Second Paradigm (13 page)

“Um. Yes, officer?” Chris gulped down some air and forced himself to continue. “How can I help you?”

“Yeah. He’s a fit,” Chuck said, his eyes never leaving Chris. He seemed nervous, as though he had some lingering memory of what hadn’t happened the night before. “You fit the description of someone we’ve been looking for, sir. I’m sure it’s nothing, so if we could check your papers, we’ll be on our way.”

Shit! Not again.
Chris fumbled through his pockets, pretending that he searched for his wallet. “Really? What happened? Lemme find my papers. You know, this happens to me all the time; I must look like some criminal. Now what the hell did I do with …?”

“I’m going to go back to the car to get my retinal,” Chuck said, still staring at Chris. “Maybe we can get a positive ID with the Visual Imaging Unit.” He started off back down the hill.

“Godamnit. I know I have them on me somewhere …” Chris continued to stall. A scowl swept across the face of the officer with the cybernetic arm. “Maybe …”

Chris blathered on, feeling a now-familiar growing sense of dread as he ineffectually patted his pockets. But there was no pressure in his head, and time moved forward as it always did. Franticly he searched his mind, looking for a way to unlock whatever defense mechanisms he had, but there were only empty echoes of his last encounter with PolCorp.

Deliverance came in the form of a massive ball of fire lighting up the sky beyond the D.A.B., followed by a shockwave of rolling thunder that screamed up the mall, shattering the high impact Plexiglas windows of the shops, like a tsunami of plastic shards racing down the walls of the buildings towards them.

Chris could feel his organs rattling throughout his body and then the shockwave hit him—flinging him backwards, and then smashing him into the ground. The world spun around him as he tried to regain his feet, and Chris ended up spending a moment balanced on his knees and clutching his gut as he tried to make the world stop spinning around him.

“Holy shit! What the hell was that?” the PolCorp guard looked dazed as he stood up and gazed around the mall. Chris pointed behind the guard, towards PolCorp. The man turned and saw the raging fire and plumes of smoke coming from the direction of his station. Without another word he turned and charged down the hill toward his fallen comrades, forgetting that he had been about to bust Chris for some unknown crime.

Overhead, dozens of PolCorp cruisers streaked by, the faint sound of gunfire punctuating their flight as Chris’s abused hearing stopped ringing. He looked away from the erupting firefight to Little Paris. The shockwave that had torn apart the upper stories of the surrounding buildings spared the little shop.

Through a thin haze of bluish cigar smoke, the two old chess players peered out the window, watching Chris. He smiled and waved at them, as though to say “Hello … I am a real person, not street theatre.” The two men turned back to their game, apparently having decided that the show was over.

Some people hurried up the mall away from the blast, but most only looked down the street for a moment and went back to what they were doing. Chris gazed at the few people he could see, then down at his own hands, scraped and bloody.
What can make a society so callous?
Aching joints protested as he climbed to his feet.
And how can I ever fit in here?

Despite the muted sounds of occasional gunfire and explosions, Chris spent the rest of the day in Little Paris, drinking coffee and alternating between working on Quantum and Time theories on a borrowed sheet of paper and relaxing.

With the amount of stress he had been through, it felt good to unwind, and a dim realization hit him at some point in the day that perhaps this society was not the callous, uncaring place he thought it to be at first. Perhaps it had become a survival trait to mind your own business. It was something to think about at any rate, and he filed it for later mental consumption. But for now, he thought, more coffee and maybe some local history.

The rich aroma of coffees permeated the air as Chris approached the counter again. “Has this place been here long?” Chris asked the man behind the bar. The guy was in his sixties—almost as old as the two men playing chess—and was lanky and tall with a few flecks of blond in the gray hair of his goatee. He wore an ancient baseball cap with a cartoonish picture of a cat’s face wearing sunglasses, a cigarette hanging out of its open mouth.

“Well, it’s been on Cherry Lane for ten years. For about forty years before that it was called the Penn Street Perk, back when there was a Penn Street. After GeoCorp took over and rebuilt the city, we ended up here, in the shadow of their big, shiny cock.” He gestured toward the massive skyscraper at the end of the mall.

Chris glanced around at the pictures of boats and old houses that lined the walls, giving the place an antiquated feel, at least compared to the world outside. “So I take it you’re not run by GeoCorp?”

“I’m not run by nobody, man. Paris, well, it might as well be. They let us run it however we want, but we’re close enough to their big dick that we need to stay within ‘certain parameters.’” The old man chuckled, then coughed. “We make the best cuppa’ joe around though. It’s hard to shut down the place where you like to get your coffee. Bad karma, ya’ know?” Steam jetted up from the espresso machine as the barista foamed the milk.

“So you’ve worked here long?”

“Fuck you man, yeah, I’ve worked here long. I’ve worked here all my fuckin’ life, man. I was going to be something, you know? I was gonna write, but here I am. Look, you want your latte, or are you just here to fuck with me?”

Chris took the cup of coffee, tipped the guy ten dollars, and went back to his table. He liked the barista—he had some indefinable quality that Chris could relate to, despite his surliness. Or perhaps it was his surliness. Knowing that there were likable people in this dismal world definitely made a difference to Chris, as harsh as his first impressions had been.

Flying cars and stray pedestrian policemen made for a colorful scene in the world outside the coffee shop. Occasionally foot traffic would wander by, oblivious to the riots around the city. Once a thunderclap of gunfire sounded nearby, bouncing off of the armored windows of the shop.

The afternoon rolled on and the chess game across the shop concluded. As one of the men packed up the board, the other rolled up his sleeve and, to Chris’s horror, peeled back the skin of his forearm revealing plastic tubing and dimly glowing fiber optics.

Chris watched, his horror turning to fascination, as the man pulled out a small can, opened a latch within his arm, and emptied the contents into the opening. He flexed his hand a few times, reattached the skin, and chuckled something to his companion in a gravelly voice, though what he said couldn’t be heard from across the coffee house.

The old men walked out, leaving Chris alone with the bitter barista and his thoughts. When three o’clock rolled around, Chris was so absorbed he didn’t even see Dr. Jameson wander in and order a latte. “…it would still need something—a catalyst, and I don’t have one.” Chris mumbled to himself. “Could I be …?” He saw Dr. Jameson standing over him, his amused expression held a dark cast.

“Oh. Hello.” Chris cleared the little table of his notes and gestured for the doctor to sit down.

“Hello, Chris. I’m glad you decided to meet me today. We’ll be able to talk freely here, and I’m sure you have many questions to ask me.” Jameson slid into the chair across from Chris and folded his hands in front of him on the table.

“Well, yeah. First, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of this,” Chris gestured with his arms towards the windows, “and I can’t figure out how it could be possible in forty years. I mean the city, the flying cars, everything. It … I don’t think it was like this in … back then …” Chris stopped, at a loss.

“Ah, yes. Quite extraordinary, is it not? The leaps in technology, sociology … cultural growth alone is faster now than any time in recorded history. Amazing what humanity can accomplish when we find ourselves under the gun, so to speak.” Chris thought he imagined a slight, brief wave of relief wash across Jameson’s face.

“You see, after the oil crisis some twenty five years ago, the governments were at a loss—particularly in what was then the United States of America. The world governments had dabbled in alternative fuel sources, but their shortsightedness and greed for the money of the oil companies, was their downfall. Europe and Asia did slightly better when the oil finally ran out, but they made the mistake of giving alternative energy research over to private companies.

“These private companies, GeoCorp among them, had, in fact, come up with a clean-burning hydrogen cell eight years previously but said nothing, claiming in the meantime that any breakthroughs they had made were simply not cost effective. In fact, each cell could last years and could be produced at a fraction of the price of mining coal or drilling for oil.

“When the crisis came into full swing in twenty sixteen, war erupted. At first it was minor skirmishes … civil wars aplenty, small border infractions, that type of thing. All of this was caused initially by panic. Lack of transportation, rolling brown outs … it has been said that modern civilization is only twenty-four hours away from barbarism … practical experience now tells us this is closer to seventy two hours.”

Jameson took a sip of his latte and continued. “So it was small wars at first. But it escalated, as these things do, until the entire world was posed on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The three major corporations at the time—GeoCorp, I Net, and Poldine Incorporated—stepped in when the world governments were desperate enough and offered them a solution, for a price. What choice did they have? Within a year, the governments were dissolved and the companies took over with subsidiaries branching off and claiming independence.

“After they took over, there was peace for a while. I mean world peace. The Three, as they became known, were friendly with each other, content to scratch each other’s backs. There was no real use for a military budget when compared to the profit to be had in technology, so they began to focus inward. With the Hydro Cells being as efficient as they were, massive technological expansion was possible in a decade. It was amazing what people could think of when they were no longer limited to primitive internal combustion. In nine years, the City of Denver’s population soared to more than sixty million people and GeoCorp rebuilt the entire region in five months to accommodate the population boom.”

“Why Denver?” Chris asked.

“Well, all the cities expanded, but few as much. Denver was an ideal candidate for the GeoCorp capital because of its central location on the North American continent.”

It made sense. Chris sat for a minute and thought about it. “And I suppose a massive population was possible because there was now cheap and unlimited energy. I’m assuming the Hydro Cells are made of water?”

“Precisely. With some research into water reclamation combined with the abundance of energy, huge grow-rooms underground became possible. Not possible, but necessary, after most of the Midwest was irradiated in the War of Thirty-eight.” He could not mistake the look of amusement on Jameson’s face.

“Someone else mentioned that to me,” Chris said. “So I guess world peace didn’t last.”

“Not even,” Jameson laughed coldly. “As I said, the Three were too bureaucratic and unwieldy to manage a population that grew by billions each year. Some willingly split themselves into smaller companies to better manage their assets. GeoCorp was not as willing, but they could do nothing when the Omni Institute broke off and claimed everything east of the Mississippi River as their own.

“GeoCorp developed PolCorp in an attempt to bring Omni back into the fold with force, or, preferably, the threat of force.” Jameson laughed. “They did too good a job, and PolCorp became an independent contractor, selling arms to both sides. After the tech expansion, it was only a few small steps to take what was learned and apply it to the military. GeoCorp couldn’t control their creation, and the war lasted for three years, ending in a draw. Supposedly, everything west of the Mississippi still belongs to GeoCorp, but what used to be called the Bible Belt was reduced to smoldering, radioactive ashes during the conflict. Of course, this led to the Denver population skyrocketing even more as the refugees streamed in.”

“So PolCorp is now independent?” Chris frowned at this thought. He didn’t like the company based on his experiences so far.

“Completely. They now work as security for a number of companies around the world. Ironically, that means they constantly come into conflict with each other. It’s all about the bottom line—the boys at the top making the big bucks don’t care if a majority of that money comes from their employees killing each other, and what do the employees care if the people they’re fighting work for the same company? Paid is paid, after all, and the PolCorp guys are paid well enough not to question their employers’ tactics.”

Chris looked doubtful. “If that’s the case, then why is all this public knowledge? Seems like people would try and keep a lid on that sort of thing.”

Jameson smiled. “I’m not part of the ‘public,’ Chris, if you haven’t figured that out yet. I work for GeoCorp.”

Chris leveled his gaze at the ring of gold fibers bound around Jameson’s finger. “So why are you helping me?”

Jameson locked eyes with Chris and said nothing.

Chris backed down first, swallowed, and changed the subject. “So what about this gang war?”

Jameson shrugged, “Civil unrest.”

Chris hesitated, scared to ask his next question. “What do you know about me, Doctor?”

Jameson smiled, almost warmly, “You are Dr. Christopher Nost, who spent the last forty-one—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Chris interrupted. “I mean … something happened to me a few nights ago … PolCorp stopped me and asked for papers, and …”

“…and?” Jameson gazed at Chris, looking interested for the first time.

“…and I don’t know. Everything got … slow. I don’t know how to explain it…”

“Dr. Nost, there’s someth—”