the Dakotas provided the RFN almost all of its natural gas and oil. Though Crunch, United, had invested heavily in solar technologies, the erratic weather systems and almost permanent chemical haze in the atmosphere made them far less efficient than originally anticipated.
4. And not just Florida, of course. The overwhelming majority of the herd animals still alive on the continent—numbering fewer than five thousand, by most estimates—were maintained for the sole purpose of eventual sale to one of the methane plants that had gained popularity during the alternate-energy boom of the 2030s. Given advances in food printing and meal-replacement technologies, selling a cow for food was, a popular expression went, like trying to sell firewood to a forest.
5. Hawaii had collapsed into the ocean after the enormous rupture along the San Andreas Fault that dropped major portions of the West Coast into the ocean: a “Hawaii hour” was, in that sense, a colloquial term for infinity.
6. Actually, a full year after he first took office: the prize was announced on February 2, 2037.
7. There is some disagreement about the exact dates of dissolution. Most experts name March 25, 2042, and the infamous storming of the White House gates, as the official start of the civil war. But some experts date the conflict back to December 2041, when both California and Texas issued their now-infamous “Unity Declarations” stating their intent to secede. There is similar disagreement over the war’s end date—with some well-respected historians claiming that, due to the continued armed conflict over disputed territories across the continent, dissolution could not meaningfully be said to have ended. Please see Appendix B: “Defining Dissolution.”
8. Genebender was a derogatory term used to describe genetically engineered animals of the kind that scientists were attempting to create in the laboratory to repopulate certain portions of the continent—most notably, the Commonwealth, which in the 2060s announced its controversial Species Initiative and would, twenty years later, be subject to various punishing embargoes by countries trying to force them to bring their explosive populations of cannibalistic deer and rampaging groundhogs to heel.
1. The disastrous Accephalapod™ recalls of 2055 had proved that humans simply liked interacting with other humans. It turned out no one wanted a mechanical squid sorting currency or filing taxes, no matter how many forms it could manipulate at once.
2. Although certain android species had been boasting sentience since around 2030—both Mark C. Burnham and Secretary of State Whitney Heller had made fortunes by investing heavily in some of the first sentient android technologies—the revolution in 2063 in Silicon Valley was by far the most extensive, well-ordered, and deliberate attempt of the SAAMs to gain international recognition as full people. Twenty years later, the anti-android contingency showed little sign of caving. The then-president of the Real Friends© of the North, C. J. Raman, insisted that he would not recognize Silicon Valley as independent and that the androids living there could not be considered human to the same degree as born humans. The president of Silicon Valley Independent Nation of Engineered People-Things, named CASSIAS (a contraction of his model name, Conflict-Approved Sentient Soldier Integrated Android System), insisted that the droids would not go back to work until they were granted legal recognition as Full Persons.
3. The most common theory relates to the early days of the Arkansas executive offices—which, during Mark C. Burnham’s final presidency, was constructed as the Midwest base of operations for what was at the time the growing private company his own father had founded. President Mark C. Burnham liked to keep the working environment at a frigid 59 degrees, to promote wakefulness and productivity.
4. Human cloning had been made illegal in the Federal Corporation in 2052, making it the sixth nation to succumb to the infamous “Clone Panic” that swept the continent beginning in 2049. However, rumors persisted that in certain corners of the continent, human cloning—for reasons that ranged from the medical to the political to even the aesthetic—remained a widespread practice. One of the most notorious accusations involved the PTA in Fairfield County, which various critics asserted was run almost exclusively by clones. For more information, see Appendix C: “Annie Waller v. Kitty Von Dutch, Katty Von Dench, and Katie Von Dulch.”
5. The freight elevators, which carried workers from the teeming surface levels to the president’s living quarters and the corporate offices, took twelve whole minutes to reach the penthouse from the ground.
6. There were many counterfeit versions of the pioneering neurological implant produced by Yana Rafikov and her company, Cadence, in 2032, including the ThoughtTick™, the ImpulseChip™, and Pulse™, which was discontinued after many of its users reported neurological side effects ranging from the mild (nausea, disorientation) to the severe (seizure) to the patently absurd (hallucinations that confused, for example, people for enormous walking dildos).
7. Pre-dissolution.
1. There were, at the time, officially twelve livable altitudes in New New York, although many people disputed the characterization of the conditions within altitude five—an agricultural and arborial level meant at least in part to absorb the miasma of smells from the altitudes beneath it—as “livable.”
2. The Free Territories, a vast swath of lawless land that extended across the Rocky Mountains and into the disputed region of Upper North Dakota, had rapidly devolved from a libertarian ideal to a dangerous, violent, and hotly contested series of individual territories ruled by competing warlords and militias. At stake was control of the continent’s most valuable resource: fresh water. The Bozeman Boys held a mafia-like grip on the flow from more than two dozen ranges, from the Bridger Range to the Beartooth Mountains, and bilked the RFN for billions of dollars every year in exchange for access to it, while lakes and river systems farther east were the sites of frequent guerilla wars between armed insurrectionists and quasi-military states like the Cowboy Runs.
1. From the relevant section of The Employee Handbook of Better Business Practices: “Criticism of the Federal Corporation, or any of its subsidiaries, operations, management practices, legal statutes, or corporate management team, is in direct violation of the company’s Positive Positions Mandate and may result in punitive action ranging from docked pay to legal action. Note that criticism of the President and CEO, and/or any members of the corporate board, is considered high treason.”
2. In the Federal Corporation, this was a slang term for The Employee Handbook of Better Business Practices. And it’s worth noting that in the Commonwealth, the rivalry was, in fact, enshrined in the Constitution, which also stipulated that supporting the Yankees, the Federal Corporation’s hometown fantasy baseball team, was a crime punishable by death.
3. Pennsylvania was one of the Soviet Federation’s most important colonies for deterring threats posed by the Federal Corporation, and had been a critical win in the wars that followed dissolution. It had been, since the early ’50s, run as a vast military outpost, and was home
to a record 450,000 active-duty militia troops.
1. D. S. Natt, as he was commonly known, was Mark C. Burnham’s fraternity brother at Harvard. (As Dalia Towers extensively details in her seminal 2055 biography, The Burnham Paradox, many people have suggested that Natt and Burnham were at the center of an epic cheating scandal that rocked the university in 2020, when they were both seniors.) Natt subsequently became one of the biggest initial investors in Crunch, United, as Burnham pushed its expansion into consumer electronics, clothing, furniture, and even home technology. Natt was rewarded with a cabinet position after Burnham was elected president in 2036, serving as the secretary of defense and overseeing the infamous March Massacre in 2042, in which the air force was deployed to drop bombs on protesters marching toward the White House.
2. In 2084, many countries considered droids, at least for legislative purposes, only one-quarter people, with two exceptions. In the forward-thinking and technologically dependent country of Halloran-Chyung, widely considered the best place for an Engineered Person outside of I.N.E.P.T., androids enjoyed the same rights as natural-born humans. In the Real Friends© of the North, they had been since 2060 officially denoted 45.8 percent human, in a bald attempt to dissuade defections to the Independent Territory of Silicon Valley (as well as because of the confusion arising from the definition of Engineered Persons, given the enormous boom in plasticide-fusion surgery there). But in reality, the Real Friends© of the North had enacted a series of laws to monitor, control, and economically disempower the android population. In the Confederacy and the Sovereign Nation of Texas, they were not recognized as human at all.
3. Truckee’s analogy isn’t arbitrary here. He is making oblique (and paraphrased) reference to what became famously known, in the early days of the agrofirms, as the “non-parity” argument for the preservation of livestock. The argument was pioneered by a professor of philosophy at Washington University in support of the American Cattle Farmers Association and essentially states that a person confronted with a cow would be able to conceive of a portion of the cow, such as a steak, but a person confronted with a steak would never be able to conceive of a cow, and thus a steak cannot be said to be an appropriate “stand-in” for the animal as a whole, i.e., that steaks manufactured from other steaks should not legally count as cow products.
