Ruth Ann Minton [01]

    The air in the Infocation arboretum was the freshest in the world. Ruth Ann was sure of it. Ruth had personally designed the arboretum and she had arranged it to look exactly like the picture of the Garden of Eden that she had in her mind. She looked back through the plastiglass into the conference room to make sure that the new bid for BMI Relations hadn't come in yet. There was no commotion so she took a deep breath and tried to relax. She began eating a fig and gave a disdainful look at the apple tree nearby; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that no one was allowed to eat from.

    Ruth Minton could not have been any more proud of her only son. Robert had remained the perfect Christian boy, and as reward for his purity he had become president of the entire planet and his corporation, Infocation, had become the biggest and most influential corporation in the world.

    Ruth had married Robert's father in the 1990s. She had let the man defile her once a week for three months until she became pregnant and then never again. She hated men. HATED them. And hated this vulgar thing they wanted to do with her. She had to lay still like a stone and send her mind to a different place while Robert's father grunted, groaned and sweated on her while he did his business. It only took a few minutes, but to her, those few minutes must surely be very similar to the eternal torment of Hell that awaits sinners beneath the Earth. After she became pregnant the man still tried to touch her. He was insistent and and tried to use their marriage to guilt her her into touching him. And he would insist on touching her no matter how she recoiled from his touch and so one day he just suddenly and mysteriously died and Ruth inherited all of his money and she didn't have to worry about him touching her any more.

    She raised her son in the image of Christ. She sometimes thought that he was the return of Christ on this Earth. He was delivering humanity from evil. He was sending the sinners to Hell where they belonged and delivering the rest back to the churches from which they had strayed.

    She stopped to admire herself in the window on the way back into the conference room. She had a head that was shaped like a squash and as wrinkled as a prune. She had black horn rimmed glasses rather than having corrective eye surgery. No one, including her son, enjoyed looking at her, but she had the kind of vanity that came from pride in who she was, and in her own mind, being the mother of such a man made her beautiful.

    She sat down next to her son around a conference table and saw that Infocation had in fact entered another bid while she was in the arboretum. She controlled her face and tried not to show her chagrin at the fact that no one deemed it important to go retrieve her for the next bid. She glared at the other directors on the board of directors and took satisfaction in her superiority over them. Their function was to sit at the table and watch their wealth increase with the Infocation stock price and validate her son with their silent reverence. She, on the other hand, was allowed to speak.

    $67,500 was a staggering bid. ExxoMo's initial bid of $51,000 per share was already more than BMI Relations was worth. It was, in fact, intended to be so much more than the corporation was worth as to scare off other prospective bidders. Infocation's counter offer of $53,800 shook the whole world and sent shockwaves through the financial markets. All around the world Relations class people were suddenly scrambling to figure out what was so special about BMI Relations.

    The Relations industry was one of the very few industries that was not run by a duopoly or monopoly. In almost every industry there was a dominant corporation and sometimes there was a competitor. Competing corporations existed only to lead people to believe that there was a choice of brands to buy. Pepsi still existed for example, but hardly anyone ever bought any, its only function was to remind people that they had a choice. A choice that no one ever exercised because it was seen as suspicious not to buy Coca-Cola products and people would start watching you to see if you were miseducated. The people knew better than to even appear miseducated.

    The Relations industry was different. There were hundreds of Relations corporations and dozens of them were dominant. BMI Relations was a very old, very venerable, well established Relations firm that would add much to any corporation that could acquire it, but why such a high valuation. Why were the two biggest corporations vying for this Relations corporation when they both already had their own impressive Relations subsidiaries. ExxoMo already owned Omnicom and Infocation already owned Rubicam.


Robert J. Minton [02]

    "How high do you think Hannigan will be willing to go?" Ruth asked of her son in order to break the tense silence. The bidding war seemed to break out suddenly and the amount of money being thrown around was exciting but a bit disconcerting.

    "His next bid will be his last. And he will submit it very fast to try to intimidate us. He's out of ammunition. He'll bid $68,000. That's all he's got, but he'll bid it quickly to make us think that he's willing to keep going."

    "So you think our next bid will win?"

    "Mother, there will be no more bidding from us. I have no need for BMI Relations and I CERTAINLY don't want to pay $68,000 a share for it."

    A new bid came in from ExxoMo. The new bid was $69,000. Robert Minton smiled and then started laughing.

    "Game over," he sneered.

    "So, we never wanted BMI?" his mother asked, unembarrassed about her confusion.

    "It is a great asset, but the shares are not even worth $46,000 properly valued."

    His mother continued to look confused.

    "There are other acquisitions I WOULD like to make soon and ExxoMo was the only corporation strong enough to challenge for them. Now ExxoMo can chew on its overpriced purchase for a while. They're out of my hair." Minton submitted a formal statement to the financials that stated he was done bidding. The Infocation stock prise rose a bit, the ExxoMo stock price dropped sharply and the BMI stock price floated ever so slightly above $69,000 per share. Mr. Minton was very satisfied with himself.

    He got up from the table and ventured out to the arboretum. He marveled at his own ability to shape the world. The arboretum was a perfect example. North American soil was too toxic for vegetation to grow. Most of North America was barren except for indoor farms that used imported soil. But here in downtown Manhattan he had a vast and flourishing forest inside of a building.


Jeremy DelRio [01]

    Thick black fertile soil; Jeremy DelRio had his hands in plenty of it as a farm boy in Iowa. After a lifetime of being a soldier he was now back where he belonged; with his hands in the soil.

    September 11, 2001 he had been a little boy when there had been a major terrorist attack on New York City. He got home from school that day to find his parents watching television. That was rare. They were usually working in the fields until dusk. He sat down with them and watched the planes crash into the buildings over and over again. He was too young to understand exactly what was going on but he understood that it made his mother cry. His parents were Mexican immigrants, and they deeply loved America. There was so much senseless death that day, and seeing it over again and again magnified the gravity of it all.

    In the weeks that followed his teachers explained it to him in their own limited way. In the months that followed president George W. Bush initiated the war on terror. A war without end. Jeremy was too young to serve, but he wasn't too young to learn to hate the terrorists. As he grew into a young man he had a reoccurring feeling that someday he would get his chance to fight the terrorists.

    The sun was going to go down soon. Farming was very meditative work. And while his body dripped sweat into the hand tilled rows he would normally take care not to let his mind wander too far from the hidden paradise he had found or the younger ladies whose company he so enjoyed at the commune village. But today, try as he might, his thoughts kept wandering back to Holy War I.

    World War I was known as the Great War until World War II came along. Then it got renamed World War I after the fact. Similarly, Holy War I had been seen as a continuation of the War on Terror until Holy War II came along. Then it was renamed.

    In 2012, a wealthy but virtually unknown businessman, Sean Hannigan, became the president of the United States running as a "Libertarian Republican". The rest of the world felt like it had had enough of the United States' Republican party and its presidents. Violence began to break out around the world. When Pat Robertson was assassinated in 2013 a full fledged Holy War broke out and Jeremy was just old enough to go from JROTC to the Army.

    The objective of the 1st holy war was simple. Kill Muslims. And Jeremy had killed a LOT of them. He'd never felt particularly religious, but as he served in the army, surrounded by Christians, he was swept up in their unanimity of ideas. It was easy to get swept into. Every man who wore a turban and every woman who wore a burka, every human who knelt five times a day to pray to Allah wanted to fly a plane into a building or bomb families in Israel. Holy War I was not just the bloodiest conflict in human history, it was more than ten times bloodier than the next nearest competitor. Jeremy was in the invasion of both Mecca and Medina. Two unfathomable slaughters. The once beautiful city of Mecca was turned into a smoldering crater and all of the inhabitants of the surrounding area were hunted down and terminated without regard to age or infirmity.

    The American mainland remained fairly undamaged in the war. Much of the open U.S. highway system was bombed beyond usability --which wrecked havoc on the distribution of goods and staggered the U.S. economy-- but the cities remained relatively undamaged. A great many Americans died in Holy War I, but they died overseas and in American prisons. Many of the large urban cities in America were emptied of their poor and minority citizens. Many were drafted into the army and thrown onto the pile of bodies in the Holy War. The Pentagon had been used masterfully to get rid of threats to Corporatism both foreign and domestic. He knew of no other person besides himself who had served in the army from the beginning of the war to the end and through the years of post war operations. He had no clue how he had managed to survive the whole thing. He had come to believe that he was trapped in the army until he met death in combat. The army had promised him numerous times that he could go home and then reneged on its promise. And then one day, just like that, he was flown home and released back into the public.

    He didn't speak to anyone. He worked a job and kept to himself and hoped that it was all over for good. He had come to hate war. But it was far from over. Americans were a changed people. A blood-lusting, theocratic nightmare. He had thought that president McNeeley might actually succeed in bringing about peace. Instead he presided over the beginnings of Holy War II.

    When Holy War II broke out he couldn't figure out what side he was on. He had never had what you would call an unshakable faith in Jesus Christ. Holy War II was as much a civil war as it was a holy war. Much of it was American vs. American. Holy War I had largely missed the United States, but Holy War II, the war against atheists, pagans, gays, sexual deviants, abortionists and all other enemies of God happened house to house in American communities while it was happening around the globe.

    It was called the war that ended all wars. Right after Holy War II, President Minton presided over the dissolution of national boarders and brought about the age of the Reorganization. The people were so happy to have an end to War that they gladly gave up what had been their rights and embraced the "new ways."

    But not Jeremy DelRio. Something about all he had seen had convinced him that there was no God. And something about having been away from America for so long during the first Holy War made him more aware of the changes, and more able to perceive all of the subtle brainwashing that was going on. People didn't notice it when it happened little by little day after day, but America was a different place after Holy War I than it had been before. It was much more filled with hatred and the American people had a view of the war and the world overseas that did not match the reality he had seen. The war had been so sanitized and distorted. Claims had been made that the enemy was doing things that they were, in fact, rarely doing. And he had shot children, little boys and girls, with his own hands, and yet the official version of the story flatly denied that anything of the sort had gone on. The biggest insult to reality were the death tolls. They were so egregiously underreported that he began to feel that he had been duped. He wondered if he had been the victim of propaganda all along and had arrived at his own hatred through the same carefully crafted illusions that the rest of his country had been led to believe in. And if that was the case then how many men, women and children had he murdered that did not ever intend to fly a plane into anything or bomb anyone?

    In the final analysis, he knew only that he was now an Atheist, and America was no place for Atheists; especially not San Fransisco. Irony of ironies was that the conclusion of Holy War II, the war to end all wars, was followed closely by the War on Miseducation. But the people were assured that the War on Miseducation wasn't technically a "war". People were willing to accept a war where only millions of people died every day. Compared to the "real" wars that they were used to, where tens of millions of people died every day, it kind of felt like peace.

    Jeremy had found a job as a longshoreman in San Fransisco and it was rather obvious that something bad was about to happen to San Fransisco, so he and a coworker faked their own deaths and made their way to New Zealand. They had heard there was a resistance to 1WG there. New Zealand had since fallen and been claimed by 1WG, but there were still rebels fighting to regain its independence. And Jeremy was glad to be a farmer feeding them rather than a soldier fighting along side of them. He was too old now to do any more soldiering.

    All of the soil in North America had become too toxic to grow anything and farming was now illegal anyway. He would never have imagined that planting an assortment of vegetables could become such an act of defiance. But it had. He wasn't very confident that he and the New Zealand rebels had much chance of succeeding or even surviving, but while they drew breath he would see to it that they were well fed and his old longshoreman buddy Eric Davis would see to it that they were well informed and well entertained.


Brenna McKinna [01]

    Brenna had finally started to show. As happy as she was about becoming a mother, it was nowhere near as happy as her mom was about becoming a grandmother.

    She looked down and rubbed her belly and hoped that it was Jeremy's. Not that her New Zealand boyfriends weren't perfectly nice, but she liked the American. He was older and more worldly, serious, but with a wry sense of humor that she had finally come to be able to interpret. Plus, there was just something about his accent that sent a charge through her. She couldn't wait to see him at the alcove at sundown, and nestle in close between him and Thalia and Nester or whoever else was cuddling in their pile tonight.

    In a few more weeks, after her belly stuck out a bit more, the community would no longer permit her to be a scout. She would have to trade her machine gun and binoculars for something much more mundane and stick close to the commune. Brenna was young and didn't fully appreciate what they were up against. New Zealand, and the resistance in particular, needed to be repopulated. And she was doing her part. She fully expected that her baby would grow up to fight for the resistance.


Eric Davis [01]

    Eric Davis was in his element. He loved to entertain. He had been an entertainer once, ages ago. He loved to talk and he loved to listen. He had heard much, studied much; so when he spoke, it was with wisdom. And everyone loved to listen. He was old; real old. And as the sun was going down and the commune had done what needed doing in the daylight, all of the various generations gathered around to listen to him recount history. Eric had a great memory and they trusted his accounts of the past above any other they had access to.

    The islands of New Zealand were vastly different from what had become of the rest of the world, and their small isolated commune was especially different. As old and gray Eric Davis readied himself to speak, he looked out at his audience and there were many young men and women cuddled together and lovingly touching one another. There were parents huddled with their children. There was no fire, fire would draw too much attention. Instead they had a solar battery that collected energy during the day and gave off light into the evening. In the evening they would drag it into an alcove to make the light less visible from above. It didn't give off much heat, but that just meant the people needed to huddle closer together. In their imaginations the glowing white light was almost like a fire. And Eric Davis' dark brown wrinkled face with bright white eyes seemed just like the face of a grandfather to the entire pale faced clan.

    New Zealand's struggle for independence benefited from the fact that there was no corporation that had a high priority for bringing it fully back into the fold of 1WG. 1WG was a corporatocracy. No specific corporation had a financial interest in addressing the New Zealand problem and so each corporation left it for other corporations to worry about. So the subjugation of New Zealand was half-hearted and poorly coordinated. It was administered, for the most part, by local New Zealanders being paid enormous sums of money to try to bring the islands under control. On at least two occasions the rebels had petitioned for corporate money and received money that was intended to be used against them. That coupled with a proximity to a thriving black market in Australia had really helped their resistance get off to a good start.

    Old Eric Davis pursed his lips to speak and all of the children hushed hoping to learn something new about North American history. He told them about the first nations. The Native people who had crossed over into the Americas from Siberia. He told them about the European explorers who came to the Americas for riches, and about their arrogance and intolerance for people who were different. He spoke about the Genocides that started with the Arawak Indians. He spoke of their wars against one another and then their wars for independence from the countries they'd come from. On into the night he spoke passionately about the rise of the corporate era: The industrial age, the railroad robber barons, the insensate greed of the rising aristocracy. He spoke of slavery and indentured servitude and the rise of racism and hypocrisy. He recounted the World Wars and spoke to the ways in which the corporations used the cold war and the threat of communism to turn people against the ideas of sharing, compassionate cooperation and communities based on human needs.

    Then he began dissecting the 1WG account of history. He gave them his opinion of the much revered president Ronald W. Reagan and the rise in self-interested and deregulated corporatism and unchecked militarism that accompanied his administration. He described the two-party electoral process that was used to trick the people into believing they had a "democracy" with a freedom of choice. Ultimately the corporations managed to successfully buy off almost all of the politicians, Democrat and Republican, and used the resulting confusion to systematically and steadily rewrite all of the laws in their favor.

    He spoke about the September 11th tragedy and the way it was used to start a War on Terror and cede more power to the government and corporations. He spoke about the genocide in Africa with the coordinated disease, starvation and tribal warfare campaigns. And then he promised to tell them about the holy wars the next evening. They had heard many of his histories before, but with each hearing they were better able to remember, and they always paid particularly close attention when he spoke of the Holy Wars and all of the death and destruction from man's inhumanity to man.


Assata Lee [01]

    "Are you David Cohen?" asked FSPCA officer Assata Lee.

    "Yes I am. What can I do for you."

    "Assata Lee. I'm with the Food Supply PCA. We've received information about illegal farming on Ray Ban land under your management here in Gemilut Chasadim."

    "Someone farming? Here? Who?"

    "Rafiq Ayyubi. Ghost Status for 33 days. Sign this search order for me."

    "No problem. Good hunting."

    About the only thing that Assata Lee liked was flying. Her bright yellow Ford Fly with custom Smith & Wesson machine guns was the only thing in this world that she truly loved. She hated people. Including herself. And she had a special hatred for ghosts. Ghosts were people who had gone for more than 24 hours without making a purchase or financial transaction. It was now mandatory that all citizens had to buy something or give their thumb print on a monetary transaction of some sort once every 24 hours so that the whereabouts of every citizen could always be known.

    Whoever Rafiq Ayyubi was, he had not made such a transaction in 33 days. He was clearly miseducated and deserved a painful death. What's more, he was purportedly farming and had grown his own food to eat and so his painful death, necessarily, should happen slowly.

    With the Reorganization, private land ownership by individuals was outlawed. David Cohen no longer directly owned the land that Ms. Lee flew over. He was allowed to keep it by working out an arrangement with Ray Ban sunglasses that effectively made him the manager of the area of land he formerly owned in Gemilut Chasadim. The Ray Ban factory took up a tiny amount of land area compared to the expanse that was demarcated as their property. There would be a lot of searching to do. Normally the idea of a challenging hunt through unknown terrain would thrill her, but she hated the desert. The sand was punishing to her shiny, meticulously-maintained, bright yellow Ford Fly. Harsh winds would blow sand into the engines and into her face forcing her to go maddeningly slow.

    She just hated being here in Zone 8. As she roared some 30 feet above the desert floor it was easier than usual to psych herself up for the inevitable violence.

    Normally, she was assigned to Zone 7, Africa. She worked for ConAgra in the FSPCA (Food Supply Private Corporate Army). Her function was to hunt down people farming on ConAgra land and kill them. And all of eastern Africa was ConAgra land. It disgusted her that people would try to subvert the system by growing their own food rather than eating the food that the corporations supplied to them. Every time she hunted down a filthy, primitive tribal farmer she hoped they were the last one on Earth. But there always seemed to be more. But then again she was being assigned to Zone 7 more and more so maybe the FSPCA really did have the illegal farming problem almost solved.

    Flying above the treetops in Africa was the closest thing to joy that she would allow herself to know. Northern Africa had been converted from mostly desert into mostly concrete. Now that there was officially no such thing as France, Spain or Italy, all tourism had been moved to northern Africa. Cairo was the new Paris. It was convenient because it also allowed the Relations class to delude themselves into believing that there was still a place in the world for black people. Many Ethiopian Christians had been imported after all of the Muslims were killed in the holy wars. Relations class tourists expected to see black people and they were happy to see the smiling, happy faces of dark black Christians when they vacationed in Africa. It allowed them to believe their own lies.

    The truth was more grim than anyone wanted to be bothered with. The truth: billions who had been killed by the HIV virus and the AIDS pandemic. The truth: hundreds of millions more who had been killed in the Holy Wars. The truth: Hundreds of millions who had starved to death over the decades unable to find a way out of the trap of debt servicing that had been devised for them by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The truth: indigenous Africans had been in the way of the resources that the corporations wanted to get their hands on for more than a century and before that they had been one of the resources. And now, wayward sons and daughters of Africa, centuries removed, like Assata Lee, were grateful for the opportunity to exterminate the last of their ancestors on behalf of their corporate sponsors.

    Assata loved ConAgra. She loved the Ford Fly that they provided for her, she loved the petty privileges she was entitled to (any fruit she flew by she was permitted to pick and eat), she loved the ConAgra church that was delivering her from sin, and she loved making more than laboring wage. Assata hated everything else. She hated black people, including herself, and especially the tribals. She had never known her mother, but she knew that she hated the woman. She blamed her mother for being black, and according to rumor she was unashamedly black. She wasn't sure how well she could trust the memory but she thought she had even heard it suggested by whispering adults that her mother had been a Muslim. True or not, her mother was clearly a sinner, and a miseducated sinner at that. The name Assata was given to her in order to honor one of the most miseducated women in history. An unchristian, insubordinate, miseducated, blasphemous heretic. She was glad not to have ever met any woman who could be so wicked as to curse their daughter with a name like Assata.


Elizabeth Cohen [02]

    "CRAIG VENATRE DEAD AT 57"

    As the cover of the Wall Street Journal morphed into view Liz Cohen gasped. The subheading said that he died in a plane crash. That seemed like such a senseless thing to have happen.

    Liz had ordered a copy of the Wall Street Journal just to read about how wealthy she had become in the last 24 hours. The new share price of BMI Relations would give her more money than she could come up with ideas for.

    Even among the upper echelon of Relations class employees, people rarely switched corporations. It was no longer in the corporations' best interests to hire away one another's personnel. But sometimes, as in the case of Liz Cohen, the personnel was talented enough to warrant an exception. Rubicam had hired Ms. Cohen away from Omnicom and they payed her handsomely to make the switch. She had no living expenses. She lived in a building --the entire building-- owned by Rubicam Relations and they charged her no rent. Making money had become somewhat meaningless for Liz Cohen, but she still liked to check her wealth for score keeping purposes. But what really kept her coming to work every day was the opportunity to shape the world. She felt certain that she lived for a higher purpose. That one day she would be entrusted with even greater power to keep the world functioning as it should.

    She worked for the president of the world. She was employed by a subsidiary of the corporation, Infocation, that bought and sold knowledge. To a large extent, they determined reality; what it was and what it wasn't. She was a part of the elite few who needed to do the thinking for the masses to keep them from the chaos that would ensue if they were ever left to do their own thinking for themselves.

    Still, Craig Venatre had been wealthier than she. He had been powerful and had been shaping reality. He was the CEO of Oncologix Inc. He was a brilliant scientific mind that had created and licensed most of Pfizer's cancer drugs. Just like that, he was now dead. Seemed such a wasteful shame that Establishment class people ever had to die at all.


Sean J. Hannigan [02]

    "Accidental plane crash my ASS!," he mumbled under his breath as he rocked back and forth in an isolated leather chair near the front of his private jet. He held in his hand a paper copy of the Wall Street Journal and he felt like he recognized the work of his former mentor, Dale Berger.

    His best guess was that it was just a coincidence that Craig Venatre had been taken out on this day, but it didn't help ease his anxiety any. Sean Hannigan had learned to deal with his fear of flying long ago, but today it was threatening to overwhelm him again. When he arrived in New York City he had thought there were only two ways his trip could go: he would acquire BMI Relations and it would be a good trip or he would fail to and it would be a lousy trip. Instead he had succeeded in acquiring BMI and it had been an absolutely awful trip.

    He had paid too much for BMI; much too much. Sharon was going to be furious. He was afraid to face her. The closer his plane got to George W. Bush airport outside of Dallas, the more he wished his plane actually would crash.

    It was impossible to know who was or wasn't in DarqueOps, but two people that he knew for sure were DarqueOps agents were his wife, Sharon, and his former boss, Dale Berger. Mr. Hannigan had lived to be quite old by the standards of the day, but Mr. Berger was positively ancient. Almost nobody lived into their eighties anymore. But Mr. Berger was still alive, still the CEO of the General Broadcasting Corporation --formerly the broadcasting division of General Electric-- and, apparently, still killing people in plane crashes.

    Mr. Berger had always liked to brag and there were so few people that he could brag to. Back when Sean had been a vice president at General Electric, Mr. Berger used to invite him and Sharon over to his house for dinner and allude to several mysterious plane crashes in a way that came just shy of explicitly taking credit for them. John F. Kennedy Jr., Mel Carnahan, Paul Wellstone, Michael Moore and Cynthia McKinney had all been killed in unfortunate plane accidents immediately before they were about to do something that threatened corporate interests. And those were just the plane crashes that happened BEFORE the establishment of DarqueOps. Mr. Berger had been a part of a self-appointed oligarchy that was already doing DarqueOps type work well before DarqueOps was established.

    The Hannigan private plane shook violently again from more turbulence. It jarred him back out of his deep thoughts and made him aware of the newspaper once more. On the front page there was a prayer square with an inspirational prayer from Robert J. Minton. He hated the man. He was now convinced that the turbulence was his doing. The fog could have been coincidence, but there had been too much bad weather. It seemed to be following him. Minton was using the weather net to unsettle him. Apparently, manipulating him into overpaying for BMI wasn't enough for the sadistic bastard. The prayer square, the plane crash, the BMI stock price, everything on the front cover of the paper seemed to be there just to upset him. He threw it on the floor of the plane in disgust and immediately Karen Krystol had an ESPCA officer retrieve it and fold it neatly. Her insufficient attempt to restrain her look of disapproval and the underlying disrespect he perceived in her was bringing him to the brink. His face contorted involuntarily as he daydreamed about choking her and throwing her off the plane.


Hotcha [01]

    Life sucked. Not even the trees could bring her joy any more. She was tired of seeing the same trees over and over again. She was no longer happy to live in this vast mansion with its pretentiously landscaped arboretum. She wished the real trees could grow in real dirt outside in the real air. But that was impossible now. Here in the heart of Texas, deep in the middle of Zone 3, no vegetation grew outside. The soil was lethal.

    Hotcha was in her thirties now. She had grown up in east L.A. in a concrete jungle, but even that had had grass and trees. And her father's sprawling estate had spoiled her. She had gotten in the habit of running away from home and camping out on his property. As long as she remained out on the edge of the estate, her father Roger Kinney, a marketer of Hollywood movies, didn't seem to mind. And as long as her father sent her mother, his former housekeeper, money to keep their illegitimate child a secret her mother didn't much care what she did either.

    As soon as she had reached the age where she could figure out how to get to her father's house, she fell into a routine of stealing a bunch of books from the library and skipping school for weeks at a time while she traveled the woods on her father's land. She would stick her nose in a book and dip her toes in the stream and lose herself. She could feed herself by living off the land. One of her favorite books had been Clan of the Cave Bear and she was trying to become as self-sufficient as the main character, Ayla, had been.

    Sometimes her father would wander out and look for her. If she felt like being found, which was more often than not, he would find her. Her father was a nice man; for an adulterer. Hotcha, who's real name was Giselle, always wished she had been one of her father's "real" children. Sometimes she wandered near the house and observed them even though she wasn't supposed to. Her father was great with them just like he was great with her. The difference was they could be with him all the time and she would share a campfire singalong or a meal from the house a couple times a month.

    She missed him terribly. Everything she was, was because of him. He had financed her singing career in the beginning. He had taught her to play the guitar and how to "cut loose" when she sang. He was her audience when she would pretend to be a big star up on a stage.

    She should have been more careful what she wished for. She was probably the biggest star in the world now. What good had it done her? For all her fame she was still an ex-president's whore trapped in a diaramma with 46 overly familiar trees and one fake stream with no fish in it. She had Sean Hannigan's immense library at her disposal but it had become too tedious looking through the hodge podge of books to find a good one. Her constant, habitual C9 use made reading very difficult anyway. She couldn't even figure out why she came into the arboretum anymore anyway. To torture herself? She had sat in every nook of every tree and every spot along the stream. The stream seemed like it had been designed by someone that didn't really know what the vegetation around a stream was supposed to look like.

    She didn't want to think about memories of trees and stream beds any more. She took a C9 and the world became more vivid and less painful. Silly thoughts and sensations forced their way into her brain and she giggled.

    There was a soft tone which rang through the air that signaled that either Sean Hannigan or Sharon Shafer had just gotten home. She was pretty sure that Sharon had gotten home a long while ago so it was probably the former president. She hoped that the two of them would keep one another occupied and that neither would come looking to entertain themselves with her.


Xiang Xu [01]

    It takes a very large boat to house almost 700 Chinese expatriots. An even bigger boat to house 120 Phillipeano Muslims in addition to 700 Chinese expatriots. fortunately for Xiang Xu, he had just such a boat.

    He hadn't been planning to house the 120 Muslims. The men, women and children from the mainland he had been planning to house for so long that he could barely remember a time when he wasn't. And now they had been at sea for nearly three years. A completely self-sufficient community that seemed huge from the top deck, but very tiny compared to the vast Pacific Ocean.

    Xu was on the top deck with the laundry detail. He was the leader in most respects but in many ways he was a follower of leaders more than a leader of followers. Xu encouraged everyone to participate in decision making and lend their various expertises. And menial tasks like laundry were performed by all, even the owner of the enormous vessel.

    He enjoyed the work. It was nice meditative work. He became lost in thought and didn't realize that he had an audience. His wife, Mi Mei, was enjoying an opportunity to watch his shirtless form sweating over laundry on the hot upper deck. As a member of the Taiwanese traditional upper class she and Xu should have been enemies. But they were too like minded for that. They had met overseas when they were both completing their education in France. They fell in love just before the world fell apart.

    Holy War I had been fought against the Muslims and most of it had taken place in the Middle East. It had been a war for oil resources and a war to satisfy the bloodthirsty and vengeance-minded among the Christians. But after Holy War I people were tired of war. It took a long time for them to get over their war weariness. And Holy War I had not achieved its objective. The United States economy was still weak. It's foreign debt --Treasury Bonds and such-- was still increasingly owned by China and the eastern pacific countries. In short, America had been maxing out its credit card for decades and there was a real concern that China was going to come and attempt to collect at some point.

    The United States attacked China with all of her most subtle weapons. It began to addict the Chinese to all of the trappings of capitalism. It lobbied on the international stage against China's religious repression and when the Chinese government finally relented and allowed religious freedom, the U.S. missionaries swarmed in and started converting all of the impoverished Chinese to Christendom. China became a nation pulled in many different directions all at once. If Holy War II had been a war against an external enemy China would have faired well in it. But the Holy War II that China found itself in was China vs. China. It's armies split into Christian and atheist factions and the Buddhists fought them both. The government was still largely comprised of traditional atheists but the Christian Chinese Armies assassinated much of government when it attacked Beijing in the beginning of the war. The war was... messy.

    Xiang Xu had seen the writing on the wall long ago. He had taken his wealth and invested it all into the creation of an isolated community. And when the community started running out of places to hide on the mainland, they brainstormed the idea to retreat into the sea. It took a long time to design and build their floating city but eventually it was built. And so here they were.

    Me Mei crept up behind Xu and squeezed him. She pulled him away from his laundry work and over to the rail and they looked out at the lower decks. They saw children running, playing and learning in impromptu classes. They saw engineers working to maintain the solar energy collectors on the main deck. They saw Muslims praying in two large groups. They saw the fishers collecting food from the sea, and cooks desalinizing water for meal preparation. They saw lovers relaxing and enjoying easy conversation. In short, they saw life as they felt it should be. They shared a kiss and took a break from doing laundry.


Hotcha [02]

    There was a commotion coming from the master bedroom. Hotcha pulled out her i2 and looked up the ident info for the house. She had troubles working the i2 controls when she was high but after several attempts she figured it out. There were only the three of them in the house. Her Relations team and all of the other house staff were in separate houses situated around the mansion so she felt safe to travel. She slipped into the enormous library right next to the master bedroom. The library was a gigantic room that housed all kinds of books alphabetized strictly by author and completely uncategorized. The Hannigan-Shafer household had little idea of what they had in their library, they had such a library simply because they could.

    After the reorganization one needed a license to own a book. Too many books contained miseducation. Most people feared books and were glad to be rid of them. If one wasn't in the relations class, they stood little chance of obtaining a license to own a book or even learning to read. Those laborers who knew how to read were getting old and beginning to die or forgetting how due to the wash of chemicals in their brains. Hotcha's C9 habit made it very difficult to read, but not nearly so difficult as the C5 that many laborers were on. In another generation or two reading would truly be the exclusive privilege of the Relations class.

    Hotcha tip-toed over to the wall next to the master bedroom. Sean Hannigan had just arrived home and Sharon was screaming at him. Hotcha was one of the few upper Relations class people that hadn't heard about BMI Relations having been bought by ExxoMo, but she was learning all about it now by pressing her ear against the library wall.

    Mr. Hannigan was being hit; maybe even whipped. Not that that was anything new. And then as he begged for mercy the exchange became carnal. Mr. Hannigan was demeaned, humiliated and raped. And that wasn't anything new either. But there was a severity to it that Hotcha had never heard before. Usually when they got like this Hotcha couldn't tell if the ex-president liked it or not. This time he was clearly in pain and there was a distinct edge of fear to his plaintive appeals.

    And it got worse. It sounded brutal, hateful. Hotcha never liked Sharon Shafer much. She was cold, cruel and unpredictable. She looked at people with absolute apathy, and Hotcha suspected that she had killed a great many people without caring the least little bit. It almost sounded like Sharon was about to kill Mr. Hannigan. Not that that would have been so bad. Life at the mansion had its comforts, but she was ready for a change.

    At long last the violence seemed to stop. Hotcha heard Sharon leave. She remained in the library listening at the wall wondering what state Sean Hannigan was in but knowing better than to go and check. Finally she heard him stirring. She started to tip-toe out of the room and wished it was possible to move through the library more quietly. Then she heard footsteps in the corridor. They were headed toward the library. There weren't many other places to go in this direction besides the library and the arboretum. Hannigan rarely ever bothered with the arboretum. She held her breath and tried to remain perfectly silent and still


Jonas Clark [01]

    Madison, Wisconsin was burning. Jonas Clark was burning it. That was his job. He was good at it. He liked to pretend that he was a robot as he marched toward the center of the city in his flame gear. He took mechanical strides and swiveled his neck and inclined his head to take in the view of the wall of flame from the ring of fire that was working its way inward toward the heart of Madison.

    The men and women under his command in the Incendiary Unit of the ISPCA performed their duties as though they were of one mind. Their destruction of San Fransisco was nearly flawless, but now they'd had four more years to train. Most were conscripts from the Infocation or Microsoft PCAs, but Jonas Clark had been an unlikely recruit who had come over from the U.S. Army without ever having served in a Private Corporate Army. He had been second in command for the burning of San Fransisco but shortly after that operation Commander Franks died of lung cancer. Now Jonas was in charge of sending the irredeemably miseducated cities back to Hell with hellfire.

    He burned cities like he was born to it. And he was. He was not entirely aware of it, but he had come from a long line of fire starters in the U.S. Armed forces. He knew that he came from a family with a long line of military service. He knew his father had been a part of an Incendiary Squadron that burned much of northern Africa in Holy War I. But he was unaware that his grandfather had burned the homes of the Panamanian people in El Chorillo in 1989 or that his great grandfather had burned people in Vietnamese villages in 1971 and 1972.

    Emotionlessly he shot high pressure liquid flame at people running through the streets looking for a way to escape. They were as wounded livestock to him. Needing to be put out of their misery as quickly as possible. It had not escaped him that in a city this size there would undoubtedly be many properly educated good Christian citizens who would have to die needlessly. It could not be avoided. All known Relations class people and unquestionable Christian laborers had been spirited away at dusk before the burning began. Any who were attempting to leave the city on flying vehicles were permitted to leave the city limits, but gathered for debriefing and confirmation. It was assumed that anyone who could afford a flying vehicle was Relations class and mistakenly left behind. Everyone else was burned or shot where they stood.

    Every now and then an explosion could be heard as a missile would be fired into any structure that appeared to house a large number of people. Jonas did not take joy in the death and destruction; but nor did he feel sorrow. This city had been so fiercely miseducated that it was impossible to tell who was who. The miseducated here had become hardened. They were too good at impersonating good Christians and upstanding laborers. Interrogations were finding miseducation networks that were still teaching reading and writing and trafficking in contraband literature. Very dangerous ideas were floating around in the underbelly of this city and its complete demolition was an unavoidable last resort.

    After 12 hours, Madison was a smoldering crater in the Earth. Unlike San Fransisco, it would not be rebuilt. It would be written out of history and entertainment and it would soon be considered miseducation for anyone anywhere to speak of it. People who had had relatives there would simply forget about them and hope --to themselves-- that theirs had not been the miseducated ones so that they might meet again in the kingdom of Heaven. There were similar incinerations in the planning stages for the cities of Ithica, New York; portions of Portland, Oregon; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Calgary, Alberta; Burlington, Vermont and Austin, Texas. The world needed to be made safe from the evil that hid within these cities just as it had been made safe from the city that had been Madison.


Hotcha [03]

    "You like to listen to people having sex?" Hannigan screamed as he burst through the door to the library. He looked battered, bruised and not of his right mind. His thin wisps of hair atop his head flew wildly about and the flames of madness burned deep in his eyes.

    "So you like to people having sex, eh?," he repeated furiously as he strode across the expansive room. As he got closer Hotcha was able to see that his shirt and upper body were wet and as he got even closer she realized that he had been urinated on.

    There was an awful smell to him. Magnified by her drug induced haze. Mr. Hannigan seemed to be at the center of a swarm of flies which were now crawling all over her. It didn't make sense that they could be real but as far as she could tell they were real. She couldn't make them go away.

    "You like to listen to people having sex?!?," he demanded of her, ripping at her clothes.

    "Yes daddy," she replied. She tried to help him by disrobing herself. Her only thought was that she hoped this would be over quickly.

    Until he punched her in the face.

    That had never happened before. He had slapped her and choked her during sex, and she hated it, but now, for the first time, she felt like her life was endangered. And even though she had mixed feelings about whether she wanted to live or die, she was quite certain that she did not want to be killed by Sean Hannigan. She stood there in stunned disbelief. Her hesitation cost her. Harder and faster than a man his age ought to be able, he had punched her in the stomach. She doubled over in pain and he grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and shoved her to the ground.

    "GET NAKED! GET NAKED!" he kept shouting.

    "Yes daddy," came her reply. Women had called their lovers papi in the East L.A. neighborhood where she was born. But something about the way Mr. Hannigan liked to be called 'daddy' was very, very different. She had always found it disturbing, and now she found it frightening.

    Through the pain she attempted to disrobe but it wasn't fast enough to satisfy him. That's when the kicking began. She found herself in the fetal position trying to defend herself from the footfalls landing on her ribs and back. There were two red demons with horse feet helping him to kick her and they were engulfed in flames. She kept expecting the rest of the library to catch fire but the fire appeared to adhere to the bodies of the demons.

    She felt her clothes being torn away. The ex-president was still yelling but his words seemed like a foreign language. A Devil language. She closed her eyes tightly but she could hear the ex-president manipulating himself. And then the raping began. The brutal, hateful and surreal taking of her body by Mr. Hannigan and his demons as they continued to punch at her seemed to go on and on for an eternity. Through the litany of unintelligible words of hostility she recognized a few. It was a question. "Does daddy make you cry?" It was at that point that she became aware of the fact that she had been crying and tried to stop.

    Then former president strained in release and his muscles tensed as he held himself perfectly still on top of her. She tried to remain perfectly silent and still. The demons had returned to Hell as had the flies. All that was left was Mr. Hannigan and his disgusting smell and his sweaty body hovering over her in the quiet of the immense library. And then he spit on her.

    He rose to his feet and stood over her drooling. As she glanced upward through her good eye the flames roared and danced around Mr. Hannigan's head and she tried to prepare herself for whatever was going to happen next. Every rib that had been kicked was still making itself aware to her. Every place Mr. Hannigan had touched still felt coated with slime. She could not make his face out clearly through the blurred vision and flames but she felt like she was in grave danger still. If she could have moved she would have run.

    Then Mr. Hannigan began crying. He lowered himself on the floor next to her and started stroking her hair gently. "Awww, look what daddy did," he sobbed to himself absently. "Daddy is sorry. He's so sorry," he repeated, rocking back and forth and stroking her hair with his fingers. He laid down in the fetal position next to her and they both cried quietly to themselves unable to move.

    They both laid there for hours wishing for death.


[next: The Boob Tube]

Buy this book!