New America

by Jeremy Bates

  NEW AMERICA:

  UTOPIA CALLING

  JEREMY BATES

  Copyright © 2015 by Jeremy Bates

  First Edition

  The right of Jeremy Bates to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-988091-03-7

  Contents

  MID TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  Day 0

  Day 1

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  THE TASTE OF FEAR - PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MID TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  day 0

  One of the great, and often overlooked, perks of life is choice. Most people don’t think about how many choices they make in any given day, let alone over the course of a lifetime. But you make millions, likely billions…which means you’re of course going to make a few stinkers along the way. However, another great perk of life is that you often get to fix some of said bad choices. You drive through your neighbors’ fence because you thought it was a swell idea to pop down to the corner store to pick up some more mixer for the vodka you were swilling—well, you can rebuild the fence, or at least fork over some dough to have someone else fix it. No real harm done. Yet sometimes there are choices that lead to consequences that cannot be so easily fixed or forgiven. Society labels these choices “crimes.” You often go to prison for such choices/crimes—where, because of your questionable judgement in the past, you are severely limited in what other choices you are allowed to make in the future.

  Bob Smith did not commit a serious crime from which there was no turning back. His choice was perfectly legal. And in fact millions of people had made the very same choice before him in recent years. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily mean it was the right choice to make, and whether right or wrong, it will be one he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life.

  ☼

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked Maureen, my wife of fifteen years. We were seated side by side in front of an empty desk. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was a three-foot-tall print of a sun rising over Los Angeles—or was it New Los Angeles?

  “We’ve already decided, Bob,” she said.

  “We can still back out…”

  “We’ve already decided,” she said, and there was a hardness to her tone, and what she really meant was: You. You’ve already decided. You got this idea in your head, you convinced me, and now we’re going through with this if for no other reason than so I can say I-told-you-so when it all blows up in our faces.

  I opened my mouth, but no words came to me, because she was right. Regardless of who was the impetus for the decisions that led us to this office today, the decisions were made. It was too late to turn back. Too much had been set in motion. We had no choice but to continue on the path we were on.

  “It will be fine,” I told her.

  She stared ahead but didn’t say anything, and I could see the tightness in her face, the fear.

  I slipped my hand into her lap and took her hand in mine. I squeezed reassuringly. I didn’t think she would return the affection, but she did, she squeezed, so tightly it hurt.

  Then the door to the office opened behind us, and a woman’s voice said, “Sorry about the interruption, folks. That was my daughter’s teacher. She’s fallen sick, my daughter, and—and what do you care, right? Today’s your big day! Gosh, I’m so envious. I really am.”

  ☼

  The office was small, not much of a step up from four partition board walls and a door. Sara Malik settled her curvy body into the empty seat behind the desk and smiled at us. She was in her early thirties. She had brown skin, though no trace of a foreign accent. Black curly hair framing a meticulously made up face tumbled past her shoulders, the ends resting on a pair of large breasts. Her pink top didn’t reveal any cleavage—the neckline rode up to her throat—but it was made of a thin material, and tight, revealing the outlines of said large breasts.

  “So,” Sara said, “you guys must be so excited about today. Are you excited?”

  “A little nervous, to be truthful,” Maureen said. She’d released my hand and now clasped hers together on her lap.

  “Scared as hell,” I said.

  Sara nodded. “Which is perfectly normal. Everyone experiences apprehension to some degree. It would be unnatural not to, wouldn’t it?”

  She smiled again, waiting for us to smile back. We didn’t. We were too anxious, I suppose, even for a nervous smile. Also, there was something about Sara that bothered me. She was too happy. No, correction: she was too happy for us. I felt a bit like I did when Maureen and I sat through a timeshare hard-sell while we were vacationing in Las Vegas a couple years before. All I kept thinking at the time was if the units the sales guy was pushing were so fantastic, why didn’t he own one?

  “So,” I said, getting to why we were there, “everything’s on track? No…delays…or anything?”

  “One hundred percent on track, Mr. Smith. This meeting is only a formality so I can answer any last questions you might have. Your wife and yourself are still scheduled for two ten this afternoon.” She checked her watch. “Which gives you, oh, four hours to sit back and relax before you begin your lives in New America.”

  I glanced at Maureen. She finally cracked a smile, and I was about to smile too when I noticed her bottom lip trembling. The smile was a pretense, an attempt to hold back tears.

  It worked on Sara, however, because the woman sighed whimsically and fed us her “I’m so envious” line again. I wondered how many thousands of times she had used it before.

  “What do we do until then?” I asked.

  “Whatever you like,” Sara replied. “The museum is on the second floor. You can learn everything you want about miniaturization and—”

  “I’ve done my research,” I said, perhaps a bit too harshly. “We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”

  “Of course, of course. Nevertheless, it’s a great place to pass some time. The New Miami wing has just been completed in anticipation of the city’s opening next year. The cafeteria is on the third floor, and the Experience Project is on the forth, where you can enjoy a variety of virtual tours of New America.”

  “I think we’d just like someplace quiet where we could wait,” Maureen said.

  “Then I would suggest the botanical gardens. This floor, just follow the signs.”

  “To smell the roses one last time?” Maureen said.

  Sara frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “To smell the roses one last time.”

  Sara chuckled. “The roses in New America smell just like real roses, Mrs. Smith. No, what am I saying? They are real roses. Everything’s real. The sky’s the same sky above you right now. The sun’s the same sun, the air’s the same air—”

  “It doesn’t rain,” Maureen said. “I think I’d like it if it rained.”

  “It still rains, of course—”

  “But the dome stops it.”

  “You can’t have rain drops the size of boulders falling on New People now, can you?” Sara chuckled again, though this time uncomfortably. She looked at me to step in.

  “You won’t even notice the dome, dear,” I said. “No rain—that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?”

  “I know, I know… It’s just…”

/>   “It’s okay, everything will be okay.”

  Maureen nodded, pulled herself together, and stood.

  Sara and I stood as well.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Sara asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I think we’ll just walk around for a bit. Thank you.”

  Maureen was already opening the door to leave. I pushed in my chair and followed.

  ☼

  We didn’t go to the museum or the cafeteria or the fourth floor for the virtual tours. We took an elevator underground to where the miniaturization occurred. The cab, one of several, opened to a space the size of an airport departure lounge. And that’s exactly what it looked like. Large-screen monitors everywhere displayed ID numbers and miniaturization times. Check-in counters—or whatever the hell they were called—lined the far wall. They were lettered A through Z. Queues of fifty to a hundred people snaked back and forth before each. Unlike at an airport there wasn’t any luggage in sight. You entered New America as naked as a newborn. There weren’t any children either as it was illegal for anyone under twenty-one to miniaturize—at least in America.

  Maureen and I went to one of the lounges scattered about and sat in claytronic seats that molded to our bodies. Our check-in counter was K. It was so distant I had to squint to make out the letter. “Shitty if you got your letters mixed up,” I said. “Might end up in New China.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” Maureen said.

  “You know that’s impossible, dear.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “There’s never been—”

  “I don’t care!” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  I turned my attention to the other people sharing the lounge with us. Blacks, Asians, Latinos, whites. Many were a similar age to Maureen and I, mid-thirties, and many appeared to be couples. Some were speaking softly to one another, while others stared at nothing, their expressions ranging from frightened to excited to bored.

  My eyes drifted back to the check-in counters, the queues. It was an efficient process, miniaturization. According to the figures, more than two thousand American citizens were miniaturized each day, fourteen thousand a week, more than fifty thousand a month, or roughly six hundred thousand a year.

  New America had a current population north of twenty million.

  The idea of miniaturizing human beings had been around since the middle of the last century, yet until relatively recently scientists had always believed the rules of quantum mechanics prohibited the shrinking of organic matter. The problem had been that atoms, the particles that composed the world and everything in it, did not scale. They were a fixed size. There was no way to reduce the size of a proton, neutron, or electron. Moreover, there was no way to reduce the number of atoms in a human body, or the distance between them, without dramatically altering the body’s chemical characteristics.

  Nevertheless, twelve years ago Daniel Mathews, a British physicist and systems design engineer, proved conventional science wrong when he successfully shrunk a dog by ten to the minus two, or to half an inch tall, through a revolutionary process that avoided quantum mechanics altogether, thereby allowing regular matter and shrunken matter to interact in a symmetrical and invariant way.

  Matthews coined the process dimensional shifting, and within the year a world body was convened to discuss the possibility of miniaturizing segments of the human population to alleviate overpopulation and humanity’s carbon footprint, which had been responsible for the planet going to hell in a handbag over the previous two decades.

  China was the first county to create a New City, followed by India, Germany, and The Netherlands. There were already two dozen New Cities around the world before US lawmakers approved the creation of New America—which, I should note, was a misnomer, as there were only three cities up and running thus far: New New York City, which everyone called NY2, New San Francisco, and New Los Angeles. NY2 and NSF were currently at maximum capacity, while NLA was at close to eighty percent, though it was scheduled to be fully occupied by the time New Miami opened its doors next July.

  I rested my elbow on the back of Maureen’s seat and massaged her neck with my hand. She was stiff as a board, though as I kneaded the knots from her muscles she loosened up.

  She wasn’t afraid of the process of miniaturizing, I knew, which governments liked to tout was safer than flying. She was more concerned with the fact shrinking yourself was a one-way journey. That was the caveat with the technology. Scientists could shrink you to the size of a cricket, but they didn’t know how to reverse the effects, or supersize you, for that matter. Not yet, anyway.

  What this meant, of course, was that if you chose to become a New Person, you had to say goodbye to your old life forever. You could still communicate with friends and family digitally, where size and mass were translated into ones and zeroes, but you could never touch them in person, never see them in person. For me this wasn’t such a big deal. Friends could be replaced, and my parents died when I was so young I didn’t have any memories of them, and I didn’t have any siblings. Maureen’s situation, however, was different. She had great parents, three older sisters, one younger brother. She was close with all of them.

  Even so, sometimes you were called to make difficult decisions and sacrifices. We were bankrupt, jobless, destitute. Our only child was dead. We needed a new life, a new start.

  And New America offered that.

  ☼

  At exactly 2:10 p.m. I said to Maureen, “It’s time.”

  We stood and made our way down the concourse to check-in counter K. We joined the quickly forming queue behind an obese Caucasian man and a stick-thin woman.

  “I hope the chicken tastes like chicken,” the man grumbled.

  “Of course it will, John. Why wouldn’t it?”

  “By the look of this line, maybe we’ll no longer be the minority. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “Stop that!”

  The big man glanced over his shoulder at Maureen and I. “Halleluiah, more white folks,” he said, turning and sticking out his hand. “I’m John. This is Wendy.”

  We introduced ourselves as well.

  “Ready for the brave new world?” he said.

  “Think so,” I said.

  “Think so? You got about two minutes to decide, pal.”

  “No, we’re ready.”

  He hooked a thumb at the check-in counter. “You would think these guys could shrink my gut while they shrink the rest of me, wouldn’t you? But they say it can’t be done. All their technology and they can’t get rid of belly fat.”

  “Huh,” I said, shuffling forward with the line.

  “So where you guys gonna be living?” John asked.

  “Dwiggins Street in East LA,” I told him. “Or East New LA, I guess.”

  “What do you know. We’re in East NLA too.”

  “We’re temporary,” Maureen said. “We’d like to move to NY2 in the future.”

  “John and Wendy Sexton,” John reminded us as he and Wendy reached the front of the line. “Look us up when you get there. You play cards, Bob?”

  “I don’t gamble,” I said, and Maureen stiffened a bit.

  “Well, look us up anyway. Dinner or something.”

  They proceeded to the check-in counter.

  Under her breath Maureen said, “You don’t gamble except with our life savings.”

  “Not now, Maureen.”

  She stared stonily ahead.

  John and Wendy continued past the check-in counter and through one of many identical doorways.

  The attendant waved for us forward.

  ☼

  She was of Asian descent and dressed in a ruby-red uniform with white piping and a matching hat. She told us to look straight ahead while an array of biometric sensors scanned our body temperatures, heartbeats, retinas, and so forth, the results of which were displayed on an augmented reality HUD.

  “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Smith,
” she said a moment later. “Please continue past me.” She indicated one of the doors behind her.

  ☼

  The room was small and featureless except for what looked like a hotel laundry chute in the wall to our left. The floor was a series of interconnecting white hexagonal tiles. The center one was red.

  “Please deposit your clothing and footwear in the shoot to your left and step onto the red hexagon, Mr. Smith,” a voice instructed me over hidden speakers. “There are no cameras. Your privacy is assured.”

  I took a deep breath and kissed Maureen on the lips. “See you soon,” I told her, then went to the left wall and stripped off my clothes and shoes. I dumped them into the chute. They fell away into the darkness without a sound.

  Trying not to think about what was about to happen to me, the dimensional shift of my atoms, I stood on the center hexagon. This triggered a kind of force field to surround me. It hummed softly.

  I raised my hand to Maureen in farewell. She watched me with terror on her face and tears in her eyes.

  She’ll get used to it, I told myself. She’ll just need time to adjust.

  “Please remain still, Mr. Smith,” the voice said.

  There was a loud clank, then the hexagonal tile I stood on lowered noiselessly into the floor. It stopped a dozen feet down, and I found myself encircled by three gold rings. They were at head, chest, and shin level respectively, each tube-like and thick as a water main. The air was warm and had the smell of new electronics.

  “Please take a deep breath and don’t exhale, Mr. Smith,” the voice said.

  White light glowed from behind the tubes, bright enough I closed my eyes. Breath held, heart hammering, I waited. I felt a tickling inside me, beneath my skin. Then a different sensation. Thinning, or stretching.

  I snapped open my eyes.

  Nothing had changed. I was still—