As the Tear Gas Clears Pt. 2 - Keeping It Personal

Marty Junior

Marty puts himself first in line to shake the governor’s hand at the recognition ceremony hosted in Ann Arbor. Michigan’s governor recognizes the key role played by the Office of Remote Surveillance in putting down the strikes, and elevates the agency to the level of department. Marty's boss’s boss becomes  the Secretary of Surveillance. The ripple effect of promotions, and the governor’s handshake, earns Marty a plum day-shift supervisor spot. Marty rejoices at the prospect of spending nights and weekends with Tina, Trey, and newborn Tonya. 

Ann Arbor, Michigan
As noted, the tear gas has cleared.

The family settles into a comfortable, and what they hope will be, stable life. Trey needs the stability, as he is diagnosed with developmental delays, which were likely inherited from the male side of the family. His grandfather had to cope with dyslexia, and though Marty Junior never got a formal diagnosis, he joked that his love of numbers and logic problems stemmed from borderline autism. Domestic life takes priority over profession for Marty Junior and family, as the upheavals around the General Strike fade in the rear view mirror.

Until Detroit hosts a mega donor event in the summer of 2030. Marty is off-duty the evening of the Midterm Massacre. Detroit is the scene of the botched attack that devolves into a hostage situation, so Marty and his day shift team get called in. They manage to track down the extended family of a Shining City fighter who allowed a brief lapse in ‘no technology’ discipline. State Police round up the extended family, which is brought in and threatened with execution if Shining City won’t lay down their arms. The fighter in question agrees to surrender, but the rest of the group refuses. The governor demands a show of force, so police storm the venue. The ensuing gun battle leaves 127 dead, including the extended family of the fighter who attempts to surrender.

With this successful detective work, Marty gets promoted to Deputy Director for the Upper Peninsula in 2031. While the wife and kids bemoan moving to Marquette, they soon fall back into a comfortable routine, albeit with few of the educational services Trey needs. Marty complains to Tina that he should have received a more prestigious post, but she reminds him to play the long game. They don’t know it, but out of the populated areas of the state actually serves Marty’s career. He receives little of the blame for the intelligence failures of 2036.

Jillian

Jillian gets less sleep than she did during residency in the wake of the General Strike. Their son, Vern, named for the Vernal Equinox on which he was born, is a needy boy wracked by separation anxiety and night terrors. During middle-of-the-night changing of soiled bedsheet, she must remind herself how terrified the boy was he would never see his dad again, or that the men in blue suits would come back for him. 

Ashtabula, Ohio
You can almost see Canada from here!

And Jillian loses sleep every time Chris gets out of bed. Due to the torture during his imprisonment, Chris falls into a crippling addiction to legal painkillers. Jillian always writes him fresh scripts and clings to hope that he will clean up. But social welfare and drug treatment programs are not funded by the government and are ruinously expensive for all but the most well-off. If anyone who keeps track of the paperwork notices the trend, she’s never called into question over it. 

Chris’s shoddy bookkeeping drives the clinic closer to net loss every year, which affects the family’s bottom line, as well as providing another source of depression for Chris, which positively reinforces his addiction. Of course, this net loss is only on the books. Many of Jillian's patients must make payment through barter rather than formal crediting and debiting. Fortunately for Jillian and the staff, in the wake of the General Strike, they voted to turn the clinic into an employee-owned co-operative. When a patient must offer barter to pay for medical services, someone on the staff likely needs whatever goods or skills the patient has to offer. 

Jillian gives birth to a second child, daughter Autumn in 2032, during a year and a half streak of sobriety for Chris. On warm summer afternoons, the family walks along the shores of Lake Erie. Jillian looks north with no small degree of longing. She attended medical school in Montreal, and speaks fluent Québecois French. The couple figures they could move north and fit right in. But with the disillusion of the Canadian state, legal crossing becomes ever more difficult. For a couple still clinging to the belief that they operate in a world of just rules and laws, illegal immigration remains out of the question. 

Bobby

Arriving in Tennessee with a fistful of dollars and no real prospects doesn’t much bother Bobby. Growing up, his father worked 12 hour shifts as a manager at a burger joint. His pay went to ever-increasing contributions to an HSA that never quite covered the bills for treating his worsening diabetes. As a result, Bobby spiraled away from his nuclear family, couch surfing and finding kindred spirits amongst other high school slackers. As the train rolls to a stop in a changing yard on the north side of Memphis, Bobby feels good about his chances.

Frisco Yard, Memphis, Tenn.
This picture is over 50 years old. 
Train yards don't change much.

Bobby finds employment at a fried-fish restaurant in the midst of hiring staff to fill holes left by the strike. Bobby took seriously his grandpa’s admonition to learn to cook, because cooks never starve, and lands a job on the line. The rest of the staff treat him like a plague rat, until a young hostess, Jeannie, figures out that he was in the city for the Battle of Louisville. That Bobby sat in jail as the bullets and drone-grenades flew doesn’t matter to her so much as the residual scent of tear gas and delousing powder.

When Bobby receives his first paycheck, he’s shocked that his wages receive the same deduction for lost potential profit as everyone else. Bobby initially reacts sourly, but a common refrain from the Louisville strike keeps ringing in his head; “they withhold something from all of us.” Bringing it up to other staff leads to stony silence at first, until Bobby makes clear that he wants a solution for the whole crew, not an exemption for himself. They know management won’t change the policy, and striking is now illegal. Perhaps rashly, perhaps because of their budding romance, Jeannie asks if Bobby would carry the message for the staff to the debt collectors.

In a dark alley behind a boarded up tire factory, Bobby meets a young woman. She asks a few questions, gives simple instructions, then ends the meeting after five minutes. Bobby returns to work, on the look out for the information the debt collector requested. He discovers that that the owner of the restaurant faces financial pressure from his principal creditor, a wealthy owner of multiple franchises in the Memphis area. Bobby scribbles this info on a scrap of paper and leaves it in a small tube on the back of a bench in a bus stop shelter.

A few weeks later, headlines scream about a suspicious explosion that leveled the house of a local financier. The police arrive at the restaurant and arrest seven members of the staff, including Jeannie. While they have no specific evidence, they hold them without charges. Four of those arrested return to work a few days later, but the other three including Jeannie, are held an extra five days. With a split lip and swollen black eyes, she can barely keep eye contact as she breaks up with Bobby and tells him he needs to leave town. Reluctantly, Bobby packs his bag again and rides the rails south, this time winding up in New Orleans. 

Allison

Allison walks from her crash pad to the restaurant with confidence. People in the neighborhood giver her friendly, almost knowing smiles along the way. At work, the new owner discontinues wage garnishments over lost profits, and even shares some of the profit directly with the staff. Rumors swirl around the Firestone Park neighborhood that anyone with a predatory creditor ought to visit the fried-chicken place on Millington Road. If you leave an empty pack of cigarettes, with a name and address tucked inside, at the booth next to the kitchen entrance, you might get a paper note tacked to your door with a time and location to talk to one of the Memphis Debt Collectors.  

Abandon Firestone Plant, Memphis, TN
Looks like a great place to build an IED...

Federal laws passed by the Reactionary Party remove ever more categories of debt from the list of what can be discharged through bankruptcy, including medical bills, home and even auto loans. The trickle of empty cigarette packs, sometimes appearing only once every few months, becomes a weekly occurrence. Soon, Allison, and her two accomplices have more work than they can handle. They take a quiet break from threatening and murdering creditors in the wake of the bust of Jeannie and her coworkers. This decision comes at a fortunate time, as the police raid the restaurant a few days later. Thanks to a scheduling error, which turned out to be quite intentional on the part of the restaurant’s new manager and owner, neither Allison nor her accomplices were at work that day. 

The staff of the restaurant continue to secretly feed Allison and her two accomplices, and the three begin squatting in an abandoned warehouse, before acquiring a defunct RV on an abandoned lot on the north end of the city. One night in late 2035 Alison answers the door of the RV and finds herself face-to-face with a man who simply introduces himself as “the Professor.”

The man gives them an address and promises that in two weeks time, for one night only, there will be a suitcase EMP in the dumpster out back. If the group takes the device, he will assume they are ready to turn the country back into a shining city on a hill. With that, the Professor disappears into the drizzle and fog of a February night in the Mississippi delta. Two weeks later, with shaking hands, Allison pulls a heavy brown suitcase out of a dumpster. Back at the RV, the trio inspect the device and decide to dig up their stash of ‘faulty’ batteries and ‘expired’ blasting caps, to take one last shot at toppling the oligarchy.