Don't Pal Around with Terrorists
Marty Junior takes the information he gleaned from the home surveillance of the Reactionary Party candidate to his superiors. Not his direct supervisor, but as far up the chain of command as he can confidently reach, to an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security. This woman reviews the data and agrees that the kind of double dealing their elected official engaged in compromises the security of the homeland, and green-lights an operation by Marty’s office to expose the elected official. But first, we need to take a quick digression into the land of endless surveillance and drones.
The Shining City and their affiliated insurgents learned long ago to avoid electronics, as they’re all compromised by the state. Stationary platforms and fixed installations are constantly sabotaged, often by 10 and 12 year old boys with rocks. No community will give up its kids to the state, so unless the kids get caught red-handed, the damaged equipment must be replaced, often at not-insignificant cost. Even more nefarious, some contractors install the equipment, but do lazy jobs of it, leaving the state blind in huge swathes of US cities. And the Upper Midwest is a hotspot of armed insurgency, so the sabotage is even more widespread.
Frustration with the surveillance problems leads Marty to an inevitable conclusion; surveillance needs to go airborne. While drones have been in use since at least the early 2010s, they’ve never been able to operate uninterrupted due to power constraints. Yes, loitering UAVs can operate up to 30 hours, but smaller drones can, even in the 2040s, only operate on one battery charge that lasts between 30 and 90 minutes. What has changed in between is the quality of optics. Even small drones can now reliably recognize faces at further distances, even in poor-visibility situations, like the blanket of smoke from Canadian wildfires.
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| I'm sure they'll only target bad guys. |
Marty’s office monitors the elected official for a number of weeks, until he hears the words he’s waited for; “Meet me at 1:30.” A trusted subordinate launches ten drones, each armed with a grenade and linked to a facial recognition database. The drones follow the official’s SUV through Detroit for half an hour. The vehicle enters the lowest floor of a defunct parking garage. The drones loiter for a bit, until locating a group of six young men, all suspected of affiliation with insurgent groups. The young men enter the parking garage from different directions. After waiting a few minutes, the drones swarm the group and detonate their grenades. None of the young men survive. Neither does the elected office and his driver.
The one reporter brave enough to ask for comment on the official’s death gets fed a (mostly true) story, that the representative was meeting with insurgents and was therefore a valid target. The message to the public is simple: “don’t pal around with terrorists.” The message going around the inner circles of power is a bit less nuanced: “no one is safe.” Marty receives a promotion to the level of Assistant Secretary, and the woman who green-lit the operation moves up to the rank of Deputy Secretary. If he’s bothered that the insurgents and the elected official probably wouldn’t have been convicted in a court of law, based on the circumstantial evidence Marty presented, just as when we met him, Marty loses no sleep over it. After all, he’s one of the good guys.
"We Live in a Country Where Children Have to Die to Save Their Mothers"
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| The background is a bit too nice for a single mom living in a slum, but this was the best the Internet could do with the prompt given. |
Jillian couldn’t get out of bed for months after Vern’s death. The handful of nurses that stuck with her after the closure of the clinic began to drift away. While they want to help her get over the death of her son, they need to feed themselves and their families too. And none are trained to help a parent handle the grief over the death of their child. Autumn, her now 5-year-old daughter, scrounges what she can from friends and distant relations to keep the two of them fed. Eventually, the eviction agents arrive, and their things, along with the mother and daughter, end up on the street.
Eviction does come with something of a silver lining. It snaps Jillian out of her grief. With winter quickly approaching, the low-hanging clouds blowing in off Lake Erie take on a distinct battleship gray as before the blanket the city in feet of snow. The family makes it into Ashtabula’s only homeless shelter, which can offer little more than a paper-thin wall between people and the elements. Autumn develops a serious cough, and cannot keep down the meager food Jillian’s work as the clinic’s resident doctor brings in. Perhaps its pity or inspiration, but one of the transients of the clinic knows, ways, to get the antibiotic Autumn needs. Taking matters into his own hands, the man gets a handful of pills to Jillian and her daughter. The cough eases and the girl’s health improves.
This single act of thievery, and kindness, inspires Jillian to restart her medical practice. Over the coming years, she and Autumn live in the shelter and administer what medical care they can, to the impoverished and the homeless. This brings her minor local celebrity as some kind of local saint. The story makes it onto the curated, state-controlled internet, and comes to her older brother’s attention.
Marty visits Ashtabula to take stock of his sister and niece. They appear underweight and poorly groomed to him. He offers to take them in, promising good food and a clean, warm place to live. Jillian wants desperately to take him up on the offer, but she sees something in his eyes that chills her more than the gray snow falling outside. Jillian politely refuses his help, and Marty sweetens the deal, offering to have her criminal record expunged and allowing her to return to legal medical practice. When she continues to refuse, he threatens to have her jailed for medical malpractice and Autumn removed from her care.
The next day, a pair of Marty’s agents show up to remove Autumn from the shelter. Jillian will not relinquish her daughter to her now-estranged brother, and a scuffle ensues. The people of the shelter put themselves between the doctor and her daughter, and the government goons. Guns get drawn, and Autumn, now 11, understands what must be done. She agrees to leave with the agents so that her mother will not be harmed. Through all-to-familiar tears, Jillian says goodbye to a second child in five years. That night, some concerned friends from the shelter hustle Jillian out the back door as Homeland Security Agents shut the place down and begin arresting anyone with so much as a suspicion of a criminal record.
Los Estados Unidos Quieren Tú
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| Nationalism: Getting young men to kill each other since at least 1848... |
Bobby sets to work in Veracruz building a new life for himself. He doesn’t live among the diaspora from the USA, instead moving in to a shack in the dockworkers neighborhood. While the peso fluctuates wildly with each twisting turn of the Revolution, those employed loading and off-loading ships always manage to keep themselves fed. Within a few years, Bobby finds himself senior man on a dockworker’s crew, stakeholder in the dockyard’s collective ownership cooperative, and perhaps most surprising, happily married to a local girl named Margarita, with a baby on the way.
That’s right. By 2041, a 32 year old gringo with no history of staying too long any one place finds himself something of a pillar of the community. And with this stability, an old urge kicks in. Maybe it’s wanderlust, or imposter syndrome, but when the call goes out for volunteers to join the liberation of the north, Bobby signs his name. He justifies it to Margarita and the baby by saying he’ll be far behind the lines working logistics. And this is his chance to strike back against the empire that drove him from his homeland. Margarita threatens to leave him, but he swears to a number saints that he will return as soon as the war is over.
While not exactly being lied to, he does serve in a support role which is technically non-combat, Bobby soon discovers the asymmetric warfare which defines the Mexican invasion of South Texas. On multiple occasions, his logistics unit finds itself under attack, typically from US airstrikes. While he never suffers direct injury, Bobby does rescue five other men from burning vehicles, earning the Cruz de Vida, an honorary title bestowed for, well, saving the lives of fellow soldiers. There’s a different distinction for saving the lives of civilians. Revolutions love to bestow honors on those who fight for them, and La Joventud is no different in that regard.
Bobby returns to Veracruz in the summer of 2042 to a much-relieved Margarita and little Roberto. The dockyard re-hires him, and the community welcomes him back. Now that he’s fought back and won, the taste becomes intoxicating. Bobby looks north across the Gulf, and wants another victory.
You Only Do Two Days
Allison tries to conceal her terror and glee, finding that both emotions can cohabitate in the same person, at the same moment. While the authorities snatched her off the street on suspicion of a crime, the crime in question has nothing to do with the bombing the Debt Collectors carried out. Instead, they think she engaged in a series of burglaries in one of the posh condo buildings downtown. Though she had nothing to do with these crimes, Allison soon discovers that innocence will not keep her out of prison. Her head is shaved and she is shoved into a general holding cell with dozens of other men and women of Memphis’s underclass.
Since 2036, she bounced from county prison to state penitentiary to a slave labor camp in the Smoky Mountains. Officially, the facility is named the West Creek Labor Rehabilitation Facility, but no one there lives under any illusions about the camp's true purpose. Fortunately for her, on the first day of detention back in ’36, a fellow inmate recognized her as the girl he’d talked to about an onerous set of payday loans. While she insisted that she didn’t know what he was talking about, the rest of the inmates got the message. Allison never found herself on the receiving end of any inmate on inmate crime. Even the guards largely left her alone, to pass year after year in state custody.
None of the inmates of the slave labor camp knew anything about the Demonstration Party’s landslide wins in 2042, which included winning control of the governor’s mansion in Tennessee. After several years of prodding by human rights activists, the governor visits the West Creek camp on a ‘fact-finding’ mission. Once there, he seems genuinely shocked at the conditions. When he finds out many of the inmates were never even convicted of a crime, he demands the facility release all prisoners held without trial, on their own recognizance. The warden of the facility drags his feet, until the new governor threatens to throw the warden in with the inmates. On June 21st, 2045, Allison walks free from prison after seven long years. When she gets back to Memphis, and people ask her how long she was in, she tells them she did just two days, the day you go in, and the day you get out.
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| This, but with less concrete and more canvas tents. |
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