World Order 2021

Fiction by Steven Yates

Jason watched from the window of the large, electric-powered tram as it approached the North New Richmond Education Complex and coasted to a stop in front of the middle school. He grasped his transparent tote bag containing a box of text-disks, notepad and daily planner, and rose from his seat. Momentarily his eyes went to the surveillance cam that hung from the ceiling between the driver’s seat and the open exit. Another, he briefly recalled, hung from the ceiling thirty rows back, surveying the inside of the tram from the far end. He filed out of the tram with his classmates to the sound of a soft female voice that repeated exit slowly, watch your step, exit slowly, watch your step, exit slowly….

Outside, a frigid breeze sliced into his cheeks. His breath sent puffs of white mist aloft that quickly dispersed against the slate-gray sky. He shivered and drew his coat tightly around him. This winter was going to be bad. Just like last winter. Thirty degrees, the womin on WBS News’ Global Net Weather had reported this morning. And it was only November. She’d made a point to add that North America had had four straight cold winters because World Environmental Agency scientists had finally reversed global warming. Their computer models said so. According to his history facilitator last year, when the Union formed it ended the last resistance to Kyoto and Smart Growth by environmentally insensitive Americans more concerned with their big cars and whatever right they believed they had to do as they pleased regardless of the cost to the planet.

The tram pulled away behind him. Other trams approached different parts of the Complex. One bore his younger brother Bobby toward the elementary school where he would head for his fifth grade home room. Another would transport the bigger kids and a few adults to the North New Richmond High School and Lifelong Education Center, both housed in the larger oblong construction visible across the cordoned-off open space beyond the middle school. Jason joined the line of students making its way, snakelike, toward the public middle school’s main entrance. Heavy coats and jackets stayed closed; hands, lodged in pockets; stocking caps on heads. Atop the entrance, indifferent to the cold, another cam watched silently.

The main entrance was taken up by the security area. Students crowded their way inside until one of the security womyn said, "Single file, please!" Once in the building they started through security. Each student’s bag went onto a moving conveyor belt. Each student, identicards in hand, allowed coat to be unzipped and padded down by waiting security personnel with ADS insignia on their lapels. ADS stood for Atlantic District Security. Finally, Jason’s turn came. He opened his coat and submitted to the search, watching what was going on ahead. Further on, each student’s irises would be scanned. The student would swipe his or her identicard through the computerized reader. The scanner would open its gate, admit the student, then close behind with a chikk that had always struck Jason as vaguely ominous somehow. Then, after the scan, it would greet the student. Jason got in line, watched mechanically as the students went through the scanner one at a time. Finally his turn came. He swiped his identicard. The machine beeped and flashed READY in green letters. He positioned his face. There was nothing to see or feel, just a barely-audible click, followed by the familiar tinny female voice: Recognized – Jason Sandborn, ID NR22938423949FT698OP, North New Richmond Middle School, Atlantic District. Good morning, Jason.

The gate slid open. He was thinking; therefore he existed, and was who he said he was: Jason Sandborn, age 13, of New Richmond, the Smart City that had been built up over the torn-down old Richmond that had once been the capitol of a state called Virginia but was now part of the Atlantic District, North American Union, Pan-Americana. Jason retrieved his bag from the belt and momentarily took in the scene. More cams were poised here and there, canvassing the main intersection just ahead and gazing down halls. A bulletin board on one wall proclaimed, Our Smart Community, with a brightly colored illustrative map below the words. Another, to the left, displayed: Great Leaders of the Past: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Jefferson Clinton and Hillary Rodham-Clinton, George H.W. and George W. Bush.

He paused near the main intersection of corridors. Classrooms lined both sides of the corridor that went left and right, leading around in a large circle. Down the main hall toward the center of the building were Administration and Surveillance; Tech Support; Business Partners; the Goals 2025 office; Health, Family Planning and Counseling (Health, for short); the Multi-Ethnic Affairs; and so on. A stairwell led down to the gym and exercise area one floor below. Some students continued down the main hall toward Health to get their daily medications, sometimes for hyperactivity, sometimes for other things. They would return, having been alive and vibrant this morning, to sit in class quietly. Jason silently thanked goddess that no one had ever mandated he take anything. That was because he kept a lot of his thoughts to himself. Always had. He was the naturally quiet sort, at least most of the time.

He turned left and entered the lavatory two doors down, automatically going to the far stall. The cam inside, above the doorway, made him nervous. Surely an eighth grader should be able to go to the bathroom without someone in surveillance possibly seeing. Maybe not. The purpose, he’d learned years ago, was to prevent kids from smoking tobacco or doing or dealing in unauthorized medications in these places. Grandpa had told him that often happened when he’d been a kid. Jason finished, washed and left after giving the cam a final furtive glance.

Desks in homeroom were arranged in a large semicircle. Everyone could see everyone else. Still another cam surveyed the scene from the far left corner, like every other room in the school, and in every room in the District, and in every room in all other Districts. Each desk sported a monitor-screen mounted atop a keyboard. Minicomputers hung from the right side of each desk. Jason took his assigned seat at the back of the room, booted up his computer. The familiar Netsoft Smart Windows ‘20 Student Deluxe Edition logo came up. He checked both wordmail and vidmail. Nothing in either mailbox. A Latino-American girlwomin named Juanita appeared at the next desk over to the right, flashed him a quick smile that was little more than momentary recognition. When Cortessia, the tall African-American girlwomin on the opposite side appeared, Juanita immediately lost interest in him. The two of them pawed each other constantly back here, sometimes kissing and sometimes going further. The homeroom facilitator, Ms. Stark, had seen them. They did this in all the classes they shared, and were hardly the only same-sex couple at North New Richmond Middle School. These displays of affection were supposed to be against school rules. But no one dared say anything that might offend anyone exploring her sexuality which was a natural thing, after all. Especially not a Euro-American boy! All partnerships were to be affirmed and celebrated equally; that was the rule. Obedience was also the rule. Students who obeyed, got promoted and might work at good jobs someday. Facilitators who obeyed got raises and might get into administration someday. So Juanita and Cortessia paid more attention to each other than to anything Ms. Stark said, much less whatever was on their computer screens.

Jason tried not to watch as the two hugged and then kissed deeply. "Took you long enough," Juanita said.

"Scanner stopped working and they had to call a technician. Took her ten minutes to get it working again."

"Oh."

Equipment breakdowns were not uncommon. But nobody could come in without being scanned. That, too, was the rule. Jason momentarily visualized the students still standing out in the cold while security waited for one of the resident technicians to fix the iris scanner. Evidently he’d gotten through just in time.

"Got my rep’rations credits last night," Cortessia announced, and then lowered her voice. "Beer’s on me Friday. Tell Martina and them ev’rybody’s invited. It’s girlwomyn’s fetish party time! Wear your best and then get undressed! No boys allowed!"

"Global!"

Jason closed his eyes; then abruptly opened them again lest someone see and think him insensitive. He swallowed and took a breath. The volume level seemed to have gone up. Other students were entering, chattering, some filing into their seats and some moving around to be with their friends. He heard casual cursing from someone across the room. Cursing was supposed to be against the rules, too. But calling a student down for it invited a confrontation, and confrontational facilitators weren’t promoted – especially if the student’s guardian sat on one of the governing boards. More students came in, found seats. Jason observed that there was a larger concentration of boys in the back. A few, Jason noticed, seemed to stagger a little. Others seemed unusually fidgety. These boys’ medication, he recalled, was to keep them awake, not calm them down. For whatever reason, they tended to want to sleep too much. Boys had always outnumbered girlwomyn at least five to one among the medicated kids, for some reason nobody seemed to know. Jason felt uncomfortable watching them.

It was almost eight. Ms. Stark came in, a pale, diminutive womin in her late 30s who like most of the facilitators at North New Richmond rarely smiled. She booted up the main computer and inserted the diskette she’d been carrying. A bell sounded, and the room quieted some. A womin’s voice intoned over the intercom: "Please stand for the reading of the Pledge." Everyone rose, even the kids struggling with their hyperactivity medication. They turned as a group toward the blue and white flag hanging near the window and began reciting from memory, along with the voice from down in Administration:

We pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the United Nations of Pan-Americana
And to the Global Union, for which it stands
One World, Indivisible,
With Equality, Democracy, and Justice for all.

Grandpa, who lived with Mom and Dad because he couldn’t work, had told Jason just recently that the Pledge used to be different, but before long nobody would remember the forbidden original words. At one time, too, according to his history facilitator last year there had been no United Nations of Pan-Americana. Just the United States of America. But there had been the heroic United Nations, barely surviving as it worked to create the world of today while former nation states threatened each other with weapons of mass destruction.

"Please find your seats, everyone," came the facilitator’s voice. Students assumed their seats, assigned to as to achieve the maximum mixture of cultures and ethnic groups represented at North New Richmond – although same-sex couples and groups were usually not split up (fortunately these often spanned more than one culture or ethnic group). Ms. Stark began calling the role. A general murmur continued in the class; after a while it became hard to hear the names, and Ms. Stark finally had to call for quiet, with only limited success. She continued with the roll, coming to Jason’s name and then continuing beyond. Four students were absent, all of them boys. Their names would be placed in the database and cross-referenced with the list of those whose guardians or adult companions had called them in sick. Their names had better show up on that list. Truancy was a serious offense! Not global. Not global at all.

Homeroom ended with a few announcements that did not really register. Another bell rang. A few students filed out and a few others filed in. Jason had his first class in this room, so he stayed; so did his two girlwomyn neighbors. After a moment, Ms. Stark was replaced by Ms. Winnie, the eighth grade math facilitator. Ms. Winnie was a short, stumpy African-American womin, her hair done up in dreads that hung loosely around her shoulders and down her back, with multicolored beads throughout. "Today," Ms. Winnie finally began, "we’re going to begin the chapter on your math diskette on fractions." Jason reached into his bag for the diskette with his math text on it. Putting all texts on computer disks had begun about the time he was born, he reflected. Disks were easier to carry around, and easier to monitor since they were coded to respond to security scans a certain way. Plus, electronic texts could be revised every year if necessary by the District Education Board to reflect a rapidly changing world. Regular books, because they were so cumbersome and couldn’t be so easily changed, were obsolete. Grandpa had a pile of them, but none of his classmates did.

Jason called up the main menu on the disk and found the chapter on fractions. When it appeared, he paused. He knew all this stuff, had for years. Grandpa again. He pictured Grandpa: tall and still well muscled from his days of working out down in the gym in town (he’d stopped last year because of "too much arthritis in my hips and lower back"). He was 64 but still walked everywhere, something that was easy since no one in New Richmond drove personal vehicles anymore. No one needed them except police, emergency personnel and government officials – although large corporations had exemptions so they could transport goods. They were expensive, meaning that only corporations partnered with government could afford them. If anyone else needed to go further than a few blocks she took a tram. And while the corporate-government partners used large vehicles to transport goods, most people never traveled beyond the confines of their smart cities anymore. There was little reason to, since most everything one needed was now in easy walking or bicycling distance. Obtaining permission to travel was possible, but it was a long, drawn-out procedure.

Grandpa hadn’t been the same since Grandma had passed on in '19. Before, he’d held his tongue; now, he spoke without seeming to care who might be listening in, his eyes bearing sadness and steadfastness at the same time. Jason knew that other people sometimes stared at Grandpa – like their neighbor one unit over, for example. Her name was Laura Cotton, a fairly young womin with thick black hair who lived with her daughter Jason’s little brother’s age. No one had her figured out. She kept to herself; but then again, so did the Sandborns. Grandpa had once said that neighbors knew each other when he’d been a kid. Not any more. For all the talk about ‘smart communities’ there were no real communities any more, he said. Laura Cotton had made it clear she wanted nothing to do with her neighbors. Bobby had come in crying once because the two had been playing and she had sent him home, not wanting her boy to play with her little girlwomin. Especially since he was a grandson of someone with a reputation for arguing about politics. Jason wondered if Laura Cotton was spying on Grandpa. Some people kept track of who criticized the government – and Grandpa let it be known to all that would listen that he had been a vocal critic of the Union when it formed, and all that led up to it. But Grandpa was smart – maybe the smartest man Jason had ever known. Smarter and more interesting to listen to than any of his facilitators. Smarter than even his parents – guardians, he corrected himself. (Better to have guardians than the adult companions a few of his classmates had, especially the ones on medication to keep them awake.) Jason recalled how he, Grandpa, his guardians and two brothers would play games around the kitchen table at suppertime when he was younger. Knowledge games. Everything from math problems to geography questions to quizzes on who could come up with the name of a historical figure first, based on a description of what the person had done or accomplished. Grandpa had different things to say about them than his history facilitator had. His history went back further, too, and contained a few different personalities. Jason had screwed up his forehead as he puzzled how the past could be changed simply by changing the wording in a book. Once, long ago, he’d even asked a facilitator and been told that those old personalities had been taken out of the texts because they were evil exploiters who had fouled the land, butchered the Native Americans who had lived here first, owned slaves, sometimes beating them, sometimes raping them and having children by them! Thomas Jefferson, one of those old and forbidden names, had had children by an African-American slave girlwomin!

Mrs. Winnie’s voice, jarring him from his reveries: "Log on with your groups as we all construct fractions," said Ms. Winnie.

That was then. Jason took a breath and tried to concentrate on the here and now. He watched the guide to fractions appear on the large computer screen in the front of the classroom. His thoughts quickly returned to Grandpa, who also once told him that fractions used to be taught long before the eighth grade. But times had changed. The International Standards Curriculum was practical. It facilitated computer skills, fostered multitasking and teamwork, helped bring about sensitivity to ethnic and gender differences and differences of sexual orientation as well as adult-child love, and recognized recent achievements regarding the environment. These things all helped children one day become gainfully employed human resources in the global workforce.

Jason’s team consisted of the two girlwomyn and one other boy whose name he didn’t know. He heard Ms. Winnie say, "If we have reclaimed 400 of every 500 acres as part of a protected wilderness area, let’s construct the fraction that reflects this and how great we should feel about recovering this land."

Jason heard himself respond, almost absently, "It’s four fifths."

Ms. Winnie said, "Four fifths what, Jason?" Her eyes bespoke a mixture of irritation and bemusement at the audacity of this little Euro-American boy.

At first Jason frowned, then realized what she was after. "Four fifths of the land," he said.

"Good," she said.

"May I ask something?" Jason continued almost involuntarily.

"Yes?" The tone in her voice suggested impatience.

"What is wrong with saying just four fifths?"

"You won’t have said four fifths what," Ms. Winnie returned even more impatiently. "Numbers don’t float around out in space somewhere, Jason. They’re constructed to count things. In this case, acres. If our subject was people, it would be four fifths of a population. Or if we were counting computers, four fifths of those. And so on."

"But wouldn’t the number be what all those cases had in common?"

"Jason, that’s meaningless. You still have to say what things you’re talking about, otherwise you won’t be making sense and no one will understand what you’re saying. Now can we get back on track here?" Mere irritation was veering towards anger.

Jason let his eyes drop, along with the matter. He thought he understood it perfectly but let the matter drop lest he end up one of the medicated kids. There were cases when asking too many questions in class was diagnosed as a rare species of hyperactivity, after all. Facilitators were not trained to grasp concepts, much less teach them to others. Ms. Winnie went on to draw some diagrams on the overhead projector to illustrate fractions further. She was using marked lengths to measure parts of circles by laying them against portions of the circumference, identifying one third of a circle, and so on. This, Jason realized, followed the District Board lesson plan, conformed to International Standards, approved by the World Education Association.

A few students were paying attention, some seeming amused at something. A few were looking out the window from across the room. Some just stared into space. His male team-mate was dozing. He heard giggling from his right. Juanita and Cortessia were pawing each other playfully. Whatever assignments were made later, he would end up doing the bulk of the work and the team would get the group grade. There were a few other whispered conversations, always random sounds here and there. Jason gave up concentrating and tuned out the rest of the class. Whenever the assignment came, he’d figure it out anyway. This was the last math class anyway for students in his career cluster, webcast design and development. His thoughts went back to what Grandpa had said during supper the other night. The conversation had stayed in his mind, which replayed it like a NetVideo.

The evening was a typical one in the Sandborn walk-up. Jason’s mom had come home from her public administration position in the North Atlantic District Department of Diversity at around 5 p.m., right around the time it started getting dark. She would grouse about having to cook; what did you boys think this was, the twentieth century when womyn were second-class citizens? His dad would come in around 7 p.m. from his clerical job in the city media center computer facility. He would stand in their third-floor window, look down at the quiet streets and say nothing. Below, an occasional tram would go by. Almost no one was to be seen either bicycling or on foot. New Richmond was a different place after dark. It wasn’t safe outside the electrified fences surrounding the high rises, and everybody knew it. The gangs, after all, dealing in tobacco or other unauthorized substances. Nobody talked about them. The authorities tried to control them as best they could.

They’d had turkey and dressing for supper. Jason was grateful his parents, uh, guardians, hadn’t become vegetarians. He liked meat – although not veal, which was fairly disgusting. Most people didn’t eat meat anymore, with the new regulations protecting the rights of animals. Another thing nobody talked about. None of this was what made that evening the one he’d always remember. Bobby had said global! Jason didn’t remember what had prompted him to say it. But that had started the ball rolling.

"Quit saying that!" Grandpa had snapped at the boy.

His daughter had said, "All it means is what your generation used to call cool."

"I don’t like that piece of slang, Angela!" Grandpa retorted. "It’s just another part of our corrupted language. Like all these references to ‘girlwomyn.’ Stupid, that’s what it is! When I was Jason’s or even Tom Jr.’s age, they were just girls. Even then, though, the language was being changed by methods of intimidation."

"You’re not a kid anymore, and it’s a different world now."

"Well, go to the head of the class!"

"Will you guys not argue," his dad said with the characteristic waver in his voice, as if he expected to be slapped for his boldness, and when nothing happened, he went on, "Let’s just have a pleasant supper. Besides, you never know who might hear, with these cheap-plaster walls."

"Yeah, whatever," retorted Angela. "A good warning from the authorities might do him some good."

Grandpa said nothing. High rise walk-ups such as theirs weren’t particularly expensive places to live and it showed. Sometimes Jason could hear Laura Cotton’s NetVideo through the dining room wall. He could also sometimes hear a baby crying in the bedroom above his – the gay couple up there had adopted the baby last summer and would be its adult guardians. If he could hear these things, that meant others could probably hear what went on in here. Private residences didn’t have cams poised everywhere. They were practically the only places left (there were cams at either ends of the hall outside).

The Sandborns had eaten mostly in silence, with the WBS News webcast coming from their NetVideo screen across the dining room. The blond anchorperson had been talking about a series of power outages in the New England and Potomac Districts, outages blamed on cold weather in combination with a shortage of technicians. It was only the latest in a spate of outages that had begun three years ago and worsened with each winter. The womin turned to the latest victories against the Jihadist terror groups overseas. Jason wanted to know if anyone had heard about Tom Jr., his older brother. Normally Tom Jr. sent wordmails and sometimes even vidmails (the former, Grandpa said, were once called email) from overseas where Operation Global Democracy continued – as it had for almost twenty years now. But not recently. That probably meant something was wrong. His guardians were stressed about it. Both had been trying to obtain information, but such things were usually available on a need-to-know basis and they didn’t need to know. They had been transferred from branch to branch of the Global Information Administration overseeing war personnel.

Jason hadn’t seen his brother in over two years. Tom Jr. had lettered in football but not been particularly adept at data entry or design in VDHTML or sales or any of the clerical jobs District Employment really needed to fill, so he’d been drafted into the war. Jason was working as hard as he could to make sure he wasn’t headed for the same fate when he graduated from New Richmond High, Class of ’26. Only the success of his group would get him a good job and allow him to avoid that fate. A few of last year’s graduating senior groups had been allowed to attend college so they could work in the really important jobs in public administration or war administration. Many who had done extremely well as business partners moved into paying jobs with those businesses (mostly womyn, a voice in the back of his head whispered, mostly womyn). Many of the rest had been sent overseas into International Service of one sort or another to fight the Jihadist terrorists (mostly boys, came the voice again, mostly boys). The Jihadists not only were not in the Union but fought the Union. They were dangerous, deadly butchers who terrorized womyn and tortured children, or so it was said. They were tyrants rather than democrats. They had many agents in secret cells here, or so the reporters on WBS News assured everyone. That was why security was so tight, information had to be gathered on everyone, and everyone had to be watched so closely. It was necessary, because we were at war. And the only way to end the war would be to establish Global Democracy.

But Tom Jr. had been gone since Summer of ’19 – over two long years. He’d left right after Grandma’s doctors had helped her pass on. Now, for the past six months, utter silence. No one wanted to think about the possibilities.

The womin broadcaster on WBS News was saying, "Today our forces for liberation and Global Democracy struck in retaliation for last week’s series of terror bombings and scored a decisive victory against the Jihadists in New Teheran. They – "

Grandpa asked, his hand on the keyboard, "Anybody mind if I switch off the World Broadcasting System Propaganda Machine?" Nobody said anything, so he brought up the shut down menu, and off went the NetVideo. Jason certainly hadn’t been paying it any attention. Silence enveloped the room. They ate for a while; then Grandpa threw down his fork. "This is the height of idiocy! I’ve no idea where my own grandson is!" he blurted out.

"Neither of us does, either," Angela stated the obvious without raising his eyes. Her husband seemed not to have heard. Tom Sr. took a long swallow of iced tea. Both of them would continue on, being good citizens and allowing the governmental machinery all around them to do its work, and hopefully bring them some news in the near future.

Grandpa’s voice again, after a moment: "Things didn’t used to be like this."

At that, Angela pursed her lips. Another of her father’s soliloquies was coming. Jason suspected from their demeanor that they knew – or at least quietly believed – that Grandpa was right far more often than he was wrong. But they were so grateful to have jobs that allowed them both to be home to have supper together that their eyes and ears were closed to unspoken knowledge of painful truths.

"The government possibly hiding information from families," Grandpa was saying. "Hell, the government hides information about you from you. I don’t know everything they have on file about me in their databases." He’d glanced at Jason and then at Bobby, whose eyes were on his grandfather. "When I was in school, boys and girls didn’t have their eyes scanned by machines while mounted cameras watched their every move, and they didn’t pass their tote bags through metal detectors except in the worst schools in what was then called the inner cities. And we didn’t have identicards." He spat out this last word with contempt.

Bobby asked, "So how did they keep track of everybody?"

"They didn’t," returned Grandpa. "Your daily doings weren’t considered government business. When I was a kid, and even as a young working adult, the government didn’t record everybody’s credit purchases, everybody’s bank statements, everybody’s GIN activity. Companies sometimes kept track of your purchases for marketing purposes, but nobody forced you to do business with them. Back then the government had records of your income, your driving, things like that. At least they were in different agencies, not consolidated in one huge database. Now they have everything cross-referenced, and everything monitored. And with regular cash gone, you must have a standard-issue identicard to enroll in school, get a job, open a bank account, buy groceries, get medical treatment, or have any other dealings with the government, where they always know how many credits are in your account. We have an education system where Jason does basic arithmetic in the eighth grade. Also, back then what we called the Internet and what we called television were completely separate, making the Internet an independent medium where people could communicate or put information on websites without an information license."

"Really?" asked Jason. How the Global Information Network – the GIN, everybody now called it – came about, was something that had long interested him.

"How did all this come about?" Bobby asked.

"Haven’t we all heard many times?" returned his mother sarcastically.

"I haven’t heard it many times," answered Bobby.

Jason was grateful for his little brother’s support. The two traded quick and knowing glances. His little brother was no slouch. Jason knew what he’d been told in history of technology class last year, which was that combining the old Internet with other communications media was both more efficient and afforded better surveillance over all communications that helped smoke out potential terrorists. But he knew Grandpa would have an interesting perspective. It fascinated him that his grandfather’s perspective would be so different. According to his facilitators, consolidation of all these media under central control by the government had been a savior. Without it North Americans would be at the mercy of Jihadist terrorism such as had been wrought in New York City, San Diego and St. Louis, not to mention the ecoterrorism long practiced by private corporations and people who drove big cars. According to Grandpa, though, government had taken away the liberties of the people without protecting anyone from real terrorism, which was why shootings, snipings and occasional bombings such as San Francisco three years ago continued to happen. Which was why people in New Richmond did not go out much after dark, even with cams watching everywhere. The perps, he observed, were always from overseas or from outside what had once been these then-sovereign United States. But again, no one was supposed to say that. Those from outside had, after all, been cruelly exploited by the then-wealthy United States, and only under long-term Union supervision of redistribution programs were they beginning to catch up. What Jason had been told is that our world’s main goal had to be the establishment of Global Democracy. The defeat of the Jihadists would usher in a period of unparalleled prosperity for everyone everywhere. Or so the broadcasters on WBS News promised.

"You want to know when things changed?" began the old man. "Really, things started to go bad for the old Republic before I was even born."

"Republic?" said Bobby, frowning.

"Our original government, under a written Constitution."

"Like the Union Charter?"

He laughed, a sound conveying no amusement. "No. Not like the Union Charter. That thing empowers government. Our original Constitution limited government. It stood above government. It was understood back then that government couldn’t be allowed to set its own limits, or it would have no limits."

"I don’t understand," complained Bobby. "How can something stand above government?"

Jason said, "We were told in history class that authority comes from people’s rights, and that rights are granted by governments."

Grandpa sighed. "This is a long story. It goes back to rights being granted by God and not coming from government or from some written document at all."

"I still don’t understand," came Bobby’s voice again. Jason watched his face. The fifth grader really was puzzled.

"We really started getting into trouble around the time I was growing up. Maybe somebody will have the time and resources to put it all together someday. But the first really major event was the collapse of the old Soviet Union, where the Russian District and part of the old European Union is now. Communism in the old sense was dying rapidly. But the real cold war was just starting. That was the war over whether the United States of America was going to stay a sovereign nation with a government that protected the rights of its native-born citizens, or whether it was going to give up its sovereignty little by little, and through trade agreements, treaties, mass immigration, entangling alliances, and so on, get on the fast track toward what we have now. During the early 1990s, under the first Bush and first Clinton presidencies, we got on that fast track. They didn’t start it, of course, far from it, but George Bush the First and Bill Clinton were the first presidents with fully globalist agendas. Even your texts admit as much. The first waged a war in the Middle East that came to be known as the Gulf War. With the involvement of the old United Nations, this set us on course toward the destabilizing of the region that led eventually to the Middle Eastern District we have now – although it’s not a District in the sense of the Atlantic District, since most of the people living there don’t recognize Pan-American authority. That’s what these wars are really all about, after all. But anyway, the second of those two presidents I named, Bill Clinton, signed off on the treaty known as NAFTA that helped destroy our original job base and set us on course toward merging economies all over the Western hemisphere. Result: the elites got richer and more powerful. Most everyone else was soon struggling. We were told things like, ‘Expect to change careers four or five more times in your life.’ Nobody asked us; we sure didn’t take a vote on it.

"Then, there was nine-eleven, as everybody soon called it. That’s because it happened on September 11 in 2001, during the second George Bush’s presidency and almost seven years before you were born, Jason. It was a horrible day, that much is true. A group of early Jihadists flew planes into the two tallest buildings in the country, called the World Trade Center. The planes were filled with fuel that ignited on impact, destroyed the buildings and killed over 3,000 innocent people. It was the worst such attack on U.S. soil. The place I’d been working, normally bustling with activity, was completely silent except for televisions – there were at least two more planned attacks. One dove into the Pentagon and another that was thwarted over Pennsylvania before it could crash into the White House. No one was sure the attacks were over. That started the war against the Jihadists, as we call them now. Jihad was their term, not ours. This was convenient. Our leaders of the time described Islam as a ‘religion of peace.’ So it became crucial that this be not a Christianity-versus-Islam thing but a Democracy-versus-Jihad thing. America attacked one of their supposed strongholds, then called Afghanistan, a little over a month later. The attack brought down the government there, but didn’t stop the Jihadists.

"There was a saying back then that nine-eleven changed everything. Well, it didn’t change everything, but it changed a lot of things, most of them right here and a part of that real cold war I mentioned, the one only a few of us noticed. Before nine-eleven, people actively resisted identicards – back then we called them national ID cards. Before nine-eleven people basically resented intrusions by the state into their privacy, and even launched Internet campaigns against things like Know Your Customer – that was a program the banks were involved in back in the rough-and-tumble days of cash and check transactions, when credit was still just optional. After nine-eleven most people were so scared there would be more terrorism that they turned to government en masse and were even relieved when it gave itself one new set of powers right after another, starting with the airlines. Even before then there were those of us who warned about the rapid erosion of basic liberties in the United States – liberties supposed to be protected by the old Republic’s Constitution." He shook his head. "A few people listened, but not enough."

"My history facilitator last year said the Constitution was superceded by the Charter because it was outdated," said Jason, to observe Grandpa’s response.

The old man shook his head. "I know the official line. Everybody’s been trained to say that and even believe it. But the Constitution wasn’t outdated, it just wasn’t followed. It was inconvenient. It was hard to change. It was a real thorn in the side of those who wanted power. But its principles were valid. Those principles of God-given rights for individuals that limit government helped build this country, at least for the first few generations. Naked power grabs by government were rejected as unconstitutional back in the early 1800s. That really ended long ago, but until the last couple of decades most politicians at least paid the idea lip service. Now we’ve scrapped the idea that government should be limited – an idea that took centuries to develop. Nobody even understands it anymore. And we’re paying the price! Boy, are we paying the price!"

"But if government is limited," Angela asked, "can it really do the things it needs to do? Things like ensure our safety from the Jihadists that might be here, not to mention seeing to it that people have adequate places to live and adequate health care."

Grandpa had bristled. He had never approved of his daughter’s choice of occupations, but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. The offer she’d been made had been too good for her to pass up, particularly since her husband had been living from hand to mouth when they’d gotten married. Still would be, without the credits she was bringing in with her job in the district diversity department. "That’s just the problem!" he said. "Even before nine-eleven, half the country believed that only government could do certain things – regulate industry, help the environment, deliver the mail, run the schools, manage health care, feed the poor, ensure workforce diversity, create an offense-free world, protect us all from the bad guys real or imaginary, you name it. Very soon, those people who lived off government outnumbered those who didn’t. They simply outvoted us. There’s your democracy. Back around the turn of the millennium I ran across a saying, ‘Democracy is two wolves and a lamb taking a vote on what to have for dinner.’ If you were against government control of education, the vote-empowered politicians, their bureaucratic followers and media shills would say you were against education! If you believed employers should be able to hire who they wanted instead of according to a government-approved ratio, you were a bigot! If you wanted freedom from police surveillance, you must be on the side of the terrorists!"

"But then who would do all those things?" Angela demanded.

"What we used to call – " he involuntarily lowered his voice, as if the phrase was obscene " – free enterprise. The free market. People interacting freely, based on their best observations of what others in their community need or want and supplying it, not simply doing what they are told and working according to job quotas and making dutiful reports to the authorities like a bunch of sheep. For a long time, you see, people were allowed to find their own way in the world, not be shepherded into the jobs corporate-state bureaucrats wanted to fill. There were more interesting and better paying jobs then, too. Not just sitting in front of computer terminals all day long and entering data."

"Sounds like it was pretty chaotic, though," said Bobby.

"Actually there’s more chaos now than there was back then." Grandpa looked at Tom Jr. and Angela. "It is really too bad that home schooling became illegal after so much progress. I’d undertake the task with these two guys in a heartbeat."

"Yeah," Jason’s mom said. "A lot of those home schooled folks are in prison now. Others simply disappeared, along with their guardians. Nobody knows what happened to them."

"I’d like to know," said Tom, in a low voice.

"No," said her father. "You probably wouldn’t. And it’s sad. Those were the only people left who understood the founding principles of these United States, knew that we all answer to a Higher Power, saw what government had become and what a lot of corporations were becoming. Those people had become the biggest threat the globalists faced. Most hadn’t even rebelled openly. They just wanted to be left alone, including worshipping God as they saw fit – not this goddess we sometimes hear about – and if that included condemning all these same-sex marriages and adoptions and eventually the adult-child love relationships that came out of the closet right before Jason was born, then so be it. There were folks who said that our society was in decline even before the new millennium started. I suppose it was, but back then we could have turned things around. After all, there were smaller political parties, a handful of independence movements, and a few educational institutions and even colleges that were surviving outside the grip of federal control."

"What happened?" Jason asked.

Grandpa took a deep breath. "For starters, the different groups couldn’t get along with one another. Some were regional, such as the Southerners – or Southrons, as they called themselves. They believed the time had come to leave the United States itself – secede, they called it. It had been tried once before. Others despised the Southerners as much as they did the central government and wouldn’t work with them. Some were evangelical Christians; others were atheists. Those two usually ended up struggling with one another and basically canceled each other out. The private institutes never had the resources they really needed. Most of the public chose to spend money on football, on those big, fancy automobiles that would be illegal in a few years anyway, on every electronic gadget you can imagine, usually on credit, and didn’t even know these independence movements existed since they got all their news from TV. So the independence movements fell by the wayside. They ran out of money and they ran out of time. Their best idea was to consolidate their numbers by moving to a single place, such as what was then called South Carolina, or maybe Idaho – that’s now part of the North Pacific District. Or maybe New Hampshire, up in New England. A few libertarians had the idea of eventually accumulating enough numbers to get control of the legislature in one state and show what freedom could do. Elections back then worked on numbers alone – of those who voted. One way or another, we could have forced the globalists to deal with us. Even if they simply sent in troops, they’d be showing their true colors. But we couldn’t do that much. The best thing would have been to lock ourselves inside a convention hall somewhere and stay there until we agreed on a strategy that would have us standing up to the federal empire decisively, so that Rome on the Potomac – as this one slightly eccentric writer back then kept calling it – would have to either let us go or show its true colors by putting us all in concentration camps or mass murdering us like it did those people in Waco, Texas about a decade before."

"Texas?" came Bobby’s voice again.

"It’s part of the Aztlan District now," said Jason.

"Oh."

Jason turned back to Grandpa. "But wouldn’t your trying to leave the old United States also overthrow its sovereignty?"

The man’s eyes widened. "Good question, Jason. You really do have a sharp mind. The answer is that national sovereignty is an important value but not the highest value. The highest value is the individual’s God-given right to liberty: to own his own life and the fruits of his labor, and to trade those fruits with others peacefully. Government doesn’t create these rights. Government exists to encode them in law and protect them, and to punish lawbreakers – those who flaunt these rights. And when it stops protecting them and starts becoming the biggest lawbreaker of all, it is time to get rid of it and create a new government – or, some argued back then – get out from under its sway. If you can’t change it and you can’t get rid of it, you organize and leave – secede, like the Southrons wanted to do. The people’s rights as individuals to organize and secede was the most important check on the unlimited, unconstitutional growth of government power – and that was wiped out long before I was born, even before my grandparents were born. The point is, government was to answer to the people, and corporations were to answer to the marketplace. Both were to answer to universal, God-given moral principles.

"But eventually this whole argument became moot. The schools were teaching all this fuzzy relativism, and if you mentioned God-given moral principles you got either strange looks or were ridiculed as a religious fanatic. U.S. sovereignty, though, was being eroded from the globalist direction. We needed to do something, and we didn’t. At least, not enough. The controlled media got wind of us, and we were hung out to dry as dangerous anarchists and nut jobs. That was that. We’d established homes, so to speak, in cyberspace, but as government snoops began to appear everywhere and started tracking our activity on the Internet, that became more and more difficult. Then, shortly after you were born, the Global Information Administration merged the Internet itself with television and telecommunications generally, and the GIN was created – the Global Information Network, which most people now just call the Global Net. That wiped out the independent websites because all of a sudden the volumes of regulations that had applied to radio and television all along also applied to all electronic media including ours, and we answered to a huge bureaucracy instead of our editors and readers. Plus most of the old Web-writing languages and programs were useless with the new technology that was introduced. Today it’s almost impossible to be an independent unless you’re independently wealthy – and even then it’s dangerous. For most of us – well, jobs were hard to come by, and if you were associated with one of those anarchist groups … You wouldn’t get hired at all, and had no way to earn a living."

The old man stopped. Jason said, "That’s it? Go along or starve?"

"That’s pretty major," said his mother quietly. "You don’t work, you don’t eat. You don’t comply, you don’t work. That’s what was drilled into us. The age of welfare is over, or so they said."

"But they made your generation more dependent than mine was," Grandpa told her. "The globalists, that is, who destroyed the sovereignty of the United States, combining it with Mexico and Canada first into the North American Union after the Free Trade Area of the Americas was created in 2005. Then that was merged, a little at a time, with the struggling European Union, and then there was of course these ongoing wars in the Middle East, and finally we got this Pan-American leviathan we have now. Economically we’d been treading water. Europe was on its way to the next Dark Age." He laughed humorlessly. "Now we’re both on our way to the next Dark Age, and it’s practically illegal to say so. When President Hillary Rodham-Clinton signed the 8,000-page Global Information and Security Act of 2009, it pulled in a slew of things the government hadn’t been able to pull off, such as hate crimes and information crimes legislation, reparations for slavery, a total ban on private gun ownership, and ending private educational activities by people who didn’t have federally-approved credentials. That ended home schooling. It was hard to criticize the government without being charged with an information crime after that bill became law, and kids being taught by their parents were simply truants if their parents weren’t licensed by the new World Education Association and following their new International Standards. The kids were put in foster care when their parents were arrested. A lot of Christians had simply assumed that if they got their kids out of public schools they’d be fine. Oh, brother!" He shook his head sadly. "There were special forums for legal dissent, and mountains of red tape designed to discourage people from dissenting. Suddenly we independents were operating in a legal no-man’s land. Free speech was in the Union Charter, but there were so many strings on it that they might as well not have bothered. This is what put the Southerners out of business by the way. Their Confederate flag, for example, was illegal from the day that bill went into effect, even on private property, because anything considered racist by offended groups was criminalized. There was resistance. There were people put in jail because they had it on their cars, or front lawns, or flying atop their businesses. There were even a few shootouts between various small groups and internationalized police, but it was too late! A lot of Southerners and any number of others were prosecuted and imprisoned for weapons violations and hate crimes! It became impossible for an ordinary joe like me to own a gun since I wasn’t a cop or some other government official."

Grandpa paused, took a deep breath before continuing. "Somehow I got ahead of myself," he began again. "The real turning point was earlier. It was sometime in between nine-eleven and the end of 2003."

Jason asked, "What happened during that period?"

"Right after nine-eleven Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed what was called the Patriot Act. The following year he signed a huge bill called the Homeland Security Act. Late fall of that year, right before the first winter storms hit. It brought about the largest reorganization the federal government had seen in the whole previous half-century. Most of Congress hadn’t read either bill, had no idea what was in them. Most of the public didn’t know or care about domestic spying programs such as Total Information Awareness, run by a Dr. John Frankenstein Poindexter whose amoral antics almost ruined a presidency twenty years before. Then, in 2003, came the bill we all called Patriot II – its official name was the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. That bill opened the floodgates to the all the surveillance offices we have today, the compulsive record-keeping, the government’s ability to track every citizen in the name of fighting terrorists who the government kept warning could strike any day. The real war here was against the U.S. citizen, not the Jihadists." Grandpa gave another humorless laugh. "Why would al Qaeda – that was supposedly the major Jihadist network back then – waste time trying to destroy us? We were doing a pretty good number on ourselves! Many people warned how dangerous it was to believe that the central government could protect everybody if only we gave it more power. There were warnings about turning driver's licenses into national ID cards. There were warnings about Homeland Security: its employee databases, medical databases, databases that kept track of your every credit card purchase, every magazine you read, every airplane and hotel reservation you made, every time you saw a doctor, every site you visited on the Internet – all this added to the employee records, driving records, insurance records, tax records, medical records and other stuff the government already had. Some of that stuff got dropped from Homeland Security, thanks to the Internet. But things like Total Information Awareness didn’t go away. They just got real quiet. And even after the Domestic Security Enhancement Act became law, nothing dramatic seemed to be happening. There were no overt power grabs. Tanks didn’t come rolling down the streets. A few people griped about tightened security in airports, but most everybody relaxed. They went back to sports, Survivor, and whatnot.

"The global elites had learned, you see. They’d learned long before that if you want power, evolution by stealth always works better than revolution by violence. Sudden, abrupt changes in governance don’t work. I’ve heard it called the boiling frog syndrome. Put a frog in hot water, and he’ll jump out. Put him in cool water, turn up the heat little by little, and he’ll stay in his comfort zone and eventually boil to death. So those who wanted power moved a little at a time, turned up the heat a little at a time, while their lapdogs and shills in the media kept as many people as possible distracted with sports, celebrities and the latest gadgets. Only a few of us noticed what was happening to our freedoms, as when our driver's licenses weren’t just driver's licenses anymore. The elites had learned another lesson, too: that you don’t have to own what you can control, usually by controlling resources and information. So corporations kept their identities. The global elites, working through the old UN, had had a plan for over ten years already to control the world’s resources; they called it Agenda 21 – for the 21^st century, I presume. Corporations they subsidized with what some called corporate welfare. Everybody loved this because they said it created jobs. And it did – the kinds of global-workforce jobs the elites wanted, and at the expense of whatever would have happened in a free market. This was how corporate America gave up its autonomy – through the deadliest of all snares, the ongoing subsidy. Other weapons of control were environmental regulations and racial and homosexual extortion. Even wealthy CEOs went along with these or faced vilification in the mass media. They instituted their sensitivity training sessions. It all happened, little by little. Every overt move the government made was rationalized with: this helps us find and fight the terrorists as well as turns out a workforce better prepared for the racially, sexually and behaviorally diverse global economy of the future. The masses welcomed it. Just so long as they had jobs, were entertained, and felt safe. Those who protested, got fired. There were a few examples made in the early 2000s. But it didn’t take too much longer. Now we’re cooking in that boiling pot."

"Hmmm," Jason pondered. "Was anybody safer?"

"You tell me. People began spying first on strangers, reporting conversations they thought were suspicious to the police. This went on even though the Homeland Security bill repudiated it – supposedly. It was one public step back and two very private steps forward. Business as usual. The surveillance began through Total Information Awareness, controversial though that was. The assembling of records on everyone began, quietly, quietly. Most were worthless, of course, and just took up disk space on government computers at taxpayer expense, but if government bureaucrats wanted to destroy someone or some company, they could do it. Since I had politics that were more and more banned, I sure didn’t feel safe! I had a substantial electronic paper trail through email and Internet posts, and it eventually caught up with me. That’s why I have to live here – not that I don’t want to be around you and your brother and your mom and dad, but you know what I mean. It would be nice to be able to work, but – I’ve got too much arthritis anyway.

"Anyway, the last step was creating the GIN system. Our old Internet merged with television and cable, already controlled by media conglomerates that might as well have become branches of the central government. The elites saw those of us who published on the Internet as a threat, just like the home schoolers. By the 2004 election there were as many people reading us as were reading the controlled print media. But again, there were no overt power grabs that might set off people’s alarm bells. Just stories dropped here and there about ‘hate sites’ on the Internet. There were the pornography sites, which ‘everybody agreed’ needed to be banned, and that meant controls over the Internet. There was spam, which again, ‘everybody agreed’ was a nuisance and had to be stopped: more controls. One thing led to another. One step at a time. The major media first ignored and then scorned sites set up by well-educated people who criticized official policy from well-informed perspectives like the Austrian one. But they couldn’t stop us from publishing or people from reading. But then, presto, the technology changed. The GIN made early HTML and programs using it obsolete, and a webmaster’s skills were suddenly as useful as those of wagon wheel manufacturers. The new VDHTML – Virtual Dynamic Hypertext Mark-up Language – allowed you to design webcasts instead of websites, importing live videoclips, news-feeds, and do a lot of other things you couldn’t use HTML to do. You’ve seen the results. They not only behave like short television programs but allow for more direct interaction with viewers. People liked it because it seemed to put more information at their fingertips. Point your remote to the designated place on your NetVideo screen, and you could download all kinds of information. There were public assistance programs to retrain the webmasters in VDHTML – forcing them to get a certificate to go on working in the industry. That meant having the right attitudes, and not just about the new technology. So the old Internet was taken down and today’s GIN and NetVideo replaced it. There were subsidies for old Internet Service Providers to ‘help them through the transition’ by offering sweetheart deals to customers. They either accepted this arrangement or they couldn’t compete with those who did, and didn’t survive. Most people were easily controlled because the economy stayed horrible for that whole decade and people were scared to death of losing their jobs. The unwritten rule was – " he glanced at Jason’s father " – play by the new rules, or starve."

Jason recalled reading about old HTML webmasters – flamboyant outlaws on the early electronic frontier before it came under the jurisdiction of the Global Information Administration’s Electronic Media Division. He’d heard them described as hackers and anarchists and worse. "Did all the webmasters cooperate?" he asked.

"No. Some who’d worked for independent outfits couldn’t get certified but tried to keep their sites up anyway, for those who still had the old equipment. But they were eventually arrested – easier than catching someone driving without a license – and their sites were taken down. They weren’t compatible with the new technology anyway. You couldn’t use it to access them. A lot of information simply disappeared like it went down a black hole. The Global Information Administration – the result of that Global Information and Security Act – finally had what those in charge of it wanted: total control over the production and distribution of information in the Western world, except for a handful of rebels who went back to print media and started copying leaflets – sometimes by hand! Knowledge was indeed power. Then the United States basically ceased to exist. We’re not distinct states anymore but Districts: the Southern District, our Atlantic District, the Washington District, the New England District, the Aztlan District out west, and so on."

"Dad," said Angela, "things aren’t quite as bad as you portray them. You should be thankful Tom and I both have stable jobs. There are people who don’t."

"So who do we blame for that?" Grandpa demanded. "The people out of work? Their careers were destroyed! Good jobs were going overseas and south to what used to be Mexico before any of this stuff started. And remember, you guys are paying over 60 percent of your incomes into taxes: the New Richmond city tax, the Atlantic District tax, the North American tax and the Tobin Global tax. No wonder you both need to work almost twelve hours a day. When I was a kid my father worked and my mother stayed home to raise my sister and me. That’s what a stable family unit was in those days."

"You hate the government," said Angela. "But you’ve got to admit, it’s taken care of us alright. There’s a saying, Don’t bite the hand that is feeding you."

"Unless," Grandpa retorted sarcastically, "it’s keeping you from feeding yourself."

"Okay, okay – " Jason held up his hands. "Let’s not fight." The others, even his little brother, looked at him. Jason swallowed nervously and looked at his father. He sometimes had to remind himself that this wasn’t school, that he could tell Grandpa what he really thought, that he could tell his parents – uh, guardians – most of the time. "There’s a lot I don’t know," he said, "but I do know I don’t like this sense of being watched even when I pee." He looked at his grandfather. "But what are you suggesting that we do?"

Grandpa gave another of his humorless laughs. "Build a time machine! Go back in time to around 2001 or 2002 or even 2003, it wasn’t too late. Go back and knock some sense into those third-party people and independence movements, tell them to stop fighting amongst themselves and get organized. Tell them to stop wasting time trying to get elected on national third party tickets and focus on education for taking back their country, and to start raising the money it would take. Knock some sense into the rest of the knuckleheads that kept voting for Republicrats and Demopublicans. Tell them to teach their children how to be self-employed and how to gain financial independence the same time they’re teaching the principles that the original United States was founded on. They gave those up almost without a fight – because they weren’t paying attention and didn’t sense the danger. Tell them to knock some sense into the people more interested in football and Reality TV. Make them wake up! Some of those people even believed as the independents did and had the money to support them. But they spent their money on frivolous stuff. That was their choice. But choices always have consequences. Always!"

"There’s no such thing as time travel," said Jason’s father with an uncomfortable smile. It seemed to Jason a pointless remark, a statement of the obvious, something to fill the air with words and prevent the awkward silence that would doubtless ensue. "That’s silly," he went on. "Nobody today could build a machine like that even if it could exist."

Jason’s little brother, who had kept listening intently, grimaced and said quietly, "Yeah. They can barely keep the eye scanner thingy going at my school."

"We had a problem at New Richmond Middle this morning, too," recalled Jason. "I remember one of the other students mentioning it."

"Technology’s breaking down," observed Tom, eyes on his plate. "We have constant problems with system crashes down at the media center."

Angela shrugged. "Same in my office. There’s not enough skilled technicians."

Tom said, "Maybe all we have to do is wait."

Grandpa nodded. "Our technological society originally got built because there was freedom and because people had real educations that imparted real thinking skills. Now all three are gone, and the technology’s going to start to fall apart before too much longer. That’s what’s behind all these blackouts they’ve been having up north. Not just a shortage of qualified technicians but the fact that people are being herded like cattle into occupations they’re not suited for, and nobody understands how it all works anymore. Half the schools’ graduates can’t read the directions on a piece of equipment, much less diagnose a problem with it.

"I haven’t mentioned the international debt, in the tens of trillions. Today almost nobody understands what’s wrong with centralization, that in the long run it doesn’t work. As long as the bureaucrats keep trying to make it work, we’re not just living on borrowed credit, we’re living on borrowed time."

He looked at his daughter and son-in-law. "One reason you haven’t heard about my eldest grandchild probably isn’t malice. Those in charge over there really don’t really know where he is or how to reach him, with all the equipment breakdowns and communications failures. But I have heard a few rumors. Some of those leaflets I mentioned. Most folks made fun of those. But when people want to get information distributed bad enough, they can usually figure out a way to do it. And what I’ve been hearing is that the WBS people are simply lying and the war overseas is not going well at all. The Jihadists have not only been holding their own but attacking and overwhelming parts of what was the European Union. They had a lot of their people – Muslims, that is – already living there because of years of mass immigration. Those people all became part of the European Union and then the Pan-American Union. But they never took loyalty oaths." He shook his head. "Here, either. What became the Aztlan District was formed by Latinos in what was the American Southwest who thought they were going to reunite with Mexico, and the kind folks who built the North American Union gained their support and used their votes. Then the globalists doublecrossed them. They just used that movement to weaken U.S. sovereignty, then pulled Aztlan in with the rest while letting them go on using that name – almost like slapping their faces, letting them know they’d been used. Now there are Latinos seething with resentment out there, and I don’t blame them. There’s going to be a bloody war for independence one of these days. I might live to see it. I know you will. Not to mention this futile perpetual war on the other side of the world, a place we had no business being anyway. This Pan-American leviathan is going to fall apart. Empires always do. They always have. It’s a law of nature. No government built on violence, theft, and lies has ever lasted. This one won’t either." He looked at Jason. "That’s your answer. Since we can’t go back in time and knock some sense into those knuckleheads twenty years ago, we’re just going to have to ride this out – "

***************

The rest of the school day went by much like any other. There had been two fights, with four students sent to Health for counseling where they would doubtless also be prescribed the appropriate medication. There were the usual dull lectures delivered to tired-looking students by listless facilitators practically reading from Board-approved texts via computer disk. The business-partner classes seemed a little better; the tasks were moderately engaging. Sometimes Jason invented little games played silently with himself, competing only with himself to see how long it took him to accomplish certain tasks. He’d always tested high in computer and design skills on his International Standards Tests, and so that was the career path his counselors had steered him down. Working out the code would be more challenging if he didn’t always have to stop and explain it to others in his group, though; worse, Juanita and Cortessia continued to show more interest in each other than anything he said or the project itself. He fell down on people skills and even more on videophone skills in his role-playing sessions because sometimes he grew impatient. "Smile!" his facilitator Ms. Cruz, told him. "Relax! Be more interested, more patient with others!" And: "Be sensitive to the needs of your group-members. Remember, their grade is your grade." He said he would try. These were his only soft spots, even if in the end he usually carried his group. His work became their work. He was sure that in just a few weeks he’d probably be able to visit a few corporations in New Richmond’s downtown office parks and begin working on his job skills down there, maybe with team-members that weren’t strung out on medication or putting their hands inside each others’ clothing. Next year for sure, when he entered high school. Then his present team members would have to find someone else to carry their load. It would be their problem and not his. Until then he would do what he had to, to impress his elders enough to get out of here and maybe avoid being sent overseas to fight in the perpetual war Grandpa was sure the Union was ultimately going to lose, bankrupting itself in the process.

The only thing: Grandpa’s version of history was fascinating. He wanted to explore it further. He liked history. The subject would not be part of his official curriculum anymore, though. He’d learned all the history his counselors believed he needed to know to be a useful member of the global workforce someday.

At the end of the day, Jason boarded the same tram he’d come in on. It ran out of the downtown district, past the open space areas and finally came up alongside the various high rises where nearly everyone now lived. It made the usual stops to allow students to get off, finally arriving at the one where he and his parents and brother and Grandpa lived, their porch overlooking this very avenue. His was one on the final high rises on the tram’s route before New Richmond’s urban boundary, which was evident from the thirty-foot-high wall. Beyond the urban boundary was the designated wildlands or wilderness area where humans were now forbidden by international law to live.

The tram passed through the gate surrounding his high rise, the electrified fence extending in both directions, and stopped in front of his high rise. He was frowning even before he was outside. There were three police vans parked in front, their lights whirling. Police were striding here and there talking into wristphones. The tram his brother was on pulled in just as his departed. The sliding doors opened and a few younger kids got off, Bobby among them. "What’s going on?" asked Bobby as he came up.

"I’ll see if I can find out," Jason said. He made his way around the grassy area which was also forbidden, to the sidewalk, and up toward the ground floor entrance past the sign that read NEW RICHMOND TOWERS – because affordable living is your right! Jason stopped when his grandfather emerged in the walkway, his hands behind him, two policewomyn on either side, three more behind. His face was drawn and haggard; at the moment he looked considerably older than his sixty-four years. His parents – both apparently called away from work – followed close behind. His father was pale, and his mother was wide-eyed. At least their hands were free. Jason came up. "What’s this all about?" he demanded.

"They’re arresting Grandpa!" exclaimed little Bobby. He began to cry.

His parents – guardians – looked at each other. His father stared at his wife, with her more powerful job, as if to say, Do something! She stared back, looking helpless, her head turning from side to side. Finally she said, "He was warned. We told him."

"It’s going to be okay," Grandpa said. "They’re just going to interrogate me."

"They’re going to do more than that!" Angela snapped.

Out in the light, Jason could see it: a trickle of blood near Grandpa’s hairline. One of the policewomyn had probably struck him, possibly to subdue him. Jason studied his parents – guardians, confound it! Two defeated people, doing nothing! He tried to grab one of the policewomyn by the arm. She pulled away from him. One of the policewomyn following held up her hand, a gestured warning that he be cooperative like his parents. "Why are you arresting him?" he demanded.

"Leave my grandpa alone!" Bobby cried. He tried to strike at one of the policewomyn escorting Grandpa out to the main walk.

The womin turned and gave the little boy a shove. He sprawled to the pavement and lay their crying.

Angela dashed up, her face white. "Was that necessary?"

The policewomin glowered back. "Shut up! Or you’re next!"

Angela’s jaw dropped open. Tom went to his wife’s side and took her arm. She shook it off almost indifferently. Jason helped his sobbing brother to his feet.

"Information crimes, ladies and gentlemen!" intoned Grandpa, obviously emphasizing the archaic phrase deliberately. "The criminalizing of the spread of truthful information did this!"

"Well talk about it down at the station," said the policewomin whose arm Jason had touched. "F****** sexist!" growled the one who had shoved Bobby. They continued Grandpa on his way to the nearest of the waiting vans. Their efforts were assertive without becoming openly violent, but only because Grandpa was not resisting openly.

Jason looked around, and said, to no one in particular: "So how did they find out?" And then it dawned on him. He backed up, looked up the side of the building. To a certain window, three floors up. The walk-up next to theirs.

The neighbor. Laura Cotton. Jason could see her from here, standing behind her window, watching. He remembered what Grandpa had said about neighbors spying on neighbors. And what his mother had said about how easy it was to hear through these cheap-plaster walls. Jason pointed up at her and shouted even though sure she couldn’t hear him, "You did this, didn’t you?!"

One of the other policewomyn said ominously, "You had better control your children, Mrs. and Mr. Sandborn!"

"Jason!" came his mother’s voice again. "Calm down!" Several of the policewomyn were now focused on him as much as they had been on his grandfather.

Laura Cotton had retreated into the shadows up there. Her curtain abruptly closed. Jason turned and looked back and Grandpa, who was now outside the fence and behind the largest of the vans. Its rear slid open. Jason felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. He broke free and ran down the grassy embankment, his little brother following.

"Do not run on the grass!" ordered one of the policewomyn.

"That’s government property, kids!" said one of the others.

Jason ignored them both. There was no green this time of the year, anyway. Bobby spoke for both of them: "Please let Grandpa go!"

One of the policewomyn looked at the two adults. She pointed across the avenue. "I’ve got that van over there awaiting your two kids!"

"It’s going to be okay," Grandpa said, interrupting whatever Jason’s father had been about to say. "I’m an old man. What can they do to an old man?"

A stepladder descended with a metallic whine. "Inside the van," directed the policewomin. Jason glanced toward the front of the van. A man was in the driver’s seat. That was because womyn were in charge here, as they were nearly everywhere. Men drove them around. Back at the station, men were office clerks and security guards.

Grandpa cautiously stepped up, wincing as the arthritis that had taken up residence in his hips protested. Before disappearing inside, Grandpa turned and looked back. "Jason," he said, "like I said the other night, you have a sharp mind. Never stop using it! Never stop thinking!"

"Inside, Mr. Sandborn!" ordered the policewomin. She turned to Jason and Bobby. "You two return to your guardians before you get in trouble! And don’t walk across the grass!"

His grandfather disappeared. The stepladder ascended once again, and the rear of the van slid closed. Bobby cried openly. Jason felt tears welling up in his own eyes as he thought back over the things Grandpa had been saying the other night – it could have been then or it could have been any of several other occasions. Because a neighbor, trained to be loyal to everything Grandpa had been attacking, had overheard and ratted. And now his grandfather would probably be prosecuted under the very information crime laws he’d struggled against!

Terror welled up inside him, rose up his sternum in a column like a pent-up animal about to break out. People accused of information crimes sometimes never made it to a trial phase.

Sometimes they simply disappeared.

Worse yet, there wasn’t a thing he or anyone could do about it! As the policewomyn clambered into their vans, he considered banging on the side of one of them. He wanted to do something, anything.

But getting himself thrown into that other van wouldn’t accomplish anything beyond further upsetting his parents. (Guardians! his mind screamed, in accordance with his eight years of training in school. Guardians!)

Since we can’t go back in time and knock some sense into those knuckleheads twenty years ago, we’re just going to have to ride this out.

Jason felt torn. There was much he didn’t understand. But this wasn’t right! It couldn’t be! He thought about the world around him: a world of perpetual surveillance, of technology designed for control, of neighbors who spied on neighbors, a world where speech was limited to officially approved topics, where people lived like sardines in high rises and travel was limited to officially approved areas, where education was limited to an officially approved curriculum, where kids like him were steered towards careers when they were in the eighth grade and always away from dangerous subjects like history – a world where those who didn’t comply well enough or measure up well enough were sent overseas to fight a perpetual war where they disappeared into thin air.

A violent world inside urban boundaries that looked tranquil by day but allowed gangs to come out at night and traffic in unauthorized goods and substances. Because, as Grandpa would explain, even the most powerful of governments couldn’t suppress some people’s natural demand for the items and other’s natural ability to meet that demand. The illegality drove up the price along with the level of danger. The womyn who ran New Richmond couldn’t begin to control it. Although the local segments on WBS News always implied that the city government was instituting new programs to deal with the gangs. The mayor herself had appeared just last week and said they were finally bringing the gang problem under control.

But it would still be a world where kids couldn’t come inside a school without being searched, ID’d and iris-scanned. A world of massive taxation, massive inflation, massive redistribution of wealth, massive dependency – a world whose technology was starting to break down.

It would still be a world that existed with this diffuse, almost unsensed undercurrent of anger – an anger that erupted in the form of the occasional fight – surprisingly, sometimes with weapons since even though firearms had been illegal for years now people still obtained them from the gangs or other underground sources if they wanted them badly enough. But this was only certain people. For many of the rest – Jason saw it embodied in his facilitators, the administrators, the school nurses and counselors, and many of his fellow students – there was this settled listlessness and boredom. Motions with nothing behind them. The mental lifelessness of the lifelong dependent who had accepted that she would be controlled for life, but would collect nice pensions and benefits. With boys it was worse. Boys were less than zero, which was why so many were on medication. And the authorities wondered why there were technological breakdowns and power outages, and why the gangs were uncontrollable.

Grandpa again: centralization doesn’t work! Not in the long run. Nor does any sort of political favoritism such as the feminist one steeped in hatred of men. These "womyn" have become as masculine and controlling as what they despised.

The coming Dark Age, Grandpa had several times said.

Now what?

Grandpa’s voice again: we’re just going to have to ride this out.

If only people twenty years ago had done something to prevent this. If only they’d wanted more out of life than a nice job and a steady stream of entertainment. If only they’d paid more attention to what their leaders were doing and said in one loud voice, No. If only they had started thinking as individuals instead of as group members. If only they hadn’t been so obsessed with feeling safe. If only they had asked more questions, such as why legislation supposed to ferret out terrorists was being used to legalize and rationalize spying on them, and subjecting them to the humiliating searches that were only the start.

If only….

But then, also in his mind, he heard his father’s quiet voice, a faint cry of hope: maybe all we have to do is wait…

May 24, 2003

Steven Yates [send him mail] is an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A professional writer and editor with a PhD in philosophy, he is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). His latest book manuscript, In Defense of Logic, is undergoing revisions. He works out of Columbia, South Carolina.

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