Charles Kindriff [01]

    "Please stand."

    When the television gave you an order it was compulsory to follow it. And when the person on the telescreen was President Robert J. Minton, the words "please stand" were roughly equivalent to "Get your ass up right now!"

    Charles scrambled clumsily but determinedly out of his Spider and stood, with some difficulty, in between his Spider and the monitor. His legs were asleep and his balance was poor, but his resolve was firm. He had seen this commercial before, many times --but not recently-- and he had been waiting to see it again.

    "Hello. I'm President Robert J. Minton, and I would like you to take some time to take this vow with me." Charles put his hand on his heart and concentrated on getting all of the words right. "I am a believer in the Holy Bible. The Bible has instructed me very clearly as to how I might avoid the path that leads to temptation. I will not commit sins of the flesh. I will not give in to the Devil's desire to have me touch myself in sinful or indecent ways. I will not lay down with members of my own gender. I will not lay down with members of my opposing gender, except within the sanctified confines of Holy matrimony, and even then ONLY for the purposes of procreation. And if I have difficulty with my adherence to the Holy Bible's clear directive, I will go to a Pfizer store and buy a box of Pfizer NoStims. The safe and effective way to fight unholy urges."

    Charles had only just entered puberty. He didn't fully understand the vow he had taken, but he understood that he meant every word of his promise. And he was so grateful that the President was such a good man that he would take the time to help deliver him from temptation.

    He had spotted the change in the commercial. The 1WG flag that was waving behind President Minton had replaced the Nabisco logo with a Lay's logo. He made a mental note to get some potato chips next time he was at the store. It was the least he could do for the president.

    Charles had been doing his best to avoid impure thoughts. But sometimes a brief impure thought would pop into his head for just a moment before he cast it out. And what was worse, much worse, was that he sometimes had dreams about girls. Last week he'd had a dream where he married the little girl down the hall and they started to make a baby but then his mother suddenly came in and told him he didn't get married right and he wasn't really married. He awoke with a start, but it was too late. There was a mess on his Serta sheets that had come from his penis. He was so mortified and filled with self loathing. He had taken 4 Pfizer NoStims that day, but he had been waiting and waiting for the commercial to come on again. Somehow he felt that if he took some Pfizer NoStims directly after having seen the commercial he could be sure that he was taking them properly.

    He never wanted to touch himself or touch a woman until he was old. He HATED girls. He didn't want to think about them but somehow they had the power to force themselves upon his brain. Also, there were only 3 girls his age in the neighborhood that were laboring class anyway. He was not interested in unemployeds, not even in talking to them. They were filthy animals as far as he was concerned. And all 3 of the laboring girls were fat. He didn't like fat girls. He wanted to marry a woman that looked like Hotcha. He himself was very fat, but he didn't feel like that should matter.

    He felt very fortunate that he rarely ever saw girls. He would see them at church or when he went shopping. They were fat and they were sinful. He could just tell. He took a third Pfizer NoStim just to be safe, and crawled back into his Spider to continue watching tv in his underwear until it was time to go to work.


Laura Bramble [02]

    Laura Bramble was just getting off work. She felt like she was forgetting something. It was hard for her to think. The Pfizer Ups that she needed to take to make her stay awake at work also seemed to make it hard for her to think. Maybe even something about being awake for so long was, in and of itself, something that made it difficult to think; she couldn't be sure. There seemed to be a lot of things that made it hard to think. Everywhere she could go in her world, there was a continuous high pitched noise. It was omnipresent. It existed at work, at home and out on the street, and it, too, made it difficult to concentrate. She was sure that she had heard it explained one time why the noise was necessary, but she felt like she probably hated the noise just the same. She couldn't be positive, it was hard to concentrate long enough to arrive at certainty.

    Another effect of the Pfizer Ups myster drugs was that they made her want to work some more. She often felt, after working a 30 hour shift, that the only thing she wanted to do was continue working. But she knew better than to fall into that trap. She was obligated to go home and get some sleep so that she could work again soon.

    She stepped into the elevator and mechanically pressed the down button and listened to the commercials for each floor she passed. The third floor had a commercial that said "Floor 3 - McRonald's quad burgers are YUMMY!" and suddenly she remembered what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to take Mary to McRonald's. How could she be so stupid as to forget that?

    If the commercial on the elevator hadn't reminded her, she would have had plenty of other opportunities to remember. The lobby of the LovinCare had a McRonald's in it and the entire floor of the lobby was tiled with corporate logos, many of which were for McRonald's. The sidewalks in front of LovinCare were plastiglass and had logos underneath them. And then as she crossed the street she saw the McRonald's that was in the 1st floor of her apartment building, which was the McRonald's she would end up taking Mary to.

    Hannity Housing complex seemed like a very fine place to live. She was quite pleased with the selection of chain stores that she had to walk through to get to her house. She didn't think of them as chain stores, she thought of them simply as stores. All other kinds of stores had been made illegal during the Reorganization. Every store was now a corporate franchise store; which seemed quite a fine way for things to be.

    Mary screamed at her as she entered the house. The little girl was very, very upset that it had taken her mother so long to get home from work to take her to McRonald's. Laura apologized profusely and got her Wall-Mart purse and took Mary to McRonald's as fast as she could.

    Mary's eyes lit up as soon as she spied the big yellow M on the first floor of Hannity housing. It meant she was getting close to the one place that provided her with warmth and joy. She did not know it was an M or even what an M was used for. She assumed it was supposed to be a picture of Freedom Fries. The white letters that spelled out McRonald's had been removed from the logo decades ago. As had all words from all logos. People didn't feel deprived by not knowing how to read, it had become an antiquated skill that was no longer important for laborers or unemployeds.

    Laura ordered a McMac for Mary and two Quad-Burgers for herself. It was all they could afford. The total came to $13,550. Laura sighed as she approved the transaction. She had no idea how she had gotten so deep into debt. She was not very good at math. It just seemed that no matter how she tried to save money she could never get ahead. She felt like the only person that could not properly manage her finances.

    Most people felt like they were the only person who could not properly manage their finances. People generally did not speak to one another, and they especially did not speak to one another about their finances. They were too ashamed.

    Laura let Mary get their food out of the food dispenser. They quietly walked over to a booth and entered. All seating was in booths. Booths could seat four fairly thin people comfortably which meant that there were usually no more than three people to a booth. Booths were divided from one another by plastiglass so they were nearly sound proof and the same continuous high-pitched noise droned on both inside and outside of the booths. Having a conversation with your family in the booth was possible, but having a conversation with other families in the surrounding booths was near impossible. It would have been seen as suspicious behavior anyway.

    Laura and Mary dug into their meals of meat. They felt joy and remorse as they masticated the moist, pungent burgers. Joy because this was the best sensation their mundane lives knew and remorse because it was always over too soon and this time was going to be no different.

    All of a sudden they saw a Relations class person. And she was coming their way. She had short blonde hair and a very expensive looking suit. She looked very authoritative and almost masculine but with a very pretty face and a bright smile. Mary had never seen a Relations class person in person; only on tv. Laura rarely ever saw them these days. Their hearts pounded in their chests as the young woman entered their booth.

    "Hi. My name is Marsha McConnel and I work for McRonald's, and today might be your lucky day. What's your name?' she asked, looking exclusively at Mary.

    "Mary Bramble."

    "That's a very nice name. Would you like to take a history test?"

    Mary's eyes lit up. "Oh YES! YAY! Yep, yep, yep!"

    Marsha smiled at her enthusiasm. "Okay. Can you name all of the presidents?"

    "Ronald W. Reagan, George W. Bush, Sean J. Hannigan and Robert J. Minton."

    "THAT'S RIGHT!," Marsha exclaimed. "What a smart little girl you are. You've won a ticket for a small box of Freedom Fries."

    Laura and Mary both looked like they were about to faint.

    "The ticket for the small fries is yours to keep. BUT if you get this next question right you can trade that ticket for this ticket: A BIG box of Freedom Fries AND a McShake!"

    Mary was as nervous as she'd ever been in her entire young life. Her blood pressure was now dangerously high.

    "What are each of the presidents famous for?"

    Laura looked mortified. She could not imagine a more difficult question that could be put to her daughter. Mary just took a deep breath and answered with confidence. She had watched the History Show many, many times while her mom was at work. She knew all of the words. She didn't know what many of them meant, but she felt certain that if she concentrated hard enough she could pronounce them all properly. "Ronald W. Reagan won the Cold War by defeating communism and was the father of deregulation. George W. Bush won the war on terrorism and ended tax oppression. Sean J. Hannigan was president during the first Holy War and officially established the United States as a Christian nation. Robert J. Minton won the second Holy War, and brought about the reorganization; which brought peace to the world and dissolved international borders with the creation of the One World Government."

    There was a tense silence. A gradual smile began to fill Marsha's face. "THAT'S RIGHT!"

    Laura and Mary leapt to their feet and shouted and screamed. Mary bounced around like an idiot and Laura beamed with pride. Marsha exchanged tickets and Mary ran breathlessly to the food dispenser to retrieve her Freedom Fries and McShake. When she got back to the table Marsha was gone but she had left a miniature 1WG flag for her in the middle of the table. Mary stared at it in awe. It had McRonald's, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Coca Cola along the logo strip at the bottom. She looked at her mom who had a tear streaking down her face.

    For the first time Laura began to hope that her daughter might beat the odds and become a laborer. She had no way of even guessing what the odds were, but it had occurred to her that in Hannity Housing there were 10 floors full of unemployeds and only one floor for laborers. But her genius daughter had watched the History Show so much that she now knew everything there was to know about history. She was a genius. There was no telling how much else television had taught her. She didn't know how Mary got to be so good at paying attention to the tv, but she could not imagine how any mother could be any more proud of their daughter than she was.


Marsha McConnel [01]

    Young miss McConnel couldn't really understand why laborers weren't allowed to buy memberships at the gym. A lot of laborers seemed a bit dirty, but they could be made to shower before using the gym.

    Oh well, what did it matter. She was Relations class and before that she had been in the FSPCA. It was a nearly impossible jump to make, from laboring class to Relations class, but she had done it. Now she could use the Gym in her apartment complex.

    She was obligated to use it, more accurately. Working for McRonald's was a tremendous privilege, but she needed to remain in peak physical condition to keep her job. Every day she had to be seen by the customers, enjoying McShakes and McMacs at various McRonald's restaurants all over Brooklyn. Then she had to head to the gym and sweat it all off again and have her bodyfat index taken by the machines. She had worked so hard of late that she now had a little room to spare but she felt like she was constantly needing to make more and more time to exercise. She wanted to keep exercising until she looked like Hotcha. She looked at her profusely sweating face in the mirror and felt like she was getting close.

    She wished she had time to go to school or to spend time with her mother. But there simply wasn't time. There was time enough to rush from neighborhood to neighborhood, McRonald's Restaurant to McRonald's restaurant, in her shiny, new, hot-pink CargoSport Spider. It seemed a shame that she had all of these privileges as a Relations class person but no time to utilize them. But that's the way it goes. With great privileges come great responsibility and she figured she was doing a great service to the world by helping McRonald's to make money.

    In actuality, that wasn't even the case. McRonald's greeters didn't make the corporation any money. They were of no financial benefit to McRonald's at all. Even a really good greeter didn't make enough of a difference to justify their salary. Their job, of giving away food and mingling with the customers, was a vestige from a time long gone by when it was important to create a brand loyalty. Brand loyalty actually made a difference back when there was more than one competing brand to chose among.

    Marsha examined her thighs and felt a disheartening dissatisfaction with the eighth of an inch of fat that the elastic on her unitard was digging into. Her red unitard with the big, bright yellow M reminded her of the corporation that loved and took care of her. She knew it was an M, and that M was the first letter in McRonald's. But she didn't know how to read.

    Marsha McConnel had been born before people were divided into laboring, unemployed and Relations class. Her mother had been fortunate enough to be made a laborer during the Reorganization. Marsha had been lucky enough to be a laborer for McRonald's before the restaurant business had become entirely automated. As McRonald's laid off its workforce it made a handful of positions available in its Private Corporate Army to employees. Something about her looks, her last name or her willingness to obey orders without ever questioning them got her selected over the 170 other applicants for her position in the FSPCA.

    Her first assignment had been in Germany. Germany had resisted joining the 1WG (One World Government) along with Hungary, France, Spain and Italy. But Germany was easily infiltrated by DarqueOps agents and emulators. It fell and was integrated into 1WG within a year's time. Still, there were Germans who resisted the new rules. German restauranteurs were attempting to run underground eateries and Marsha was charged with locating them and bombing them. Within two years all German restaurants were franchise restaurants and Marsha came back to Zone 1 to receive a nice cushy Relations class job.

    There were many jobs, like her job as a greeter, that were completely unnecessary jobs. They were jobs that existed for no other purpose than to balance the population. If there were not enough people in the Relations class such jobs were created. If there were too many people in the Relations class such jobs could easily be eliminated and Marsha would find herself tossed back down to the laboring class and no longer be permitted into the gym that she had come to take for granted. But she was unaware of all of that. And ignorance was bliss.


Rupert Ingles [01]

    The world watched as Rupert Ingles was dying. People the world over felt sympathy for the kindly old man who had given them so much. There would be no final words from him, he was in a deep coma and within the hour the Healthsouth hospital would be pulling the plug.

    Rupert Ingles had not been born. He had been created. He was a product of the mind of a DarqueOps administrator named Dale Berger. In the years between Holy War I and Holy War II there came a need for media consolidation. There were too many channels and it was too difficult to regulate all of it. Miseducational programs were always getting onto cable or satellite channels. And when one would be taken care of, another would pop up in its place.

    Arrangements between all of the broadcasting corporations were made and it was decided that television would be limited to five channels. But it was back in an era where people were far less willing to do as they were told without questioning it. People, naturally, preferred to have more selection on tv. Rupert Ingles convinced them they didn't.

    Two different men had been Rupert Ingles. The first Rupert Ingles was a DarqueOps emulator named Thomas Brady. He had a team of four script writers and two skilled DarqueOps Authenticators and project oversight by Dale Berger --who also happened to be the CEO of GBC broadcasting. As a DarqueOps emulator he was willing to give his life for the project and, indeed, the project required it. But he had passed away before Rupert Ingles was supposed to have died.

    The second Rupert Ingles was a Hollywood actor named Jeffrey Standish. He played the role very well, but he had never been privy to the last page of the script. No one had ever made him aware that the role called for his ultimate demise. Now, in his vegetative state, the tabloid tv watching public looked on as he clung to his last breaths of life. Most people felt very fond feelings for the old man because they had been told that they had fond feelings for him enough times that they now believed it.

    It was very different when his campaign began. When people first started to hear the name Rupert Ingles, he seemed to be some crazy old man who had an inexplicable way of getting himself onto all of the morning talk shows and news programs. He kept going on and on about the olden days of television when there were only 3 major networks and how the country was better off when all of America watched the same shows and could talk about the shared experience. He would bring film clips of miseducational programs and scare people about the implications of these shows for good Christian citizens. Dale Berger saw to it that shows that were especially offensive to Christians started showing up on the satellite stations and then clips of those shows were shown on network television as examples for why satellite and cable television should be abolished.

    Still, very few people bought into the idea that having fewer channels could be a good thing. So a literature campaign started in the churches. People were reluctant to go against the will of their churches so as soon as they became convinced that it was a church goer's obligation to be against too many tv channels they started to get statewide referendums on ballots all across the southern states. And still, the referendums only received about 25% of the votes, but the news media reported that they received 45% of the votes and people began to realize that it was only a matter of time now since the news media often went on and on about what a popular movement this was. People didn't want to be on the wrong side of a popular movement or vote for anything that was going to lose, so more people started voting for the state referendums and as soon as the referendums were receiving a solid 40% of the vote it could be reported that they were receiving 60% and so state by state the referendums passed. Finally the Relations industry was able to convince Congress that the people were going crazy demanding an end to cable and satellite television and so national legislation was passed. And then the Relations industry had a very captive audience.

    What people saw in the United States was very tightly controlled. There were five channels and three of them were run by GBC, the former branch of General Electric that had once been known as NBC but was now its own corporation. Another one, ABC, was run by the Disney Corporation and hardly anyone watched it any more. They had the highest rated show on tv, the Manpower Hour but when the Manpower Hour was not on, hardly anyone watched Disney's channel. The 5th channel was QVC, a 24 hour shopping channel run by the Wal-Mart corporation.

    Over time people came to believe that they were very grateful to Rupert Ingles for making tv viewing so much simpler. And now, many years later, there was no more need for Rupert Ingles. Jeffrey Standish and the entire Standish family were now dead or dying to protect the secret nature of the Rupert Ingles story forever. And around the country people were feeling a renewed gratefulness for the kindly old man that delivered them from miseducation. His funeral would get massive ratings and the commercial spots would cost a lot of money, but sell a whole lot of products. People would make a note of it to buy things for Rupert.


Paul Craddich [01]

    Eloise Simpson's dead body didn't bother him much. He was concentrating on the television. The Manpower Hour was about to come on and this would be his last chance to win.

    She should have just let him watch the Manpower Hour. Then he wouldn't have had to kill her. It was her own fault. She knew how much he needed to watch the Manpower Hour. This was the day he was finally going to win.

    Once upon a time Paul was a young man. The young Paul Craddich would have hated everything about the old Paul Craddich. The young Paul Craddich was confident --no, arrogant-- and affluent. He was young and intelligent and successful. He was a programmer for Citibank in the financial zone in New Jersey. He shared a penthouse suite with two Citibank brokers. With their high incomes and lease sharing arrangement they could afford anything their heart's desired. He had a sports car that young ladies at night clubs were particularly impressed by. He had his life all planned out and he had scheduled three more years of screwing around and playing the field before he was going to settle down and start a family.

    Despite his very comfortable salary one of his favorite pastimes was to blame the poor for all of the taxes he had to pay. He kept a constant tally on how much more money he would have in the bank if so much of his paycheck didn't go to welfare recipients and old people. Any woman he dated was compelled to share those views or be denied the privilege of getting to sleep with him.

    Then one day the programming jobs at Citibank were outsourced to India. He was unable to find a job at anywhere near the same payrate. His roommates seemed very regretful as they kicked him out of the house and stopped returning his phone calls. He found a much cheaper apartment but still had to take on a part time job to keep up the payments on his expensive car. Then he lost his full time job and had to string together several part time jobs. Then he had no time for dating. Gradually the money in his bank account ran out and part time jobs became harder to find. Then Holy War I came along and it became pointless to own a car because so many roads were destroyed. He sold his car and lived comfortably for a time but then his money started to run out again. He managed to scrape by for many years until Holy War II came along and the economy finally turned upward again. He got a good job for all of three years and then came the Reorganization. Under 1WG there were far fewer jobs and very few jobs existed for men who had not been veterans of any war. As the world was divided into the laboring class and the unemployed class he was shoved down into the latter. He refused to believe that there was no job for him and he searched and searched but the world no longer wanted or needed him.

    Eventually he stopped wasting his time looking for a job that didn't exist. He collected his daily entitlement payment and kept to himself like all of the other unemployeds.

    One fateful day he was trying to nail a board to his wall to help keep the wind out of his apartment when he fell and injured himself. That's where he met Eloise. She was a nurse at the hospital and she let him watch television in the hospital. He became enthralled by the Manpower Hour. It was going to be his way back to his dignity.

    His unemployeds housing complex was not very far from her laboring class home. She took pity on him and invited him to watch her television one day and he had been showing up ever since. Any laboring class or unemployed class person you could ask would have told you that laboring class housing is much bigger and much nicer than unemployed class housing. The reality was that all housing for both classes was nearly the exact same size. It was cheaper to construct that way. Many laboring class people did keep their homes a bit nicer but certainly not all. Laborers and unemployeds generally believed that the laboring wage was much more than the entitlement of the unemployeds. After penalties, fees and costs associated with being in the laboring class, it usually wasn't. But there was one significant difference; one thing that conferred a sense of privilege on the laboring class above all others. Laboring housing came with a television and unemployed housing did not. And a television was not a thing that an unemployed could ever hope to afford.

    Eloise loved her television but she found herself with less and less time to watch it. She was being called on to work more hours at her job lately so there were some days that she had to work during the Manpower Hour and Paul was having a harder and harder time accepting it. She would have let him stay in her house by himself and watch it except that it was considered suspicious behavior. There had been a law against cohabitating with anyone who was not in your immediate family ever since the Reorganization. It was unchristian for a single woman to have a man in her home while she wasn't there. She had no choice but to go to work. She tried explaining that to him.

    Well, he had no choice but to watch the Manpower Hour. So there. The show was about to come on so he pressed his thumb beneath the television to register his chance to win. Just to be nice he lifted Eloise's cold lifeless arm up to the screen and registered her thumbprint too.

    The Manpower Hour music came on and he snapped to attention. Julie Jungles appeared on the screen and pitched the brand new A20 pill from Pfizer. She told him how much better his life would be if he took it and he believed her. He wanted to win so that he could afford to try it. Voices at the back of his head began to try to tell him that none of that would be possible now. He tried to shut them out. He wanted to believe that the swiftly imposed death penalty for an unemployed murdering a laborer would be waived if he was no longer an unemployed.

    Next there was ten minutes of commercials for things that he wanted very badly. Then Julie Jungles came back on and did the Manpower on the Street segment. It was utterly disappointing. The young girl on camera didn't even seem like she was trying to win. She didn't seem like she knew what she was doing at all. He felt almost enraged by the way she had ruined the last Manpower on the Street segment he was ever going to see. The young girl didn't win. She didn't even come close.

    Then there were more commercials for wonderful, wonderful products that Julie Jungles wanted him to buy. How he wished he could buy them for her. Maybe. Maybe if he won. Maybe then he could buy them. His chance to win was coming up. His very last chance. The last commercial came on and it was the commercial for Coca-Cola where the girl is jogging and at the very end of the commercial there is a split second where you can see the protrusion of her nipple through her Nike sportsblouse. It was the most sinfully suggestive thing on television anymore and almost every man wished for the commercial every time they watched television. But none of them admitted it. It was unchristian. They pretended not to notice, but they bought a lot of Coca-Cola afterward to keep the commercial in rotation.

    Julie Jungles came back on the screen and begged him to buy a McMac and a McShake. Someone was about to win a Relations class job, but she hinted that those who didn't win had a better chance to win the next day if they bought a McMac and a McShake. McRonald's was going to be VERY crowded after the Manpower Hour was over tonight. But for Paul Craddich there would be no tomorrow. He had to win now.

    Julie Jungles announced the winner. It was someone else far away. His life was over. Soon the Manpower police would show up to find out why Eloise was not at her job. Maybe they would shoot him on sight or maybe they would drag him off to some horrible place. Either way, he would never get to see the Manpower Hour again.


Jenna Sanchez [01]

    "Fuhrman Freightlines"

    Jenna sounded the words out in her head. There were painted-over signs that could still be read all over old unemployeds tenements in St. Louis. She liked to find them and practice her reading. Even though in many cases she didn't know what they meant. She didn't know what a Fuhrman or a Freightline was. But she was sure she was reading it right. Her father had been a great reading teacher while he was alive.

    She had been confined to her house for quite some time. She had been keeping a low profile in her unemployeds apartment waiting for a busy day on the street so that she could locate her cousin Selena. All of her life had been building toward the day where she would finally meet Selena, She was sure this would be the day. Her father said that she just needed to find her way to St. Louis and wait for a busy day. And then meet Selena at the designated location.

    Getting to St. Louis was scary. Traveling was a very suspicious thing for an unemployed to be doing. And waiting for a busy day on the streets seemed to take forever. People never left their houses. For some reason, lots of people were on the streets today. So this was the day. The day her father had been preparing her for for her entire life.

    There were a lot of soldiers around. They made her very nervous. You could tell regular PCA officers' sponsors by the logo on their helmets. And aggregate PCA officers could be told apart by color of their uniforms. There were a lot of Information Supply PCA officers in blue uniforms and lots of Housing & Shelter PCA officers in brown uniforms. But there was also an insignia on each of their Spiders and beneath the insignias were the letters ISPCA or FSPCA. It was about the only place in her world where she might encounter unobscured letters and she felt very smart because she could match those letters to the first letters of the words. She was distracted by the appearance of letters and not paying enough attention to where she was going.

    Suddenly there was a camera and a bright light and a woman in her face. "I'm Julie Jungles from Viacom," the woman said. "Would you like to be on the Manpower Hour?"

    "No. I don't think so," she replied and tried to keep walking.

    The woman looked amazed, as though no one had ever told her no before. And indeed no one ever had. Jenna tried to cover her mistake. Her father had taught her to avoid suspicion at all costs and she felt like she had done a very suspicious thing. "I mean, no, I don't think I'm worthy to be on it."

    "Well of course you're not worthy," Julie replied with her bubbly personality. "That's the beauty of it. We let you on it anyway."

    Jenna felt very intimidated and nervous. She had never seen a tv camera before. She had only ever seen a television once when her father took her to see one. He had explained a lot about television. Warned her about it. She was scared of them and now she was very afraid that she had gotten herself into something that she couldn't get out of just as she was about to realize her destiny. She had a sinking feeling that this was going to ruin everything.

    Jenna tried to guess at her next move. She feigned enthusiasm and asked "Well, what do I do?"

    "Haven't you ever watched the Manpower Hour?" Julie asked incredulously.

    "I'm an unemployed. I don't have a tv." It was the best excuse she could come up with quickly. Julie turned red with rage. Everyone on Earth was supposed to know who Julie Jungles was. Even unemployeds who had never been able to see a tv had heard about the show from somewhere.

    "What do I do?" Jenna demanded quickly. "I'll do anything!!" she insisted. She was trying to act the way a normal unemployed would act. She was trying to remember everything her father had told her about concealing her miseducated ways.

    "What do you do? You DO SOMETHING ENTERTAINING! Sing a song or jump around. Beg me for a Relations class job!" Julie sang a song that was intended to be an example of a song that a regular contestant might sing. It was a song about how great she was and she was very angry to have to be singing it about herself. She was the CEO of Viacom now. In the consolidation of network television Viacom had ended up with no television stations to broadcast on. They were forced into creating content for the networks. But by partnering with Manpower Inc. they had hit the jackpot. They had the highest rated show and it brought in a staggering sum of money. She had been the highest paid television personality for so long and had been awarded so many stock options and had become so popular with the shareholders that she had been made the CEO of the entire corporation. She was wealthy beyond description and probably the 3rd most famous person on television after Hotcha and Robert Minton. And here she was singing a sample song about how great she was to an unemployed who seemed to never have heard of her. Her camera man had to work very hard to keep a straight face and was able to do so only because his life probably depended on it.

    Jenna smiled a simple smile that was an approximation of an unemployed's smile. She signaled her readiness. The camera lights brightened. Julie shouted out "And we're rolling!" and all of a sudden Jenna was expected to perform. She was terrified. Her fear was incapacitating. Tentatively she began to sing. She couldn't remember what Julie had just sung so she just tried to sing something that was flattering. And she remembered to sing about begging for a job. She knew she was not doing well but she couldn't figure out how to fix it. She sang louder and stronger. She was a good singer. Her father had sung with her as much as he dared. But she could see in the face of the camera man that she was still screwing up. But then the camera light dimmed and her chance had passed.

    The camera pointed toward Julie and a status board that she held in her hand. "Well that was just awful. But let's let you be the judge!" Votes started pouring in from Viacom shareholders around the world. The percentages went up and down a bit and then settled at 16% yes and 84% no. "A new record! That was the worst song ever! You're horrible!"

    Julie felt vindicated. She felt powerful and in control again. Jenna felt insulted and angry but she knew better than to feel that way out loud. She guessed that she was supposed to feel distraught and began crying and wailing and pretending to feel rejected. Julie comforted her for the cameras. "Well, I'm sorry you didn't win, but here's a ticket for a McShake," Julie said with a leer.

    Jenna's eyes lit up. "Wow! Thank you!" she said excitedly making a grave misjudgment in her guess at an appropriate response. She was out of her element. She'd had no idea that the point of the song was not to be melodic or strong in the singing. The point was to humiliate yourself. Only the most self-humiliating performances ever won the Manpower on the Street segment anymore. And having lost a Relations class job opportunity was supposed to be the worst thing that could happen to her. She was not supposed to have her spirits lifted by a McShake ticket. But she genuinely was happy to get it. She only had two hours left to make a purchase before she would trigger ghost status. Western Union was likely to be very crowded on a day like this so she would be cutting it close to get her entitlement and get to a store of some kind. The McShake ticket would help her make a purchase and avoid suspicion. Except that she now felt like the most suspicious person on Earth. She probably was. Every person in front of every television in the world was probably wondering what was wrong with her. Beyond the camera rigging she could see ISPCA officers eying her and she could tell they were going to want to question her now.

    She wanted to flee. She was so close. Today was the day she had been waiting for. And then this crazy fluke had come from out of nowhere to ruin everything. the camera switched off. The Manpower Hour crew walked away disgusted. The ISPCA officers began walking toward her. She started walking away slowly pretending not to notice them. She walked a bit faster until she got around a corner and then she began to run.

    She was in better physical condition than any unemployed had a right to be. That was another thing that was suspicious about her, but it was probably the thing that inspired Julie Jungles to pick her. A young and slender unemployed had a decent chance to win if she would just sing a really humiliating song and grovel and beg shamelessly. But Jenna didn't know. She never thought she'd hear herself think it but she suddenly wished her father would have taught her a little about tv. He probably didn't know either.

    Jenna ducked down an alley and ran faster. She was torn about which direction to run. If she ran toward the designated location she might be endangering Selena. But maybe if she never showed up that would be endangering Selena. And if she didn't meet up with Selena her whole life and that of her father would become a waste. Maybe if she could just find her Selena would know what to do. But it was soon going to be too late. She could hear Spiders clicking on the concrete all around and Flys overhead. She had a general direction in mind but she had no real sense of where she was going once she entered the alleyways. The ISPCA was closing in on her. Her lungs felt like they were on fire and her heart was pounding like a jackhammer and still she ran.

    She heard loudspeakers from above ordering her to stop. She looked up as she ran and she couldn't see where they were coming from. She hoped it meant they couldn't see her. She knew better than to try to find a hiding place. Her only option was to run until she dropped. Suddenly a door opened and she was yanked inside just before gunfire rang out in the alley.


Selena Juarez [01]

    Jenna looked up at a woman who appeared to be an older version of herself. She knew instantly that this was Selena Juarez, her cousin.

    The woman shoved a pill into her hand. Jenna took it. She could read in the womans expression that she was intended to swallow it so she swallowed it as fast as she could. Moments later a blue light flooded the room and swept from side to side in a search pattern.

    The woman held up an arm. On the side of her arm the words "follow me" were written. Jenna read it as fast as she could but it took a few seconds. She nodded in understanding and the woman turned and dashed up the stairs. Though it hurt her lungs to start running again she chased the woman up the stairs at top speed. The woman led her to a janitor's closet and they scrunched inside. Moments later they were both so deep asleep that they were very nearly dead.


Jenna Sanchez [02]

    Jenna Sanchez awoke in a strange room. Strange but very nice. The bed was comfortable. The floral patterns on the wallpaper were very pleasing. The room even smelled nice. She slowly sat up to take it all in. At the foot of the bed stood the woman who had yanked her out of the alleyway and another man. A much older man. She smiled.

    "Is this UUtopius?" she asked.

    The woman shot her a look of rage.

    "Oh my...!" Jenna's eyebrows flew up and both of her hands flew to cover her mouth. She couldn't believe that she had forgotten herself so completely. She was just so overjoyed by the idea that she might already be at the place that she was never supposed to speak the name of until she got there. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to say it," she said very remorsefully.

    She felt suddenly very inadequate. One moment she was distracted by her ability to read letters and then everything had gone wrong from there. "Where am I?" she asked tentatively when she regained the courage to speak.

    The woman sat down on the bed with a piece of paper and began to write. "I'm your cousin Selena," she wrote. and then handed a pen to Jenna.

    Jenna seemed confused. She wanted to just talk, but she would write if she had to. She was very impressed by Selena's penmanship and it made her very embarrassed about her own feeble writing. She started writing very slowly and deliberately trying to form the letters as best she could. "I now you were my cosin alredy"

    Selena smiled in encouragement. She could see Jenna's embarrassment. She wrote again. "This is a safe house. It belongs to this man. He is a Quaker. His name is Thomas. You say it like Tom-is. He is a part of the new underground railroad. He can take you the rest of the way to where you're going."

    Jenna stared at the words for a long time. So many of the words were unfamiliar to her and she didn't understand it completely. But she understood the gist of it. She smiled.

    Selena started writing again. "We have to switch clothes. Quickly!"

    Jenna looked confused. She had never been naked in front of a man before. Even her father had not seen her naked since she was a baby. Thomas couldn't see what they had been writing, but as soon as they started to undress he turned around to protect their modesty. The two young ladies switched clothes and then Selena wrote on the paper again. "Your father did a great job raising you. I'm glad I got to meet you. Thomas will take good care of you. I've got to go."

    With that Selena got up to leave. Jenna grabbed her and insisted on a hug. They hugged for a time. Then Selena got up and handed the paper to Thomas. He began to burn it and Jenna felt bad. She had not finished reading it and she wished she could take it with her to remember Selena by. But that was obviously not a good idea.


Selena Juarez [02]

    Selena rushed out of the room and headed for the basement as quietly as possible. Everything was getting to be much too risky. There were a hundred things that could still go wrong. As she snuck back into St. Louis she saw posters everywhere that had Jenna's face and the pictogram that meant they wanted to capture her. The streets of the city were bustling. There were laboring and unemployed class people combing the streets looking for her. There were even more people wandering down the streets nonchalantly trying to be the person that the Manpower Hour would stumble on to. And then there were low level Relations people everywhere trying to give out free samples of everything under the grey sky.

    Selena had to find the Manpower Hour without any of the hundreds of people who were looking for her finding her first. There were even more ISPCA officers than there had been the day before. They were furious about not being able to find the girl that everyone had seen on tv.

    If the ISPCA had any access to the search technology of the past, namely search dogs, they'd have been able to find the young ladies easily. But cats and dogs and most other domesticable animals had been eaten to extinction. They now relied on new technology like biometric scans and as soon as the women had taken such high concentrations of Pfizer Downs their life signs had dropped dramatically.

    Selena had been well trained. She had a whole lot more tricks up Jenna's sleeves. And it was going to take all of them to find the Manpower Hour and complete her mission. She had gotten six whole people to UUtopius. Seven if her cousin made it there alive. When she left UUtopius the previous record had been four. She guessed she must be a legend at UUtopius by now, and as much as she preferred to remain humble, she had to admit it was well deserved.

    But, with each person she succeeded in getting to UUtopius, the risks became greater. She was sure that DarqueOps was after her now. It was only a matter of time before she was caught.

    She heard a commotion and snuck along some rooftops to see if it was the Manpower Hour show. It was. They were filming the end of the show where some random viewer was about to win a Relations class job. She saw the opening she needed as all eyes were on the filming of the show. Like lightning she rushed the immense CargoSpider that beamed the show back to the station. People started spotting her and turned around. They saw the same young woman in the same clothes as the day before. Some people stood stunned and some people rushed after her. They were too late. Selena hurled herself toward the field generator of the CargoSpider. In an instant her hands, face and much of her upper body were vaporized. The rest of her body fell to the street.

    There would be no thumb prints to make a positive ID since the body no longer had any thumbs. People were satisfied that this was the same girl however. She looked the same and wore the same clothes. Many of the eye witnesses swore --and most actually believed-- that they heard her screaming something about wanting another chance to be on the Manpower Hour before she fell into the CargoSpider by accident. But that was impossible. Selena Juarez had had her tongue cut out for speaking miseducation to her Bible Studies teacher when she was seven years old.


Hanna Wooten [01]

    Hanna stretched and yawned and shifted in her Spider. She flipped the channels between the morning shows. Most of them were talking about the death of Rupert Ingles and she was bored of it. She was too young to remember what television was like when there were more channels. She found a channel where the morning show was doing a review of the new Ford Spider model that was about to be released and she really wanted it; in spite of the fact that the Spider parked under her was brand new.

    She was hungry and did not want to stop watching tv. She didn't know if her father was at work or not but she called out for him in case he might be available to prepare some breakfast for her. He didn't answer. She frowned and sighed and turned the television volume way up so that she could hear it through the whole house. Then she went to check his schedule which he had drawn on the wall. He was working. Her father, Thomas Wooten drove a huge PassengerSpider and he was driving out west and would be gone for two days.

    That was good. Working was the one thing that her father did that she approved of. It was vital that he work hard and do a good job so that she could live in this nice house and have constant access to television. All of her father's other activities seemed to threaten that need. If her father was home on Sundays he didn't like to watch the Bible. He was a Christian but he was a kind of Christian called a Quaker, and she didn't know what it was but she knew it wasn't normal. She felt like it was a suspicious kind of Christian to be. And her father was always trying to talk to her while the television was on. The man seemed to lack the basic ability to be quiet and listen to the television.

    She couldn't prove it, but she got the sense that he was miseducated. She couldn't be sure but she thought she even remembered him trying to teach her to read once when she was little. He seemed to hold beliefs that were contrary to the world as she knew it through television. And the television had warned her against such people. She had her eye on her father. And she was ready to report him to the proper authorities at the first sign of trouble.


Jarod Brannigan [01]

    Jarod Brannigan was a very miseducated young man. Very few Relations class people were so miseducated as he was. But that was because he was relations class in name only. He had been born to the Children of the Rose. It was a secret society founded by members of Pax Christi, a Catholic organization that had opposed the Holy Wars and the war on miseducation. As far as he knew, Jarod was the last living Child of the Rose.

    He was headed for another secret society, UUtopius. They were the only other society that he had a vague notion of where they were located. He was succeeding in his mission to get in a position to steal books to bring back to the Children of the Rose, but now that their society had been found and slaughtered he was going to get the books to the people of UUtopius instead.

    He was just waiting for the right opportunity. In the meantime he had to pretend to be a young Relations class hotshot. He had the skills for it. He was very convincing as he pretended to be a greedy, self- interested, profit-hungry Relations executive. He had landed an assignment on the Hotcha account and Hotcha lived in the Hannigan mansion where the books that he needed could be obtained.

    His duties were very basic at present. He was essentially Hotcha's babysitter. He was there to make sure she got high whenever she wanted and that she had access to entertainment and was kept comfortable while she was being iced. But he was also supposed to do all of that without bothering her. He was supposed to stay completely out of her hair except to make sure that any drugs and distractions she might require were available where she could find them.

    It left him with a lot of down time. Time he'd like to have spent searching the library, but unfortunately Hotcha was always standing outside of the arboretum for hours at a time deciding whether or not to go in and the door to the library was in plain view of the arboretum. He couldn't figure her out and didn't really want to. He was working on a plan to substitute Pfizer Downs for her C9s one day so that he could search the library while she was asleep. But then he also never knew what days Sean Hannigan or Sharon Shafer would be home and he never knew where the rest of the house staff would be. It was a very risky operation and he didn't want to blow it so he was stuck biding his time.

    In order to avoid suspicion he spent his days in the way that would be expected of a a young Relations executive. He conducted market research. Put another way; he watched a lot of television. He enjoyed dissecting the commercials and analyzing their hooks. He was aware of what made commercials compelling on both a conscious and subconscious level. He was trained in employing the same techniques himself. He was amused by how many Hotcha commercials there were and the difference between the strong confident and wholesome image put forth on the tv screen and how that differed from the short, slender, lost-looking young woman he observed every day.

    More than the commercials, he enjoyed the shows. The shows were often commercials themselves but they were also carefully crafted propaganda used to mold society. There were a whole lot of shows about single men who could not find love. They were laboring class men or unemployeds --there were no shows on television about the Relations class unless you considered the Manpower Hour to be about the Relations class-- and these men had some deficiency or another and they could never find love. The effect of their being so many shows about men who couldn't find love was that the general population came to view it as normal that they were aging bachelors and spinstresses. They acknowledged their loneliness but they felt a kinship with all of the lonely people that they watched on tv. They did not go out and seek to find relationships. The tv had convinced them that it was all rather pointless. And so it had become rather pointless. These days if you went out looking for companionship you would find none because everyone was at home watching tv shows about single people.

    Then there would be the occasional show about a happy couple. There was no background story on how this couple managed to meet or what their courtship was like. They would just be a successful laboring class couple who inexplicably had schedules that allowed them to be at home together at the same time with one another and their children. And in every case, this happy couple was very properly educated, very Christian and very diligent about buying products. And so the viewing public tried in vain to emulate these model couples. Viewers would buy as they bought and think as they thought and worship as they worshiped hoping that they might someday attain these television results that did not exist in reality for anyone in the laboring or unemployed class.

    Unemployeds had to find laborers in order to watch television and then they had to work around their work schedules to find tv time. This dynamic should have been the perfect opportunity for the laboring class and unemployeds to meet and intermarry. But it wasn't. The laboring class had been given such a bias against the unemployeds that they could barely tolerate them. All laborers wanted to find another laboring class partner to marry but it was almost impossible to find time in their schedules to look for one. Any unemployed would have been happy to marry a laborer but they viewed themselves as fundamentally unworthy and so they knew better than to even ask. The two classes were so completely divided that they may as well have been two different species.

    All of it served to make the public very eager to buy things in the hope that it would bring them love, companionship or family. But more than that it served the larger agenda of getting rid of the surplus population. Unemployeds especially were getting old and dying childless so that saved the establishment the work of having to kill them directly.

    Jerod Brannigan was unique in his ability to understand so much of what was going on. A lot of his teachers at Children of the Rose were very sophisticated students of the world around them. They had invested all of their knowledge in him and sent him on this mission. Now they were dead. The community he had known as a boy had practiced such a different kind of Christianity that the entire Christian world would not be able to begin to fathom it. Every Sunday from sun up to sun down all 5 networks simulcast the Bible. But the Jesus from the Bible on television was never heard to say 'feed the poor' or 'turn the other cheek' or 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone' or 'love your neighbor as yourself' or anything of the sort. It was a Jesus that promised an eternity in the kingdom of Heaven for those who obeyed authority. It was programming designed to teach people the stories of the Bible and the sequence of events with any elements that threatened the establishment conveniently removed.

    There was not a Children of the Rose community to go back to. He hoped to help bring about a future where it would be possible to start another one some day. The memories of what was good about it lived on in him. So it was important that he survive. That gave him the patience he needed to refrain from rushing into the library even when there seemed to be an opportunity. He did not know when his chance to get into the library would come. He simply had faith that it would.


[next: Scrambled Eggs]

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