This is the sixteenth installment of an exploration of some
of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator, having recovered from a bout of the flu, goes for a walk,
meets someone he’s encountered before, and begins to understand why the
Lakeland Republic took the path it did...
***********
The next morning I felt pretty good, all things considered,
and got up not too much later than usual. It was bright and clear, as nice an
autumn day as you could ask for. I knew I had two days to make up and a lot of
discussions and negotiations with the Lakeland Republic government still
waited, but I’d been stuck in my room for two days and wanted to stretch my
legs a bit before I headed back into another conference room at the Capitol. I
compromised by calling Melanie Berger and arranging to meet with her and some
other people from Meeker’s staff after lunch. That done, once I’d finished my
morning routine, I headed down the stairs and out onto the street.
I didn’t have any particular destination in mind, just fresh
air and a bit of exercise, and two or three random turns brought me within
sight of the Capitol. That sent half a dozen trains of thought scurrying off in
a bunch of directions, and one of them reminded me that I hadn’t seen a scrap
of news for better than two days. Another couple of blocks and I got to
Kaufer’s News, where the same scruffy-looking woman was sitting on the same
wooden stool, surrounded by the same snowstorm of newspapers and magazines. I
bought that day’s Toledo Blade, and since it was still way too early to
put anything into my stomach, I crossed the street, found a park bench in front
of the Capitol that had sunlight all over it, sat down and started reading.
There was plenty of news.
The president of Texas had just denounced the Confederacy for drilling
for natural gas too close to the Texas border, and the Confederate government
had issued the kind of curt response that might mean nothing and might mean
trouble. The latest word from the
Antarctic melting season was worse than before; Wilkes Land had chucked up a
huge jokulhlaup—yeah, I had to look the word up the first time I saw it, too;
it means a flood of meltwater from underneath a glacier—that tore loose maybe
two thousand square miles of ice and had half the southern Indian Ocean full of
bergs.
There was another report out on the lithium crisis, from
another bunch of experts who pointed out yet again that the world was going to
run out of lithium for batteries in another half dozen years and all the
alternatives were much more expensive; I knew better than to think that the
report would get any more action than the last half dozen had. Back home, meanwhile, the leaders of the
Dem-Reps had a laundry list of demands for the new administration, most of
which involved Montrose ditching her platform and adopting theirs instead. There’d been no response from the Montrose
transition team, which was probably just as well. I knew what Ellen would say
to that and it wasn’t fit to print.
Still, the thing I read first was an article on the
satellite situation. There was a squib on the front page about that, and a big
article with illustrations on pages four and five. It was as bad as I’d feared.
The weather satellite that got hit on Friday had thrown big chunks of itself
all over, and two more satellites had already been hit. The chain reaction was under way, and in a
year or so putting a satellite into the midrange orbits would be a waste of money—a
few days, a week at most, and some chunk of scrap metal will come whipping out
of nowhere at twenty thousand miles an hour and turn your umpty-billion-yuan
investment into a cloud of debris ready to share the love with anything else in
orbit.
That reality was already hitting stock markets around the
world—telecoms were plunging, and so was every other economic sector that
depended too much on satellites. Most of the Chinese manufacturing sector was
freaking out, too, because a lot of their exports go by way of the Indian
Ocean, and satellite data’s the only thing that keeps container ships out of
the way of icebergs. Economists were trying to rough out the probable hit to
global GDP, and though estimates were all over the map, none of them was pretty. The short version was that everybody was
running around screaming.
Everybody outside the Lakeland Republic, that is. The
satellite crisis was an academic concern there. I mean that literally; the
paper quoted a professor of astronomy from Toledo University, a Dr. Marjorie
Vanich, about the work she and her grad students were doing on the mathematics
of orbital collisions, and that was the only consequence the whole mess was
having inside the Lakeland borders. I shook my head. Progress was going to win
out eventually, I told myself, but the Republic’s retro policies certainly
seemed to deflect a good many hassles in the short term.
I finished the first section, set down the paper. Sitting
there in the sunlight of a clear autumn day, with a horsedrawn cab going
clip-clop on the street in front of me, schoolchildren piling out of a
streetcar and heading toward the Capitol for a field trip, pedestrians ducking
into Kaufer’s News or the little hole-in-the-wall café half a block
from it, and the green-and-blue Lakeland Republic flag flapping leisurely above
the whole scene, all the crises and commotions in the newspaper I’d just read
might as well have been on the far side of the Moon. For the first time I found
myself wishing that the Lakeland Republic could find some way to survive over
the long term after all. The thought
that there could be someplace on the planet where all those crises just didn’t
matter much was really rather comforting.
I got up, stuck the paper into one of the big patch pockets
of my trench coat, and started walking, going nowhere in particular. A clock on
the corner of a nearby building told me I still had better than an hour to kill
before lunch. I looked around, and decided to walk all the way around the
Capitol, checking out the big green park that surrounded it and the businesses
and government offices nearby. I thought of the Legislative Building back home
in Philadelphia, with its walls of glass and metal and its perpetually leaky
roof; I thought of the Presidential Mansion twelve blocks away, another
ultramodern eyesore, where one set of movers hauling Bill Barfield’s stuff out
would be crossing paths just then with another set of movers hauling Ellen
Montrose’s stuff in; I thought of the huge bleak office blocks sprawling west and
south from there, where people I knew were busy trying to figure out how to
cope with a rising tide of challenges that didn’t look as though it was ever
going to ebb.
I got to one end of the park, turned the corner. A little in
from the far corner was what looked like a monument of some sort, a big slab of
dark red stone up on end, with something written on it. Shrubs formed a rough
ring around it, and a couple of trees looked on from nearby. I wondered what it
was commemorating, started walking that way. When I got closer, I noticed that
there was a ring of park benches inside the circle of shrubs, and one person
sitting on one of the benches; it wasn’t until I was weaving through the gap
between two shrubs that I realized it was the same Senator Mary Chenkin I’d met
at the Atheist Assembly the previous Sunday. By the time I’d noticed that,
she’d spotted me and got to her feet, and so I went over and did and said the
polite thing, and we got to talking.
The writing on the monument didn’t enlighten me much. It had
a date on it—29 APRIL 2024—and nothing else. I’d just about decided to ask
Chenkin about it when she said, “I bet they didn’t brief you about this little
memento of ours—and they probably should have, if you’re going to make any kind
of sense of what we’ve done here in the Lakeland Republic. Do you have a few
minutes?”
“Most of an hour,” I said. “If you’ve got the time—”
“I should be at a committee meeting later on, but there
should be plenty of time.” She waved me to the bench and then perched on the
front of it, facing me.
“You probably know about DM-386 corn, Mr. Carr,” she said.
“The stuff that had genes from poisonous starfish spliced into it.”
“Yeah.” Ugly memories stirred. “I would have had a kid brother if it wasn’t
for that.”
“You and a lot of others.” She shook her head. “Gemotek, the corporation that made it, used
to have its regional headquarters right here.” She gestured across the park
toward the Capitol. “A big silver glass and steel skyscraper complex, with a
plaza facing this way. It got torn down
right after the war, the steel went to make rails for the Toledo streetcar
system, and the site—well, you’ll understand a little further on why we chose
to put our Capitol there.
“But it was 2020, as I recall, when Gemotek scientists held
a press conference right here to announce that DM-386 was going to save the
world from hunger.” Another shake of her head dismissed the words. “Did they
plant much of it up where your family lived?”
“Not to speak of. We
were in what used to be upstate New York, and corn wasn’t a big crop.”
“Well, there you are. Here, we’re the buckle on the corn
belt: the old states of Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and across into Iowa and Nebraska. Gemotek marketed DM-386 heavily
via exclusive contracts with local seed stores, and it was literally
everywhere. They insisted it was safe, the government insisted it was safe, the
experts said the same thing—but nobody bothered to test it on pregnant women.”
“I remember,” I said.
“And down here, it wasn’t just in the food supply. The pollen had the toxin in it, and that was
in the air every spring. After the first
year’s crop, what’s more, it got into the water table in a lot of places. So
there were some counties where the live birth rate dropped by half over a two
year period.”
She leaned toward me. “And here’s the thing. Gemotek kept
insisting that it couldn’t possibly be their corn, and the government backed
them. They brought in one highly paid expert after another to tell us that some
new virus or other was causing the epidemic of stillbirths. It all sounded
plausible, until you found out that the only countries in the world that had
this supposed virus were countries that allowed DM-386 corn to cross their
borders. The media wouldn’t mention that, and if you said something about it on
the old internet, or any other public venue, Gemotek would slap you with a
libel suit. They’d win, too—they had all the expert opinion on their side that
money could buy. All the farmers and the other
people of the corn belt had on their side was unbiased epidemiology and
too many dead infants.
“So by the fall and winter of 2023, the entire Midwest was a
powderkeg. A lot of farmers stopped planting DM-386, even though Gemotek had a
clause in the sales agreement that let them sue you for breach of contract if
you did that. Seed stores that stocked it got burnt to the ground, and Gemotek
sales staff who went out into farm country didn’t always come back. There were
federal troops here by then—not just Homeland Security, also regular Army with
tanks and helicopters they’d brought up from the South after the trouble in
Knoxville and Chattanooga the year before—and you had armed bands of young
people and military vets springing up all over the countryside. It was pretty
bad.
“By April, it was pretty clear that next to nobody in the
region was planting Gemotek seeds—not just DM-386, anything from that company.
Farmers were letting their farms go fallow if they couldn’t get seed they
thought was safe. That’s when Michael Yates, who was the CEO of Gemotek, said
he was going to come to Toledo and talk some sense into the idiots who thought
there was something wrong with his product. By all accounts, yes, that’s what
he said.”
All of a sudden I remembered how the story ended, but didn’t
say anything.
“So he came here—right where we’re sitting now. The company made a big fuss in the media, put
up a platform out in front of the building, put half a dozen security guards
around it, and thought that would do the job. Yates was a celebrity CEO—”
Unexpectedly, she laughed. “That phrase sounds so strange nowadays. Still,
there were a lot of them before the Second Civil War: flashy, outspoken, hungry
for publicity. He was like that. He flew in, and came out here, and started
mouthing the same canned talking points Gemotek flacks had been rehashing since
the first wave of stillbirths hit the media.
“I think he even believed them.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t an
epidemiologist or even a geneticist, just a glorified salesman who thought his
big paycheck made him smarter than anyone else, and he lived the sort of
bicoastal lifestyle the rich favored in those days. If he’d ever set foot in the ‘flyover states’
before then, I never heard of it. But of course the crowd wasn’t having any of
it. Something like nine thousand people showed up. They were shouting at him, and he was trying
to make himself heard, and somebody lunged for the platform and a security
guard panicked and opened fire, and the crowd mobbed the platform. It was all
over in maybe five minutes. As I recall, two of the guards survived. The other
four were trampled and beaten to death, and nineteen people were shot—and
Michael Yates was quite literally torn to shreds. There was hardly enough left
of him to bury.
“So that’s what happened on April 29th, 2024. The crowd
scattered as soon as it was all over, before Homeland Security troops could get
here from their barracks; the feds declared a state of emergency and shut
Toledo down, and then two days later the riots started down in Birmingham and
the National Guard units sent to stop them joined the rioters. Your historians
probably say that that’s where and when the Second Civil War started, and
they’re right—but this is where the seed that grew into the Lakeland Republic
got planted.”
“Hell of a seed,” I said, for want of anything better.
“I won’t argue. But this—”
Her gesture indicated the monument, and the shadow of a vanished
building. “—this is a big part of why
the whole Midwest went up like a rocket once the Birmingham riots turned
serious, and why nothing the federal government did to get people to lay down
their arms did a bit of good. Every family I knew back in those days had either
lost a child or knew someone who had—but it wasn’t just that. There had been
plenty of other cases where the old government put the financial interests of
big corporations ahead of the welfare of its people—hundreds of them,
really—but this thing was that one straw too many.
“And then, when the fighting was over, the constitutional
convention was meeting, and people from the World Bank and the IMF flew in to
offer us big loans for reconstruction, care to guess what one of their very
first conditions was?”
I didn’t have to answer; she saw on my face that I knew the
story. “Exactly, Mr. Carr. The provisional government had already passed a law
banning genetically modified organisms until adequate safety tests could be
done, and the World Bank demanded that we repeal it. To them it was just a trade barrier. Of
course all of us in the provisional government knew perfectly well that if we
agreed to that, we’d be facing Michael Yates’ fate in short order, so we called
for a referendum.”
She shook her head, laughed reminiscently. “The World Bank
people went ballistic. I had one of their economists with his face six inches
from mine, shouting threats for fifteen minutes in half-coherent English
without a break. But we held the referendum, the no vote came in at 89%, we
told the IMF and the World Bank to pack their bags and go home, and the rest of
our history unfolded as you’ve seen—and a lot of it was because of a pavement
streaked with blood, right here.”
Something in her voice just then made me consider her face
closely, and read something in her expression that I don’t think she’d intended
me to see. “You were there, weren’t you?” I asked.
She glanced up at me, looked away, and after a long moment
nodded.
A long moment passed. The clop-clop of a horsedrawn taxi
came close, passed on into the distance.
“Here’s the thing,” she said finally.
“All of us who were alive then—well, those who didn’t help tear Michael
Yates to pieces helped tear the United States of America to pieces. It was the same in both cases: people who had been hurt and deceived and
cheated until they couldn’t bear it any longer, who finally lashed out in blind
rage and then looked down and saw the blood on their hands. After something like that, you have to come
to terms with the fact that what’s done can never be undone, and try to figure
out what you can do that will make it turn out to be worthwhile after all.”
She took a watch out of her purse, then, glanced at it, and
said, “Oh dear. They’ve been waiting for me in the committee room for five
minutes now. Thank you for listening, Mr. Carr—will I see you at the Assembly
next Sunday?”
“That’s the plan,” I told her. She got up, we made the usual
polite noises, and she hurried away toward the Capitol. Maybe she was late for
her meeting, and maybe she’d said more than she’d intended to say and wanted to
end the conversation. I didn’t greatly care, as I wanted a little solitude
myself just then.
I’d known about DM-386 corn, of course, and my family wasn’t
the only one I knew that lost a kid to the fatal lung defects the starfish
stuff caused if the mother got exposed to it in the wrong trimester. For that
matter, plenty of other miracle products have turned out to have side effects
nasty enough to rack up a fair-sized body count. No, it was thinking of the
pleasant old lady I’d just been sitting with as a young woman with blood
dripping from her hands.
Every nation starts that way. The Atlantic Republic
certainly did—I knew people back home who’d been guerrillas in the Adirondacks
and the Alleghenies, and they’d talk sometimes about things they’d seen and
done that made my blood run cold. The
old United States got its start the same way, two and a half centuries further
back. I knew that, but I hadn’t been thinking about it when I’d sat on the park
bench musing about how calm the Lakeland Republic seemed in the middle of all
the consternation outside its borders. It hadn’t occurred to me what had gone
into making that calm happen.
