However, our strengths have become our weaknesses. Now the terrorists aim their threats at our Bio-nets, programming them to destroy us like they did in Denver. U.N.A. scientists quickly erect their defenses via our nanites, constantly updating their programming so that no new bioterror threat can take down many U.N.A. citizens with it.
On the Dailies broadcast each morning, the government informs us of these threats and advises us how strong in spirit all U.N.A. citizens must continue to be. If the news is especially bad the Dailies will often remind us of a dark time in U.N.A. or United States history when goodness and right prevailed. Because much of our news also comes from our allies in Northern Europe, the Dailies play many quotes from British Second World War Prime Minister Winston Churchill—mostly ones that contain the word “courage.”
Directly after the Dailies and breakfast it’s time for school, which the U.N.A. resurrected thirteen years ago and which runs year-round, Monday to Friday. The process of phasing physical schools out began in 2025 and continued for fifteen years before they were formally retired in 2040. For the next decade all school-age children were taught at home by EdRos and through an early version of gushi (a full-immersion virtual-reality system indistinguishable in quality from real life). Thanks to the Bio-net, gushi is now advanced enough to be experienced directly from within people’s own nervous systems rather than on a screen. Entertainment, interactive fantasy games and stories, sexual experiences (commonly called “mashing”), broadcast of the Dailies and travel to faraway places occur largely in gushi. However, in the decade when gushi was used in place of real-world education many young people began to suffer from mental health issues due to the social isolation and overdependence on virtual reality.
As a result of these problems, when the government decided to return to the former school system, they looked far into the past for inspiration. All former school buildings were destroyed and Victorian-style structures erected in their place. Teachers were required to dress in clothing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in that era while students wore short-sleeve gray unisex jumpsuits with a collared white shirt underneath. Physical textbooks began to be produced again and the importance of participation in sports as part of one’s program of well-being was emphasized.
All students spend their seventh through eighteenth years in the U.N.A. school system. Gushi access is blocked on school property but is encouraged as harmless entertainment after hours, as long as one participates in moderation. In fact, most people’s sexual lives occur almost entirely on gushi where they feel free to experiment without pain or discomfort, in complete safety where there is no limit to what is possible. “Mashing” is considered ecstasy precisely because it’s only what you want it to be and all that you want it to be—orgies, sex with aliens or mythical creatures, acrobatic physicality that would be impossible to emulate in real life without injury.
The only time the majority of people engage in sexual relations with another live person is as part of a fertility ritual when they’re ready to have children. Marriage still exists for the purpose of raising offspring but love matches are rare. Most people (of all sexual orientations) use the Service to unite them with a suitable life partner. The Service has been performing DNA and personality matches for over twenty-five years. So accustomed to gushi mashing are the majority of people that the Service has to train newly married citizens in how to have sex with each other so that no one will be harmed attempting unsafe activities during a fertility ritual. Love matches and what people now refer to as “grounded” sex is largely frowned upon in the U.N.A. and what remains of civilized society elsewhere. Despite the Bio-net’s ability to shield people from sexually transmitted diseases there is a widespread distaste for the exchange of bodily fluids.
However, there are those who support grounded experiences of all kinds over gushi participation and believe robot employment should be heavily restricted to boost human employment numbers. The grounded movement regarded the reformation of the physical school system in 2050 as a major victory. Generally, supporters of the grounded movement also oppose the identity wiping of eco-refugees, suspected but unproven terrorists and other political dissidents. Because the government only executes proven foreign national terrorists, the government itself considers its actions against eco-refugees and others as lenient and forgiving. In reality, once their personalities are wiped and covered (W + C) with a new persona that is programmed to devoutly support the state in any way it can, these apprehended foreigners and formerly noncompliant citizens are sent to work with hazardous materials or under dangerous conditions. Often the W + C prisoners are sent to perform toxic environmental cleanup alongside robots or assist in storm evacuations and high-risk rescue operations.
The grounded movement continues to protest this treatment and promote the value of a life rooted in reality but its more radical members have on occasion overstepped the boundaries of what the government is willing to humor as civic participation and become W + C victims themselves. Though the movement contains some very eminent and powerful citizens, individual members must be circumspect in speaking of their views and stress pacifism as the only acceptable way to attain their goals. Calls for revolution are not tolerated by the U.N.A. government. Protest rallies that involve even the slightest property damage are not tolerated by the government either. The U.N.A. leaders and the governments of its allies are more powerful than they have ever been yet they also face more internal and external threats than ever before.
In 2059 a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India tore holes in the world’s ozone layer. The war was over water and was only one of many such wars for resources but in this case the use of nuclear arms and resulting damage to the ozone layer caused reduced crop yields and exponentially increased DNA damage worldwide. The number of eco-refugees spiked and, along with them, the threat of terrorism.
It’s no wonder, in an existence as harsh as this, that people seek to disappear into gushi, a virtual world where any comfort or excitement a person desires is theirs for the taking. I come from a place and time where every citizen is implanted with a microchip containing their identification at birth. The SecRos and DefRos are capable of reading the chips from a distance of thirty feet. Citizens have been murdered for their chips or had their dead bodies mutilated for them. These stolen chips then arrive on the black market where they are implanted in someone else’s arm for a price because despite the might of U.N.A. security forces, there is a continual leak of refugees and potential terrorists into U.N.A. territory.
In this future society, personal freedoms are curtailed in the name of the needs of the many. Each U.N.A. citizen must perform compulsory government service for a period of eighteen months after they turn twenty-one. The “comp” jobs are in one of three streams—homeland environmental projects, homeland security services or homeland agriculture. While young people may register a particular request for one of the three streams, such requests are often denied.
Unlike in 1985, long-term careers are no longer solely of citizens’ choosing either. Aptitude tests administered in the final years of basic education (around the age of seventeen) are measured against occupations with existing or projected vacancies. Three possible occupations are suggested to each young citizen who must then narrow their options and select a single one from the three. Only the most well-connected U.N.A. citizens are at liberty to create a fourth option for themselves or reverse an earlier decision and make another choice.
It’s an age of sacrifice and duty on one hand and one of constant escape to a fantasy world that knows no boundaries on the other. Even “the Cursed” are not denied access to gushi as long as they put in a full day’s work in the camps. It’s the U.N.A. populations’ favorite pastime. The grounded movement liken gushi to a twentieth-century narcotic and maybe they’re right because it’s often enough to distract us from the nightly curfews, mechanized security patrols, lack of control over our own lives, the constant threat of a new war to weaken
an already fragile environment or a fresh bioterror plague that will bleed our bodies dry.
I can imagine how nightmarish and unbelievable the future must sound to Lou Bianchi. I wouldn’t believe it myself if someone came to me with such a bizarre story, except that I know it to be the truth. The God’s honest truth, as they sometimes like to say in 1985.
One of the strangest things about it all was that I didn’t consider many of the things I’ve explained particularly unusual while I lived them. Most of it was just background noise to my life … until it wasn’t.
When they took Joanna I began to wake up to what was wrong with our world but it wasn’t until they took Latham that I was truly wide awake. And by then it was already too late.
SIXTEEN
My father, Luca Kallas, is the vice president of Coppedge-Hale Corp, the leading manufacturer of the nation’s security defense robots. That’s what Garren meant when he told the SecRos, on that morning back when I was twelve and a half and full of fury and sadness, “You better be careful there—you know that’s the boss’s daughter.” It was no dream—it was a buried memory.
That was the first day I really noticed Garren but I noticed him often after. Everybody knew his mothers (one of them an archivist and the other a prominent physicist) were members of the grounded movement and in later years I learned that he and his younger sister, Kinnari, made no secret of their own support for the movement. It seemed natural and right to them, like breathing.
My older brother, Latham, and I attended the same school as Garren and Kinnari Lowe in Billings, Montana, where the head office of Coppedge-Hale Corp was located along with the federal government. Latham and I were designer babies, like most of the children in Billings—intelligent, attractive and even-tempered. As the offspring of a wealthy and powerful parent, we had every advantage and, like so many other young children, I worshipped my father. This, too, seemed as natural and right as breathing at the time.
In those early years I never blamed my father for disappointing me. The birthdays and special occasions that he failed to attend and the times he was “too tired for children’s voices” didn’t make me love him any less and Latham, just sixteen months older than me, was always there to pick up the slack. I could never complain that I was lonely or had no one to play with; we were inseparable when we were children, almost as if we were twins except that Latham was worldlier and could always see through my father.
Latham and I were expected to be perfect (as custom ordered) and in the beginning my parents didn’t have any major complaints but then I started to see things before they happened. Mostly they weren’t things of any consequence but my mother, Leila, detested my visions and labeled my second sight unnatural. She began to slap my hands when I mentioned my visions and forbid me to speak of the things I saw to anyone. “Not even your father,” she said.
“What about Latham?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine not sharing the things I’d seen with him.
My mother’s lip curled as she replied, “You must never speak of it again and when you stop talking about it, the strange things will stop happening. Do you understand me?”
For years I didn’t mention my second sight to Latham and denied the visions even to myself, until Joanna, the nanny and domestic servant that my parents had employed starting when I was six (during a short period of time when it became fashionable for wealthy people to hire human domestic servants rather than robots), noticed me freeze while I was accompanying her on an errand, like I’d seen a ghost. I loved Joanna and eventually I trusted her enough to explain about my visions and swear her to secrecy. Joanna called my second sight a gift but I didn’t understand the visions enough for them to prove useful. Mostly they seemed random and pointless.
Once I saw my friend Elennede fall from a tree and injure her head but when it actually happened the Bio-net healed her without difficulty, rendering the vision a useless warning. I only ever saw things from the near future and they were always about myself or those close to me. My father being driven to work. Latham sassing a teacher at school. Me, meeting people I hadn’t come to know yet but soon would.
It wasn’t until I had a vision about the SecRos taking Joanna that I realized my gift’s potential importance. I had no idea why they would come for her—Joanna was one of the kindest, gentlest people I’d ever met—but I immediately confided my vision to her.
Joanna’s eyes filled with worry. “How long do you think I have?” she asked.
I told her I didn’t know but even as I said it I felt the danger grow. “Not long. But why would they want you? There must be some mistake.”
Joanna began to whirl around her bedroom, packing up her things. “No mistake,” she told me. “I’m an illegal, Freya. I was born in Mexico and smuggled across the border in a small group along with my aunt and uncle when I was seven. The smuggler or the chip seller must have turned us in.”
“But my father can help you,” I said firmly. If she was only seven when she crossed the border how could she carry any responsibility for her illegal status? It wasn’t right. And my father was one of the powerful men in the U.N.A. Surely this was something he could fix.
Joanna’s hair billowed out behind her as she swept up more of her belongings. “It’s better if I just leave. If they ask you, pretend you know nothing. Don’t bother your parents with news of your vision. They don’t understand.”
Joanna was clutching her suitcase in her left hand, ready to flee, when my parents charged into her bedroom along with the SecRos. My father took one look at me and then refused to let me catch his eye again. I heard him ask the SecRos which detention facility they were bringing Joanna to. “Harlowtown,” one of them replied. “Do you have further instructions, sir?”
“Yes, take her to Jamesview instead. On my authority.” My father turned towards Joanna. “It will be better for you there.”
I thought that meant he would help her in some way but it still didn’t seem enough and I interrupted, “But, Dad, why does she have to go at all? Why can’t she stay here? She hasn’t done anything.”
My father’s face grew rigid and my mother said, “Freya, let us handle this.” She pointed for me to leave the room and when I tried to speak to my father about Joanna later that night my mother instructed me not to bother him and waved me away a second time.
“You know who your father is,” she whispered as soon as he was out of earshot. “He can’t be seen appearing to help illegals. His position makes that impossible. You need to understand that.”
I didn’t. I still believed he’d help Joanna in some secret way, maybe not by bringing her back to us but by making sure she was safely settled somewhere else in the U.N.A., the evidence against her lost. The next time I had a chance to speak to my father about it alone he said, “Try not to worry about her anymore, Freya. I’ve made sure she’s in a good place.” Then he winked and added, “Don’t say anything to your mother about what I’ve told you. She’d be angry with me for months if she knew I’d stuck my neck out like that.”
And so I said nothing and tried to be content with Joanna’s safety, although I missed her desperately. Our new domestic, Ro (Joanna’s replacement), smiled too often, which made me feel worse. Only two days later she was setting my breakfast on the table when I caught a glimpse of Joanna on the Dailies among a crowd of W + C women who were working on a chemical spill site in Minneapolis. She had that weirdly zealous look in her eyes that wiped and covered people always projected, like they were burning on the inside. Burning with a desire to do whatever would make the U.N.A. stronger. The Joanna I’d known was gone forever. They’d taken her identity from her and turned her into an instrument of the state.
My father refused to talk to me about what had happened to Joanna, saying only that he’d been betrayed. My mother sat me down in her private solarium, a place where it was forever a perfect day in May. Then she told me there were many hard truths about the world that I hadn’t come to accept yet. “Your father’s work comes
with enormous responsibility. He must be seen to be above reproach.” In a word: perfect.
I interpreted her comments as an admission of guilt. Having taken my father at his word that he’d found a good place for Joanna and later listened to him claim he’d been betrayed it seemed obvious to me that my mother was the one to betray him. She must’ve forced him to change his mind by reminding him of his duty to Coppedge-Hale Corp.
I hated her for that and knew I would never forgive her. She’d destroyed a person I’d loved. I was angry with my father too but assigned the lion’s share of the blame to my mother. Hearing Garren say, “It’s inhumane, what they do,” later that same morning made my hate surge stronger, like he was giving me permission to stop feeling anything good about my mother.
The rage I felt down to the core was her fault and no one could tell me any different, although Latham tried. He said the decision about Joanna would’ve always been our father’s to make, not our mother’s, but that she’d been doing his dirty work for years when it came to us. “Because he can’t stand not to feel like the good guy to you.” Latham threw up his hands and added, “When are you going to see that, Freya? What does he have to do for you to open your eyes to who he really is?”
As angry as I was with my mother, I couldn’t bear to argue with my brother for long. “Maybe you have the opposite blindness and forgive her everything too easily,” I said. “Did you ever think of that? You know how she’s always been about my visions. She wants us to match up with these ideals she has in her head—an ideal daughter who I’ll never be.”
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