The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future

by Thomas Nevins

  Fruits of your labor, the woman was about to say, looking at the new arrival. When she looked up and saw Gabriel’s expression, she didn’t say anything. She hadn’t expected that look on the face of a Conglomerate, especially someone from the gene shop.

  Gabriel leaned over and looked into the patient’s eyes. He took hold of the edge of the sleeping bag as carefully as he could, to make sure he didn’t disturb the girl any more than he had to. He looked at the rows of patients, some of whom were the results of genetic manipulation gone horribly wrong. This was the case of the girl before him. Some had been beaten so badly by their parents or the Conglomerate handlers that they required emergency help. Some were coming out of the grip of addictions. Others were dealing with the extreme shock of their young lives.

  Gabriel looked at the woman next to him and shuddered; she looked at Gabriel, trying to determine just what his reaction meant.

  “My name is Dr. Walters,” she finally said with a slight nod, surprised by her feelings. “It’s my real name, by the way, though I did add the ‘doctor’ part. Might as well. I do the work of one, and studied it too. But they wouldn’t let me into their medical schools, and, besides, who’d want a problem doctor. Or so they thought. Shows you just how much they know.”

  “I suspect from how this place looks that you’re more of a doctor than many I’ve met,” Gabriel said, thinking of his past life. He looked down at the girl. “Besides, I have heard of you, Dr. Walters,” Gabriel said.

  Now it was the woman’s turn to blush.

  “What’s over there?” Gabriel asked, pointing to the canvas wall that divided the room.

  “Pediatrics,” Walters said. “We’ll get to that.” She had planned on bringing him in there right away, to maximize the impact of what he had done, but she had changed her mind when she’d witnessed how Gabriel took to this girl. When Dr. Walters did take Gabriel behind the wall and he saw the infants swaddled in rows of makeshift incubators, Gabriel became a true Dyscards recruit.

  GABRIEL WAS STILL on Ward’s Island under house arrest, but the terms had gradually been relaxed. By now he looked like just another Dyscard, and there was plenty here to keep him busy. Gabriel liked the work and he applied himself as if he had something to prove. Besides, it kept his mind off Christine. He learned as much as he could from Walters, even though she had to be ten years younger than he.

  Now Gabriel had earned enough of Walters’s respect and trust to be assigned a task away from the island. Two Border Patrol guards accompanied Gabriel on that short trip to Columbus Circle and back to deliver medicine to a clinic beneath the station. Everything went well. Gabriel did as he was told and hoped more missions would follow. They did. Gabriel started to travel the underworld to Dyscard outposts. He dropped in on the ER he had come to on the day he had arrived; they didn’t seem too comfortable with seeing him. Gabriel wanted to ask them about the girl X, but he knew it was better for her if he didn’t show any interest.

  Gabriel took notes wherever he went. Even if Gabriel didn’t have much time, he took out a folded-up paper and lead pencil and scribbled his impressions, captured images and ideas, sometimes the faster the better. In time Gabriel’s missions for Walters became more sensitive or dangerous, and the Border Patrol continued to escort him. They were never comfortable with outsiders, especially someone with Gabriel’s past, but Gabriel’s training lent itself to the task of relaxing the guards’ behavior, and he learned quickly how to move in and out of situations without jeopardizing the team. It wasn’t too long before he had earned respect from the guards as well.

  All of these experiences gave Gabriel the confidence to try to contact Christine. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He wanted to see if he could contact her without getting caught.

  He planned his visit to Christine, and he worked on his note to her. He wrote her a poem. He wanted Christine to recognize it was from him, but he didn’t want it to be too obvious a message, or a threat to anyone, and he wanted to give her a sense of what was going on below her and around her.

  One night Gabriel made his move. He made it into her hallway, left the note beneath her door, and vanished again. Gabriel hadn’t heard anything back. He knew that it would be impossible for Christine to respond to him, but that hadn’t stopped him from hoping she would find a way. He knew he was crazy for trying, but there were so many things he wanted to know. What had happened to her at work and with the police? He also wanted to explain things. He wanted to ask her if she had found the note, if she had not changed her mind about him. He wanted to ask her to join him here, which was the craziest thought yet. Christine probably wanted to have him arrested, if not shot. Even if he could convince her to see him, it was foolish to think this was a viable plan. Just imagine how the Dyscards would feel about the director of genetic development being among them. Still, Gabriel wanted Christine to see just what was going on, and he felt confident that if she did, she would want to help.

  When Patsy and George Arrived Out West

  The Scottsdale Municipal Airport was not equipped to deal with a plane the size of the C-5 Galaxy. The captain made it work. He could see the buses here to transport the Coots to the registration and processing area.

  The airport looked like any airport, but this one functioned differently from most. One entire terminal was devoted to processing the Coots and relocating them to their new communities. There was no welcoming committee. It was strictly administrative. The small size of the crew on the Galaxy was evident now as they each took an aisle, making sure that the arriving retirees were all in their seats. Those who objected were medicated, and others were given additional restraints.

  “Stay calm,” George said to Patsy, and he put his arm around her shoulder. Patsy seemed normal, her muscles were relaxed, but George’s pulse was racing and he knew that his message was in fact directed at himself.

  “Let’s stay together,” George said, and he realized he was saying this for the thousandth time, and that this too was self-directed. Still, he hoped the repetition would make an impression on Patsy, who responded by putting a hand on George’s knee.

  The Galaxy stopped thirty feet from the end of the runway and the waiting buses. The captain shut down the engines. The temperature aboard the plane rose quickly as it sat beneath the blazing Arizona sun. George heard a hydraulic hum and the nose of the plane started to separate from the rest of the fuselage. The desert sun poured in. George heard metal scraping against metal as the nose continued to go up. Patsy and George watched the plane split open before them.

  A team in hazmat suits carried out the processing of the new arrivals. They swept through the plane as if it were a hot zone, and in most instances they didn’t say anything to the arrivals. Rather, they would scan each I.D. card and produce an identification bracelet. They’d slap the bracelet around the wrist of the new arrival with as little contact as possible. The arrivals who were violent or abusive were transferred to wheelchairs, strapped in, and removed from the plane. This kind of treatment served as a quick incentive to get cooperation from the newcomers. But the biohazard-suited agents didn’t really need to provide much more incentive.

  A white-suited visor-faced agent stepped up from the seats behind Patsy and George. “We’ll need to ask you a few questions,” he said. “We need to get you set up in the system.”

  George wanted to respond, That’s okay. Don’t bother. But instead he said, “Fire away.”

  The agent asked a series of questions—their identification, place of origin, personal health—and George answered the questions as quickly as he could. He did not want to detain the agent or allow any further detection of Patsy. The agent seemed eager to move on as well. He scanned their registration cards and snapped I.D. bracelets onto their wrists.

  As the white-suited agents worked their way to the back of the plane, one of the buses that had been parked at the end of the runway moved toward the Galaxy. The bus was black with tinted windows and “FBI” stenciled on the side. This di
dn’t make George feel any better. The bus door opened and a team of agents disembarked. They had Plexiglas shields and automatic rifles, and they had video cameras too. They had the same biohazard suits worn by those who had just administered the bracelets, except theirs were black with black tinted visors and “FBI” emblazoned on the back.

  The agents advanced toward the plane with the shields in front of them. The captain and another man stood at the edge of the open front of the plane. The captain started to move, and all of a sudden the agents stopped, dropped their Plexiglas shields into upright positions, put one knee to the ground, and brought the butts of their automatic rifles up to their shoulders. They were pointing their guns at the captain and whoever was at his side.

  Everything stopped, including George’s breath. It lasted only a couple of seconds but it still gave George a pain in the chest. Then the captain moved toward the ramp and jumped off the edge to the runway below.

  At first George thought the captain must have fallen and gotten hurt as he went down, but then George watched as the person with the captain went down the ramp and fell to the runway as well. After the two men were down, the agents moved toward them. When they reached the men, their weapons pointed at the captain and his companion, they leaned over and searched them, one at a time. The agents must have found what they were looking for, because they led the men away. Two agents, the one who had searched them and the one with rifle at the ready, pointed at the man who had been with the captain. Then the captain followed them, and a lone agent closed up the rear.

  George could see that the captain was looking back over his shoulder as they led him away, and George could’ve sworn that the captain was looking for Patsy.

  IT HAD BEEN hard, even for the navigator, not to notice the FBI bus parked in front of them. He had looked from the bus to the captain and thought they’d finally come to take this old Coot away. It wasn’t until the captain looked over toward him with a quizzical expression that the navigator thought about the container of jeans in the cargo bay.

  The cargo was to be unloaded by the ground crew, who would come aboard and make the exchange: a container full of jeans for an envelope full of cash left in its place. Through an elaborate network of distribution, the jeans would wind up gracing the legs, calves, thighs, and the better sides of people who had to work in this forsaken place. They needed something to help them get by, and for the privilege of covering themselves in someone else’s pants, they were ready to pay a handsome sum. You couldn’t get jeans like these anymore, except on the black market: you had to have cash to shop in that store.

  The incriminating envelope of cash was on its way and there was nothing the navigator could do now to stop it.

  The kind of deal the navigator was involved in brought the cash back East and into circulation on the black market. It was a good business. One of the results of the U.S. currency transition to digital was a rapidly escalating rate of inflation as prices soared and income stagnated. The base of the digital standard seemed in perpetual flux, and this affected the rate of exchange for goods and services, or the rate for obtaining raw materials, which in turn negatively affected the quality of the goods and services. There was a big demand for hard cash. People still had faith in money, and they wanted to have and to hold their cash in their hands. People were hoarding it or spending it in the black market economy. Nobody knew how long cash would last, or how long the goods and good times the cash bought would last on the black market. At least with the illegal black market, the value of the goods and services could be determined. This wasn’t the case in the Conglomerate marketplace, where you paid an exorbitant amount from a government-controlled personal bank account of questionable value for a product of questionable value.

  But the workers found a resource in the camps, as the elderly smuggled whatever they could bring with them out West: phones, laptops, portfolios, artwork, and bonds, in addition to gold, cash, and jewelry. Cash was everyone’s top priority. The Coots traveled with money taped to them, stuffed into the bottoms of their shoes, with diamond rings hidden away. And, in almost all cases, the valuables were intercepted. That was how the personnel who worked in retirement services obtained cash to buy the jeans and whatever else they wanted that they couldn’t get through the usual Conglomerate channels.

  Some of the workers stole from the Coots outright, in shakedowns or through more subtle means. It was a case of “Let me take good care of this for you, honey.” Or, “What the hell do these Coots need cash for anyway!” This often summarized the prevailing attitude toward the elderly and their so-called personal property.

  The supplemental income was in bootleg cash, and the FBI had a supreme interest in that. The black market was growing geometrically, and the cash was flowing back into the economy. The Conglomerates had to do something about all this. To be effective, the digital currency depended on the illegitimacy of the old standard, and if cash was thriving on the black market, supporting the commerce of illegal suppliers of goods and services, it threatened the people’s dependency on the new economic system. The Conglomerates were leaning on the FBI to get a handle on this and to shut it off, and the FBI needed to have something to show fast. They’d been following the navigator for a while and thought of him as a sure thing, if small time. They knew he’d have contraband to swap for the cash and be a clean media opportunity to make an example of what happens to those who engage in illicit activity.

  IN A FEW minutes the black bus stopped within a few feet of the Galaxy. George felt sorry for that captain, and for Patsy and for himself, but he didn’t have time to feel sorry for long. The black bus with the tinted windows and the letters “FBI” stenciled in white across the side left in a blur, and the engines of the silver buses started up, one by one, like the sound of an orchestra tuning up. They climbed up onto the runway and made their way toward the plane in a single file of steel and chrome.

  George wondered what had happened to their luggage. He saw carts parked underneath the plane and he saw men coming and going from the cargo bay, unloading boxes, bags, and suitcases, and placing them on the carts. However, it didn’t appear to George that these men were going anywhere near the buses with the cargo they had removed. The cargo, and the carts, headed toward the terminal.

  The bus that Patsy and George boarded filled quickly and pulled away from the open nose of the Galaxy with a jerk. The bureaucrats obviously didn’t want the Coots anywhere near them, which was probably why they wore the biohazard zoot suits. George looked at the bus driver. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but the driver was one of them, a Coot. What did they care about a Coot? George wondered if the driver’s job, like the job of the captain of the Galaxy, was a perk or a punishment.

  SIX TV SCREENS hung along the length of the ceiling of the bus, and they blinked to life and the logo of the Conglomerates filled the screen. Two stylized hands of indiscriminate race and gender engaged in a handshake, an icon meant to evoke an image of mutual success through cooperation. To George the symbol seemed to serve as just one more reminder that the current state of affairs was a done deal. Their fates had been signed, sealed, delivered. The logo dissolved and the black screen lit with a desert sunset above a golden landscape filled with cactus and boulders and rolling foothills bathed in twilight. Then the focus fell upon what appeared to be a neat little town of cul-de-sac town houses thriving in the middle of the desert Southwest.

  “Welcome to Cootsland,” the narrator’s voice began.

  “Can you believe they call it that?” George said to Patsy, but Patsy wasn’t watching the screen; she was looking out the window. Why watch it on TV when you’ve got the real thing out the window?

  In this commercial about the Conglomerate town, there weren’t any cars or buses in the streets, but that didn’t seem to limit anyone’s activity.

  “Our residents are active. There’s so much to do,” the narrator continued. Sidewalks were bustling with folks of every stripe, walking and rolling along in shiny wheelchairs, all
in an orderly fashion. They were all old.

  What’s the purpose of this commercial? George wondered. It wasn’t as if the Coots had to be encouraged to buy into all this; they didn’t have a choice. Under the Family Relief Act, once you reached eighty years old, you were automatically registered for the program and the rest was just administration. If you were married, or partnered, you got to wait until you were both eligible. If you were lucky, you got to wait. And that’s what passes for luck, in the age of the Conglomerates, George thought.

  “And you can too!” the voice exclaimed, accent on inclusion.

  As the cameras scanned the crowds of people, four faces repeatedly reappeared. There was no dialogue, just a lively sound track of ornamental keyboards under the plucked strings of an angelic harp. The story line featured the four as they went about their days. The screen split into quadrants to follow the four stories.

  “There’s personal attention,” the voice went on, as the scenes portrayed four people coming to and going from sunny facilities, engaging in pleasant interactions with uniformed people much younger than themselves.

  “Full health care…” Each person was involved in receiving some sort of health or human service. In one quadrant an African American man was receiving an eye exam. “Therapeutic programs…” In another square an Asian woman went through the slow restraint of tai chi.

  “Individual nutrition counseling…” In the third box a silver-haired woman in a chrome wheelchair was being shown a chart by an eager young man in a white suit. The people providing the various services were all dressed in uniforms of different colors—white and soft shades of pink, green, and apricot—and they appeared wholly appropriate to the service or mood of the cheerful place.