Adams’ bark comes distorted through the microphone and speaker. “Been on the front lines a little too long, M’Kean. Where a general articulates a concept and it’s someone’s job to make it a reality. No questions asked.” Adams brightens to just before open laughter. “It’s a little more difficult with this republic thing. But plenty has been accomplished thus far. If you haven’t noticed, we’re no longer Englishmen. And when the Articles are ratified, we’ll have a new country, born of liberty.”
“Occupied by another country because we can’t get consensus to actually fight the war we started.”
Adams shrugs. “Oh, I know. But unless you want a king, this is the way it’s going to have to be. Get the Articles ratified. Write a resolution.” And the screen goes dark.
M’Kean turns back to the cart containing Philip Livingston, but there is no Philip Livingston. Instead of a man filled with water, there is only the water vacated, a dark pool spread out in blob around the cart, reflects Rush and M’Kean’s faces back at them looking down. On Livingston’s screen, that same program they monitored all the way across New Jersey, expanding in angled waves around its edges in clockwise.
“What is it, you think?”
“Well,” M’Kean says. “I hope it’s not what I think it might be.” Rush swallows. A loud swallow. “What if it’s after us?”
“Us who?”
“Us… The Signers”
john Hart :: May 11th 1779
Signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Hart is spending the morning in the library of the family home. His children and grandchildren lounge with their laptops and smartphones, flicking their way through app catalogs and digging up arcane databases to explore; a few outside in the gardens too, a few others in the extensive attic maze which tops the house. Just then one is finishing a count to a hundred and darting off to look for brothers and sisters and cousins all tucked and folded throughout the house.
What’s about to happen will be the last in a long series of crises about which John Hart has become something of an expert over the years. While listening to podcasts and taking the recycling out one morning, a vision of the tyranny of the Stamp Act took his mind and exactly 140 characters later, every patriotic blog in the New World was buzzing with John Hart’s apocalyptic imagery.
When the British finally did invade, it was his cellar that was full of provisions. Real provisions. His insane devotion to Evidence Sets of the Great End, Roman soldier history‐casts and survivalist snail‐zines helped him live like an Indian in the woods for a year while Redcoat regiments and Loyalists hunted the state for Signers. On this morning, in 1779, John Hart readies plans for town defense against panicked members of other towns not prepared for some calamity that remains a variable in this particular model. “Have to be ready,” he has told all of his grandchildren, and all of his grandchildren’s parents, something like a hundred times, a hundred times each.
“Grandfather,” his youngest grandchild says, “today is the day when Miles Standish stood on the mast of his boat and looked out and instead of sea only, he spied a new speck of land and yelled, ‘LAND!’”
“Very good.” John Hart bends again to preparing strategies of land defense and ration schedules. Be it rabies outbreak, nuclear holocaust or global ice‐over. “It is history,” he tells the young one, “not religion. Our ability to remember. This is the great motivation for men to take morals with them wherever they go.” He looks up from his work to address anyone in earshot. “Who is watching but everyone who will ever exist from this point forward, on into eternity?”
These philosophical interruptions of his practical brainstorms are common enough that all the children know the thing to do is to pretend you’re paying attention. Saves hours of Grandpa rattling off details about how the most number of humans can efficiently survive a one‐foot rise in sea level.
“Grandfather,” a child leaning back from a laptop he’s been hunched over since waking. “It’s your lucky day…”
“The battle of Gamelsdorf,” the little one recites. “William of Orange captures Exeter. Napoleon becomes one‐third of the Consul of France. Suicide bombers destroy hotels in a country not yet founded.”
“The Internet says a plague is spreading down the East Coast.”
John Hart looks up from his plans. “A plague? Coming here?” And he almost looks delighted. Finally, he looks like he’s thinking. “They laugh, they laugh, they laugh,” he’s digging in the drawer for an old smartphone, flicks it to a menu that accesses spreadsheet databases he keeps up to date and always open on his desktop. “What kind of plague are we talking about?”
“Something about a stomach,” the boy is summarizing for him. “Maybe in the drinking water.”
“That doesn’t sound like a plague,” the boy’s father says, yet another of the family gathered in the room and throughout the house and the small estate around it.
“People’s stomachs are reporting groups of people just falling over dead,” another says from the light of another computer screen, way on the other side of the room.
“Where are you reading this?”
The kid points to the screen and says, “The Internet’s a‐tickle with it.”
John Hart clicks into the first cell of a database constructed for plague‐specific command protocol. “Get all the children into the main hall.”
“A young man becomes the youngest man to ever become grand champion in the board game known as chess.”
“What?”
“It was today. That a computer program analyzed the world and told the human at its terminal that the planet was about to be destroyed.”
“Three thousand people in Concord, New Hampshire.” It’s the boy at the laptop, looking like he might be thinking more like his grandfather about this whole plague thing now.
“But there aren’t three thousand people in Concord.”
“Says they’ve come from all around to demand something be done. People in the countryside in piles.”
“Piles?”
“Piles of dead.”
“Is that what is says?”
He points. “There’s pictures.”
“The Meiji Restoration begins right now.”
“Okay, sweetheart, that’s enough.”
The ones in front of laptops are clicked into their favorite media outlets while those without computer or smartphone have rushed to look at a screen over someone’s shoulder. Doors can be heard opening and closing throughout the house. Hurried footsteps. “Let’s not panic now, family.” It’s the first rule of every contingency plan John Hart has ever devised. First rule when the British threatened to leave Canada in French hands: Don’t panic.
The sound of horse hooves on the drive out front. Shouts now. “Who’s here?” someone shouts.
John Hart moves to the center of the room. He turns to address the growing familial crowd gathering in the library despite the fact that the plan calls for a meeting in the main hall. Through the window, he can see his first‐born daughter, collapsed on the walk out front, clutching her stomach as her husband wails skyward. Don’t panic, John Hart says to himself, but then he’s not looking at the faces of his gathered family but at the ceiling. A pain in his lower chest like having the wind knocked out. A taste like sand in his mouth. He manages to whisper, “Stick to the plan.” But he’s not sure who’s still there to hear him. The men who survive this, he thinks, they will be gods. And I’ll be one of the ones who died in the very first days.
George Ross :: July 14th 1779
George Ross is pretty sure he has what’s being called The Death. That faint tightening in the lower gut, something he would have dismissed as gas before the outbreak. It’s supposed to be the first sign of what’s supposed to be a pretty quick descent. The last time he was outside, the streets were littered with them, dead Americans, victims of The Death. Their last act to rush out into the world and fall flat. Because inside windowless houses, that’s how the serfs and subjects of the Old Wo
rld would succumb to plagues. Americans are free by nature and so they get one last look at the sun, or the clouded sky, or the stars and the dark infinities of the universe. Maybe in their last diluted throws of The Death, they imagined that past their front door, some great force had gathered to save them. That somehow, some way, America would show up at the last possible second.
Ross puts his best guess at sixty‐five percent. It’s an aggregate of the wild range being proffered on the few sites and feeds still updating. Sixty‐five percent of Americans dead from The Death: two out of three. Only two months into the outbreak and no end in sight. Of course, that’s all speculation, speculation being the best Ross can do. When panicked reports started circulating that The Death was being spread through the Internet, Americans everywhere rushed out of the Cloud, never to return. Most sites haven’t changed since the outbreak broke out. Pictures of the first dead ghost every abandoned splash page, breaking news left there breaking. The whole Cloud just a wasteland now, full of old haunts and ad drones, AIs wiggling along the expanding spine of some task‐adjusted task list, firewall worms mining long‐abandoned email accounts and social networking profiles, infesting online identities with their protocol, creating more drones and more haunts and more worms. The Cloud isn’t gone—it’s just not a place for humans anymore.
There are a few brave ones still out there, though. Using the remains of barely functioning social networking mainframes, they collect and share what little information they can scrape up: tweets about the burning of Fairfield, the burning of Norwalk; headcounts estimating how many British soldiers remain; a single pixelated smartphone capture of Mad Tony Wayne and a tattered flag above a fallen royal fort. But no one knows the answer to the big question: Is George Washington still out there, still fighting? Hopes are that the old man has gone silent, ordered every smartphone in the ranks pitched into the Delaware. Like a snake, his army creeps unseen through the woods of New Jersey… off the grid. But these are just hopes. Odds and probabilities and hunches all lean toward him being dead too, Washington and all his men—fucked, just like the rest of us.
Since the outbreak, the only person George Ross has had any sustained contact with is the other George Ross. They became friends back during the second dawn of social networking, when suddenly an online presence wasn’t just for amusement anymore but a professional and then a human necessity.
It was about then that their online profiles got crossed over. The first thing was they each started getting friend requests that were intended for the other George Ross. Each of them accepted a few dozen of these thinking they were supporters or maybe small‐time political bosses they’d forgotten the names of. Suddenly they had fifty friends in common and that’s when the programming started confusing the two profiles. Sorting it all out made the George Rosses pretty good friends over the years. Having to swap misdirected e‐vites back to their rightful intendee, routing chat feeds into the smartphone of the George Ross who that chat was really opened to chat with. Lo and behold, they’re chatting too, and not just about the quirks of present‐tense communications. They’re on messageboards and listservs together. Chatrooms they both really meant to be in. Chatting away.
Then one day they logged on to find that they weren’t different people any longer, not on the Internet anyway. Some tentacle of the protocol had determined that the existence of these two separate crossed‐over identities was an error. And so the profiles were fused into one single entity. From there, it spread through the entire Internet. Two different George Rosses in the real world were now linked to the same online self.
There was nothing they could do but start their online identities over from scratch. Explaining in all their invites that they didn’t de‐friend anyone, that really it’s all a big mix‐up. But they never did take down that other George Ross. Periodically, they’d check in to see if some interaction meant for them individually had landed in the lap of the shared identity. It worked as a second or a third online George Ross—a catchall for the other two. A private scanner or secretary, a little sliver of the social network in which anything possible for either George Ross became possible for both.
It’s with this shared identity that the two George Rosses have been navigating the fractured sub‐structures of the post‐outbreak cloud. Recently, a few other users began posting to George Ross’s wall, the shared George Ross a sort of informal meeting place for humans still daring to navigate the Cloud. A belief exists among them that despite The Death, information availability is still the only hope the fledging country has. Some of the posts are clearly ad drones, pushing products and subscriptions and listservs as if the world outside the Cloud is still the world they were originally programmed to entice. Other posts seem human enough, but who knows. Could be humans or could be second‐generation drones, drones created by drones—and maybe they really do believe they’re human.
Today’s post from the other George Ross reads: “The Death has reached England too.”
“Maybe it reached America from England?”
But really no one knows where it started. Or when. Theories abound from mutated yellow fever to ancient rats long ago trapped in ice and now free. Drones once programmed to attract scientists, conspiracy nuts and sci‐fi fans cobble common words and phrases into sensational and absurd hypotheticals. Stories get picked up by news‐feed drones. They get funneled through linking AIs, and then it’s as good as true, as far as all the autonomous protocols are concerned.
George Ross shares a tweet that says, “The Death was brought on a slave ship.”
The other George Ross posts, “A weapon Parliament couldn’t control, and now it sweeps through the entire kingdom? Only time until it’s global.”
All that’s left of Asia is a giant firewall. And who knows what’s happening on the other side. If there is any Asia left at all.
What George Ross can’t bear to post is that he’s got it now too, that the weak glove of a shared identity is no protection from The Death. From all the data linked in the links on the shared George Ross’s wall, it seems like after the first pangs, you get a few days tops. That time is just about up. Seated at his computer, thinking about The Death and how it spreads, George Ross can’t help but feel like only the material part of himself and nothing more, that the core code of his existence is actually his online self. Maybe this is what comes to you, he thinks, when you can see the end of your life approaching in real time—that maybe there is a being out there so similar to you that when you die, something fundamental about you remains.
George Ross, the other one, at whatever laptop or terminal he’s sitting at, types the question: “Washington… alive or dead?”
But he’s not going to get an answer. Not from George Ross. Because right then, the pain becomes unbearable. It throws George Ross into fits of abstract breakdancing on the floor. His shins bang chair legs until the chair is toppled too. He can feel how wide open his mouth is, but there’s no screaming or even breath coming out. A moment of calm. Must be the few instants between when the heart stops and the brain shuts down forever. He thinks about those three George Rosses, out there in the fractured Cloud… have to share just one human now.
Joseph Hewes :: November 10th 1779
Joseph Hewes sits in a chair by the tall windows of his study. He has out his smartphone with that same name scrolled to the top, blinking in the pulse of the cursor light. All these years, he’s saved her number and email. All these years, transferring her from phone to phone as he aged and aged while the image of her remained the same in his brain. And what if he were to press that green call button now, after all this time? Would she be there, despite all the rules of existence? And if she were, what then? Hewes fogs the window with the words he’s used to fog it so many times before: “Where are you now?”
It was back in 1751 that she died, when the Revolution and an Internet plague were things no one could imagine. Two days before they were to be married, Joseph Hewes came in to find her sitting in a chair, b
lood spurting from her mouth. It came up out of her in molten waves. She was drenching herself with it, her own blood. He stood there frozen in the frame of the door. Their eyes met and the look on her face—a sadness at having let him down. It was her last alive moment.
The night after the funeral, Joseph Hewes climbed a hill that overlooked her family plot and her fresh grave within. He held a loaded pistol to his temple, swearing to join her. But just like the hundreds of times since, he was, in the end, unable to finish himself. And so their time apart continued. Days alone became weeks and months and years and decades. “And now I’m dying,” he says, maybe so she can hear him, if she’s out there somewhere, listening.
Outside the window, the front of his estate is crawled over with weeds and branches not trimmed back for half a year. Flowers bloomed wild and then went dead in the fall. Six months since the outbreak of The Death.
But that’s not what’s killing Joseph Hewes. He’s got something more ancient. A disease that has stalked man as long as there has been a man. Funny that while The Death kills people by the millions, while a savage guerilla war sears its way through the nooks and crannies of several states, that a mysterious fever can still find a human to kill. And though it’s not really related to all that’s happening in America, Joseph Hewes can’t help but feel that his death is as connected as any other, just another of the millions who won’t see the other side of it.
Double doors open at the back of the study, and a Negro teenager enters the room. It’s the slave boy Gibson, who tells his master, “I’ve spoken with a survivor!”
Hewes slides the phone into a pocket and turns to see the boy. Gosh, the place is a mess, the whole mansion falling in around them. They tried to keep it clean for a while, but it’s been just the two of them for so long. When all the other slaves were killed by The Death, way back in the very first week, Hewes had offered Gibson his freedom. But the teenager, wise beyond his years, just shrugged. “Where am I going to go? How am I going to outrun what can’t be outrun?”
Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America Page 3
