The autopilot of Alan’s car slowed to a crawl, and the word PEDESTRIAN scrolled across the windshield in large, red block letters.
A caravan of shrouded pilgrims trudged dolefully north on Highway 93, occupying the entire lane. Where they came from and where they were going were mysteries. They were phantoms, women all, who had chosen to walk away from it— the shit show of the world.
One day they weren’t there and the next they were. Ubiquitous in their presence and ambiguous in their purpose, connected by the esoteric matrix of their alms plates and the mute mantras of their fabrics bearing the words of their mother-prophetess stitched into the back of an old t-shirt, the pocket of a pair of pants. Their cloth colportages pollinated tables at fast food restaurants, slipped into a purse in a department store, or were shoved under windshield wipers.
Your Mother cries out of the melting ice
Her blood is the creatures of the Earth
Her wound is by your hand
~ Greta 1:1
Everyone knew it by now. Like a hot knife through butter, the new religion cut into the global zeitgeist. Men and boys, the true pollutants, arbiters of war and industry, watched the taciturn parades of girls and women taking the shawl, covering themselves from head to toe in repurposed clothes and refusing to speak.
Their alms pads, linked via an encrypted network of satellites, filled their crypto wallet with a balance that eclipsed the GDPs of small nations. From the outside looking in, it seemed like a simple scheme devoted to the singular task of disseminating The Book of Greta, verse by verse, on random and often unexpected pieces of fabric.
Some years ago, Alan had found a small, blue brassiere hanging on his car mirror. Stitched over the size B cups were an astounding twenty-two sequential verses from Book 14, dubbed The Book of Air by the academics who kept tabs on such things.
He had anonymously posted a picture on an aficionado forum where others put up their own findings. Within an hour, his mailbox had received a dozen serious offers to purchase the item—contingent upon authentication. In an age of fakes and effortless reproduction, there was a raw lust for the authentic.
The stakes skyrocketed a few days later when his photographs were confirmed by a verified forensic investigator who matched the stitching pattern to a single, anonymous Greta nicknamed Daphne due to the fact her scribing was exclusively found on Daphne brand underwear.
Daphne had garnered an impressive cult following based around her unique production of the manuscript. The bra now completed the Autumn line of 2167 from the Daphne catalog for petite women: stockings embroidered with golden thread, panties written in tight crimson, an acorn camisole with black, and now the bra—white on sky blue.
When the Universitas Luminis Stellarum’s Department of Modern Languages made him an offer under their Gretas Study Project, he declined and sold to the next highest, most offensive offer; a private collector from an eastern European city well into FEEN territory who ran a VR simulation focused on the fetishizing of barely legal Gretas.
Alan posted the receipt online, being sure to tag the university. The department chair responded, deploring the move as a tasteless attack on women. That night, he celebrated alone, with only a thousand-dollar wine and caviar set to keep him company. It was small and petty, but so was the rejection letter they had sent him years before when he had applied for a lectureship:
Dear Mr. Smith:
Thank you for your interest in the ULS Psychological Studies Department. Although your application was highly competitive, we are committed to selecting from a pool of women and at-risk scholars. Therefore, we will be passing on your candidacy at this time…
At that time, he had savored the metaphorical significance of the salty, unfertilized sturgeon eggs and the bloody vintage cleansing his palate.
When not sewing their leaflets, the rags, as the slur went, were begging alms to fund the cuttings: rallies with congregations that ranged from dozens to hundreds to a few thousand. (Since the fire, however, the great gatherings of a hundred thousand or more had faded into lore.) During these events, the initiates engaged in an act of ritualistic self-mutilation—a precise operation on the vocal cords that left them forever mute. A Greta was said to be able to leave the community if she was not yet cut. For those initiates who had been seduced into their soft folds, it was a mad scramble by families and friends to find and deprogram their loved ones before they were rendered voiceless.
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There was no reliable footage of said ceremonies, though conspiratorially, there was a string of dead and missing undercover reporters and influencers. The entity that controlled the Gretas was a mystery, but having the bankroll of several trillion tax-free dollars brought power and fear. Entire ranches were bought up for the purpose of one cutting, used once and never again, never resold. Thousands of these dormant parcels pockmarked the country and the world. Sometimes they were used as safe-havens for squatters and refugees, but if a jurisdiction attempted to subsume them, the silent women would litigate. It was common knowledge that once wrapped in their muffled robes, there was no escape.
Their lawyers worked under strict non-disclosure agreements with some authority. Iconic footage sometimes showed a bundle of Gretas walking in formation from their rough sleep beneath an underpass into a courtroom where they would sit or stand in accord or disagreement as they purchased right of ways and negotiated treaties.
The orange light of a drone camera flashed and whizzed over his car.
“Raven, identify drone.”
“Yes, Dr. Smith?” A moment’s pause. “Drone is an autonomous broadcasting agent, live streaming #gretas #POE. The best country hits and Russian folk music of yesterday and today.”
“Play stream.”
As his car crept along, an old voice sang in Russian, accompanied by an accordion. The cab darkened, and the windshield became a screen revealing what the eye of the camera saw. The drone pulled back to give a long view of the Gretas extending a mile in each direction. The camera zoomed down, following the procession, and then stopped. The pilot, an unknown force at a data center somewhere in the world, had taken an interest in one particular woman. She was not like the others, who were downtrodden beneath their burdens. She wore a mask of mesh and a tight-fitting bodysuit. A small black backpack appeared to be well supplied. The woman looked at the drone for a moment, then she swung. The picture jerked and went black. The stream ended. The windows regained their transparency.
He passed a line of climate refugees trailing the Gretas. Safety in numbers. Campers, trucks, cars, people on foot pushing or pulling wagons laden with possessions. People of the Earth, generations now drowned out of their homes and adrift in the world, often followed what were deemed large or important threads of the Greta movement, adhering to them like saints as they navigated the countries and municipalities that had ratified the Earth Treaty.
A pickup truck with a handmade apartment on the back of it was holding up traffic. A man worked a jack, and a boy sat on a spare tire. A woman stood by with a child on either side and a baby in her arms.
Behind the caravan of cars, a tribal police cruiser crept along, its lights flashing. Behind the cop, two trucks followed, in the back of which men in battle dress uniforms held rifles and baseball bats, their balding heads and potbellies revealing they were not a government-sanctioned unit. Behind the militia, a straight line of self-drivers remained orderly and composed, even if their occupants were falling apart.
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Ten miles south of the clinic, the little town of Pablo, headquarters of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, consisted of—just barely—more churches than bars. A small government complex and a university were the hamlet’s lifeblood since the death of the lumber industry during his great-great-grandfather’s generation.
He was fond of the school. When it was clear he’d been blacklisted from the ranks of private mental health facilities, Murphy had pulled some strings and secured him a residency at the university’s clinic. However, he did more teaching than counseling.
Two nights a week, he had facilitated an autonomous learning environment for the local Job Corps kids. They were the children of the depression: neglected, abused, abandoned, drug-addicted and criminal, feral and savage. They were there to write essays and work on their resumes, but instead, they wrote rap lyrics, songs full of love and heartbreak and death. And he himself was a broken spin addict, one of the very, very rare specimens who had been able to withstand the withdrawals of Escape at velocity. He reeked of death.
Becky wanted him out. She petitioned, but Murphy, all-powerful Murphy, Murphy the Magus, kept him in. Murphy knew that, in part, it was the job of the academy to provide a structure for the mind and, within that structure, a refuge. Murphy believed Alan could do great things, even after… He had been wrong, of course.
The traffic jam cleared behind him, and he was alone on the road. The AI drifted the car to the right to avoid a pothole under construction.
Deep in the hazy heart of the lodgepole forest, ramshackle houses sat with acute roofs designed to deny Old Man Winter his angle of repose. They were guarded by rusted cars worth less than the cost of outfitting them for the navigation grid, rusting bicycles, children with dirty faces, and angry pit bulls with suspicious glares.
The economic downturn had hit the valley hard about twenty years ago and never lifted. The tribe had done all it could to support its members, but after the massacre of the Highwaymen (a movement of truck drivers violently opposed to the autonomous grid), a number of whom were Natives, the vote was taken to cut ties with the federal government. Washington quickly responded by freezing all federal funds. The tribe’s next move was a vote to ratify the Earth Treaty, which opened a feeble line of money from sympathetic individuals and organizations concerned about the refugee crisis or looking to build a headquarters to replace the one that was washed away by the rising tides.
The Gretas, in their wordless mystery, lubricated the wheels of politics, and a right of way was negotiated that would become part of the Silent Trail that stretched from California to New York through reservations, public lands, and friendly municipalities.
The United States sued on grounds that this was illegal immigration. The tribe responded by calling a powwow. And the militias stewed, oiling their guns, waiting for the day.
Rampant poverty pushed the crime rate up, more violent year by year. Like everywhere in America, the Escape pandemic had ripped through the reservation, leaving the orphanage bursting at the seams. For those who miraculously avoided the spin, there was still the succor of booze and meth.