He ran to the front cab. It was the middle-aged woman in the station wagon.
“Done so soon?” she asked him.
“Not done yet,” he said, and he directed her to the urban zone checkpoint. “As fast as you can,” he said.
She pulled out of the lot and headed south along the highway, back to the border with Minneapolis. The sun was now set and the car’s headlights illuminated the row of wooden posts that Simon had noted on the way in.
“$10 for the trip?” he asked as they approached the crossing. He had already extracted his visa from his pack.
She nodded and he handed over Kennick’s coin, grabbed his bag, and didn’t wait for the car to fully stop before he was out and running to the post tucked beneath the highway overpass. He could still stop the incursion.
He handed the visa to one of the teenaged guards, who ran it beneath a handheld scanner. The device emitted a short beep and the guard ran it again. It beeped again, and in an instant the guard had grabbed Simon’s wrist.
“You’re to be detained,” he said. His partner had quickly moved to Simon’s side. “By order of the Anti-Insurgency Office.”
“That must be a mistake,” said Simon, struggling. They pinned his arms behind his back led him into the small guardhouse, to a cell attached to the back of the unheated room. “I’m the one they’re trying to rescue.”
“We’ve got our orders,” said the guard. He shoved Simon into the cell and tossed in a heavy quilt behind him. “Stay warm. We’ll transfer you down to the city in the morning.”
They closed the metal door with a slam and locked it from the outside.
The cell was lit by a yellowing fluorescent in the ceiling. A small window opened up to the dark underside of the checkpoint overpass. A rounded plastic bench was mounted on the inside wall. Simon assumed it could double as a cot. He sat down heavily and put his head in his hands.
How had he ended up on the guards’ list? As a security measure in case insurgents tried to use his identity?
He opened his HUD, but he couldn’t find a signal, situated as the checkpoint was in the uninhabited region between Fridley and Minneapolis.
Then he remembered the direct transmission connect. The AIO signal Kramarczuk had provided to send in reports. He pulled it up and dialed in.
“AIO ops.” A woman. From the background noise in some operations center.
“This is Simon Chase!” He tried to contain himself. “There’s been a mistake. I haven’t been kidnapped. I’m calling from the checkpoint outside of Fridley.”
“One moment please.”
The connection clicked, and then a long pause. So long Simon feared it had been disconnected. He tried to think of alternatives. Could he call Martin directly? Or get the guards’ attention to explain the situation to them?
Another click and his brother answered.
“Simon,” Martin said, his voice as unemotional as ever. He sounded bored. “Where are you?”
“At the checkpoint between Fridley and Minneapolis. I need to talk to you.”
“I’ll be there in the morning, with the incursion force.”
“That’s why I’m calling: you don’t need an incursion. I’m free.”
“We’re still coming.”
“That’s what I’m saying: you don’t need to invade. There’s no threat in Fridley.”
There was a pause. Martin’s pauses tended to be for dramatic effect, rather than contemplation, so his reply was uncharacteristically sincere.
“The attack is moving ahead, and it has nothing to do with you.”
“But my mission...”
“Your ‘mission.’ You served your mission, Simon. You’ve done us a great service.”
Simon thought back, to the AIO orders, to the warnings of moles and the corrupt wireless network. It had all been a ruse. A false flag to justify this military action.
“No,” he said. “He thought of Gustav. Kennick. Selene. They’re not dangerous. They’re like geese, they just migrate.”
“Don’t you see? That freedom to migrate; that call can be taken up by others. Soon the roads would be packed. The wasted effort of migration, of movement. Best for us to plan and manage and optimize.”
“But it’s working in Fridley. They have laws. They have money. They even have wireless!”
“It’s anarchy.”
“Whatever it’s called, it’s working. Besides, how can you stop geese from migrating?”
“Kill them,” said Martin. “Where they roost.” Then the line clicked, and Simon knew the call was over.
He yelled for the guards until his voice was hoarse, but he eventually fell to sleep: a fitful, restless sleep, full of anxious dreams of wild gardens full of exotic fruits, teeming with insects and weeds.
He awoke to the cell door opening. His brother entered, in his military uniform.
Simon rose without a word and followed him out into the morning sun. It was a perfect fall day: crisp and cloudless.
A dozen armored personnel carriers were parked in the lot instead of the small fleet of gypsy cabs from the day before. Simon and Martin climbed into the back of one of the trucks.
Their engines roared to life, and the convoy made its way north, toward Fridley, over the highway. Simon watched and listened intently, bracing for the sounds of explosions and small arms fire. Instead he heard only the rumble of the APC’s engine and the rhythmic thumping of the treads over the patched concrete.
Simon imagined the carts aflame; the kiosks broken to pieces. He imagined Gustav’s humble herb-truck, smashed to pieces beneath the bulk of the AIO’s tanks.
The convoy slowed, and Simon craned to look forward. Had they met resistance south of the market? Simon noted that someone spoke to Martin via his HUD, but his replies were so clipped and full of military jargon that they may as well have been in a foreign language.
Finally the truck came to a stop. Simon tried to open his door from the inside and to his surprise it swung open. Without a second thought he jumped out and ran ahead, past the half dozen APCs parked at the front of the column. They were deployed in a fan, covering the broad intersection that was the south entrance of the market.
But it was empty. There space beyond the intersection was just that: empty space.
Where the thriving market had stood just twelve hours before there were just a handful of scattered structures. The administration buildings still stood on the far north side of the market, but with a few exceptions the market had been completely abandoned. In one night the gypsies of the market had packed up their caravans and moved on. Migrated, like so many geese.
Simon walked the lot, through the flotsam and jetsam of loose boards, discarded fabric, empty pallets, and cardboard boxes. He made his way to the administration building, around to the back, where he ascended the ladder Selene had shown him the day before. He climbed to the roof, to the bench where they had sat together, and looked out over the market. The AIO forces were picking through what remained, but there would be no arrests today. No detainees freed. No seizures made.
Simon turned to the bench and sat down. The two coffee carafes were still there, and beneath one a handwritten note. “On to another market,” Selene had written. “Come find me.”
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Jon Garett is co-creator of The Adventures of Seamus Tripp and author of Willy Wise’s Garden. He is a founding member of the Agorist Writers’ Workshop and partner in Very Good Books.
He lives and writes in Minnesota with his inspirations: three cats, a parakeet and his wife. He spends his non-writing time hiking and camping and hoping that through his literary enterprises he can entertain and inform a new audience about the world of voluntarism.
Calvin Mickel is a software developer, new father, and semi-retired gaming enthusiast (new father). He has been a fair-to-middling martial arts practitioner since childhood and a sporadic but enthusiastic reader for just as long. A lifelong aspirant, Calvin has an innate curiosity and enjoys ponde
ring different perspectives and new ideas.
Peregrinus, at least in his own mind, is not ruled.
Mark Johnson is an author of software documentation and unauthorized, non-state-sponsored fiction. His company, Penelope Press, publishes illustrated children's picture books that are enjoyed by dozens of readers throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin. He lives in Bloomington, MN.
Genesis Mickel, an ecologist by day, has been eaten by bot flies, run over by alligators, chased by snakes, and stuck up to her butt in muck. All while pretending to be a ninja. But mostly, she’s indoors writing reports. By night, Genesis aspires to find time to dust off her studio and do some art-making. Sometimes, though, she does get creative stuff done. Recently, Genesis wrote a short story called “The Transgressors” that got published in some kind of liberty-themed anthology.
Described as “an edgy 12 y/o, propably [sic] trying to troll.” by an edgy 12 year-old trying to troll. Christopher Burg’s first official act after becoming a Discordian pope was to excommunicate himself. Since then he has been advocating anarchism, agorism, and crypto-anarchism to anybody willing to listen.
Dubbing himself as a discount security advisor to the proles, he tries to teach his fellow radicals how to use technology to avoid the gaze of Big Brother. In his spare time he enjoys long walks on the beach, judo, iaido, trips to the gun range, and annoying statists.
Connect with Christopher on Twitter at @ComradeBurg.
Equal parts hero and fool, Niklas Ludwig speaks, writes, educates and generally spreads himself too thin. Like all humans at birth, he is a rational anarchist, but since he knows that most people forget this as adults, he does not let that circumscribe the boundaries of his friendships. When not hosting economics meetups, planning agorist festivals, and selling insurance, Nik occupies his free seconds with the creation of speculative fiction. He writes left-handed, which explains everything else.
Matt Tanous is a software developer and anarcho-capitalist working in his spare time on ways to spread the world of liberty, both through the written word to educate and inspire, as well as developing software (posted on the GitHub account CodingAnarchy) designed to assist in circumventing unjust state edicts and help people to truly be free.
Connect with Matthew on Twitter @CodingAnarchy
Richard Walsh is the co-creator of The Adventures of Seamus Tripp, a middle-grade adventure series that takes readers to a world of Monsters, Treasure, Magic, and Mystery. He's a part-time writer and full-time husband, father, and accountant. He lives with his family and a pack of basset hounds in the suburbs of Minneapolis and stays busy with local politics and light (very light) jogging. His writing has previously been featured in Ama-Gi and Perchance to Dream.
Connect with Richard on Twitter at @rbwalsh_scifi.
For more information about how to support the Agorist Writers’ Workshop or contributing authors, please visit:
www.agoristwritersworkshop.com
www.seamustripp.com
www.verygoodbooks.com
www.penelopepress.com
https://blog.christopherburg.com/
Table of Contents
Transponder
Red Lake
ThoughtWire
The Transgressors
The Peacekeepers
Special delivery
Utopian Convergence
The garden and the market
Anarchy Rising: The Clarion Call, Vol 1 (Volume 1) Page 12
