Feb 21, 2057, 1201 Hours (UTC -5)
Austin TX, United States of America
Damien Castro’s Studio
If the famous podcast pundit Damien Castro had asked his cameramen to make Nicholas Johnson, America’s star TOCU pilot, look bad on camera, they would have been fired.
Nicky had a face resting perfectly between boyish and handsome. It was a clean-shaven, well-proportioned face which looked eternally excited to go to a college party where he would drink responsibly. He was tall at 6’2”, had lean and toned limbs that suggested athleticism without gym obsession, and clothes that fit well, but not too well, like he was borrowing his dad’s button-down and tie for a job interview as opposed to strolling into a job his dad lined up for him. The wardrobe people at Baron Nucleonics had worked magic here.
His smile, however, was the most impressive part of his appearance for the simple reason that it was authentic. Nicky had been brought up in a bubble created for him by Baron Nucleonics where everyone was trustworthy and arguments were temporary disagreements between people who misunderstood each other. He didn’t believe everyone did good—Graham was a scummy lobbyist, after all, and Damien Castro was the worst kind of huckster pundit—but they were capable of good. That was the foundation of his smile. He wanted to see them be good.
“Here he is, everyone! America’s man of steel, the superstar pilot, Nicholas Johnson,” Damien said.
“You’re one compliment shy, Damien. My contract says three, minimum,” Nicky replied with a grin as he took a seat and everyone laughed good-naturedly.
The trick, as Graham had told him once, was to bring the corporatized elements of his identity into the foreground. That way the audience knew Nicky knew and they would like him for it.
“Y’know, I’d thank you for your service, but you haven’t had any,” Damien said to him through the jungle-gym of recording equipment.
Damien chuckled at his own barb and his co-hosts chuckled with him in seamless synchronicity
“I respect those who have served, but you’re right, I haven’t seen combat. And I hope for the kind of peaceful world where America doesn’t throw her might around without good cause.Until that world exists, all I can do is stay prepared,” Nicky said.
Graham gave Nicky a thumbs-up from off-stage.
“I don’t think America needs a “cause” to throw its might around. Do you guys think we need a cause?” Damien asked.
One of the co-hosts snorted. “Hell no. We do what we want.”
“Fuck that noise,” said the other.
Damien shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m a big, scary, evil racist. But I just don’t think we need to be told how to run things by a bunch of foreigners in mud shacks halfway across the planet.”
The co-hosts confirmed that his was the correct view.
“Damien, neither of us have served in the armed forces. But I know people that have, and I don’t want to see them throw their lives away for nothing,” Nicky said, crossing a leg and keeping his expression earnest. It wasn’t hard, because his genuine opinion was that he didn’t want his fellow countrymen to die in another pointless war.
“I don’t think you have to serve to have an opinion about how our country should be run,” Damien said. “Some people may not think so, but I think this is a democracy. I have a vote. And in 2060, I’m voting for someone who’s not gonna sell our country’s military equipment to techno-elites and Chinese businessmen.”
Techno-elites meaning bad companies like Baron Nucleonics rather than the good ones like Lockheed-Boeing, Nicky supposed. Even three years out from an election, the question was already circling: Should the TOCUs be nationalized and brought back into the armed forces? Nicholas was opposed. As part shareholder of BN, he at least had some say in whether he was deployed to a warzone. If the TOCU were nationalized, he could be deployed without his input.
And the part about China was completely false. The security protocols surrounding Baron Nucleonics’ cold fusion drives were so obnoxiously tight that they even annoyed him sometimes. However, it had become a talking point on the right to claim Baron Nucleonics was selling secrets to China just because some of its investors were also investors in Chinese arms manufacturers. Nicky had trouble making sense of all the ins-and-outs of who owned and invested in what and why, but there was absolutely no chance BN was selling fusion drive research to China. The reason was an elegant one: They would lose money if the technology proliferated.
“So let me ask you this, with all your peace talk,” Damien said, adjusting his podcast mic, which was his signature move before dominating his guests. “Some of your pilots are pannies, right? And don’t try to wriggle out of that, we have the posts. Lillian bring the— bring up the posts. Put them up there. Let’s see them.”
Just off stage there was a screen showing what the audience of the podcast would see once it was edited and released. On screen was a social media post from his fellow pilot, Xolani Jefferson. In it she was spouting left-wing conspiracy theories about how the United States was an “arms-dealers with a state” and using buzzword soup phrases like “Military-Industrial Technofeudalism.”
“So, clearly she loves this ideology that— it’s killed how many people now? Billions? I mean, what’s the death count now? Does anyone know?” Damien asked.
“I think it’s like three billion or something,” one of the co-hosts said.
“Yeah, I think the people that research these things say about that. About somewhere between two and three billion,” said the other co-host.
“Jesus christ,” Damien said. “Are you okay with that, Nicholas? Are you okay with one of your other pilots supporting Pan-Democracy? Or, as I like to call it, Communism in a trench coat?”
Graham had warned Nicky that Damien would try to get him riled up by talking fast and getting his co-hosts to gang up on him. Some of the BN officials had simulated what it would be like. So when Damien started in, Nicky breathed deeply, let his muscles relax, and reminded himself that this guy was some fringe idiot and that his approval rating with the American public was hovering near 75%.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Well, it’s like you said, Damien. We’re a democracy. Xolani has a right to free speech, same as the rest of us. I agree with you that Pan-Democracy is dangerous, and I repudiate her extremist views. That’s also my right. And neither she, nor I, represent Baron Nucleonics,” Nicky said.
“So you’re fine with high-tech, American military equipment being in the hands of out-and-proud communists?”
“I think the values of Liberal Democracy stand on their own self-evident merits against—”
“Yeah, I’ll bet the BN guys told you to—”
“—against European Pan-Democracy and Asian Centralized Democracy.”
“Oh yeah, let’s talk about Asia,” Damien said. “BN picked up a new pilot for the first time in years, didn’t they? Some little Asian girl. What’s her name?”
“Apple,” replied one of the sound engineers.
“Apple!? What kind of name is that? Apple. RJ, have you ever heard of someone named ‘Apple’?”
“No. Never,” replied one of the co-hosts who was apparently named RJ.
“Apple. Wow. Who names their kid Apple? Her parents must be immigrants, I guess. They must’ve pointed to the first word they saw in the dictionary and said, “oh, we gonna name her Apple.” You can’t make this stuff up.”
Nicky stayed silent through this tirade. It pained him to hear Damien saying nasty things about Apple, especially without actually knowing her. Apple was one of the sweetest people he’d ever met, and Nicky had a soft spot for her because, like him, she was an early find. Both of them had had their childhood upturned to go and become a TOCU pilot. But Nicky’s PR coaches had trained him to sit silently while Damien ranted because it supposedly created a contrast between the unhinged grifter and the strong, stoic, self-disciplined soldier willing to let a civilian exercise their free speech, even if their opinion was stupid.
Eventually the five-minute joking session about Apple’s ancestry was over, and with Nicky giving him nothing to work with from Xolani’s online political rants, Damien Castro ran out of material. Outside of the barbs about his lack of combat experience, there was no angle of attack on Nicholas either. He had no scandals, people loved him, and most importantly, he was a regular, mainstream white boy with an earnest smile and a strong jaw.
The show wrapped up with a few softball questions that mostly involved Damien teasing nicky about being a centrist and BN being a communist company, all of which he deflected with ease. As soon as someone announced they were no longer rolling, Damien wiped the combativeness off his face and walked over to shake Nicky’s hand.
“Damn, you and the BN boys are good! I really thought I was gonna get ya with the Apple stuff,” Damien said.
Nicky shook it and offered a small smile.
“Forget about the on-air crap,” Damien said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you. Can we get a picture together? This isn’t for social media or anything, I wanna show my kids I met Nicholas Johnson.”
Nicholas stood around for pictures with Damien and his cast and crew, all of whom were ecstatic about getting to meet America’s star pilot. Knowing that the dependable word-of-mouth tortoise would eventually beat the social media hare, Nicky always gave people good stories to tell about meeting him. In his mind this was part of a larger goal of bridging the gap between Americans.
Most folks wanted the same things: Stability, community, security, comfort. The answer to rising support for Pan-Democracy and Centralized Democracy wasn’t denouncing their supporters, but showing people they could get the things they needed under American-style Democracy, without resorting to extremism. Nicholas’ role was to be the stable bridge between the many groups that constituted America and to bring them together to solve real problems like cleaning up the environment, rebuilding America’s devastated economy, and rebuilding America’s international reputation on trans-border issues.
“Great job, Nicky! But you’re probably getting sick of hearing that from me, aren’t you?” Graham said, thrusting his hand at Nicky to shake.
Nicky grasped it. “I do the best I can, Graham.”
As soon as they were out of ear-shot, both from Damien’s people and the other BN employees, Graham dropped his voice. “We have an all-pilot meeting with the DoD.”
All-pilot meetings were rare and only ever called by the Department of Defense when they needed to brief the pilots on a major security threat or international incident. The last meeting happened over a year ago and it had been to notify them of China’s declaration of war against India.
“What happened?” Nicky asked, matching Graham’s low volume.
“I don’t know. That’s for the DoD to tell us,” Graham replied in one of his rare moments of seriousness.
Within the hour, Nicky and the rest of the BN staff were taking off from Austin-Bergstrom International in a Baron Nucleonics jet. During the flight Nicky rewarded himself for getting through that god-awful interview by letting his mental-concentration training regimen lapse. He let his monkey brain flip through feeds on the on-board computer without caring for how it would damage his attention span.
The first feed was a news report on Alphabetia Network about the failures of American sustainable technology. Apparently, out of all first-world countries, America had the second-to-worst ratio of money spent on sustainable tech to measurable outcomes, with only the United Kingdom coming in behind it.
“Among the metrics examined were per capita electric car ownership, solar panel installation density, and fusion reactor construction. Despite all of these indicators being some of the world’s highest, the United States continues to have the lowest air and water quality in any advanced country and—”
Nicky changed the feed. He’d already picked up what the preachy report was getting at. He flipped to an NPR story next.
“—have not seen the sustained population increase expected, resulting in an ongoing housing crisis as homeowners are stuck in homes slowly depreciating in value. The Peterson administration has formed a public-private commission to discuss ways the federal government can work with the financial market to alleviate falling housing prices. This same demographic crisis has led economists to predict that recovery from the economic depression caused by the Lilac Spring will take decades longer than anticipated, as widespread labor shortages keep most of America’s industries shuttered. We spoke with Fed chair Alexis Ja—”
Again, a simple message obfuscated by overwrought verbiage. What they wanted was for him to have babies. Of course, the government wanted everyone to have babies, but there was a lot of interest— from the news, tabloids, Baron Nucleonics, the US government, his parents—about Nicholas in particular. The mutation of his temporoparietal junction was potentially heritable, but what the US intelligence community had learned was that the offspring of pilots, both male and female, had all been miscarriages. For security reasons they had kept this a state secret.
The question remained whether two people with the same mutation, two pilots, could successfully produce an offspring with the mutation. Uncomfortable as it was to think about, Nicky recognized the security implications of a country being able to replicate TOCU pilots at will rather than leaving it to the will of God. Among the many unpleasant things Graham had tried to pressure him and Tiffany into, this was one they had both mutually pushed back against. Even if Nicky’s shares in BN would go through the roof at the news, he was not about to turn himself and Tiffany into guinea pigs.
Sick of thinking about unpleasant political and economic matters, he pulled up his comfort show: An old mecha anime from the previous century called Mobile Suit Gundam. The public relations people swore him to secrecy about his viewing habit, but he couldn’t help himself. No other media captured the experience of being a TOCU pilot as well as this 80 year old Japanese cartoon, even (and especially) media that had come out after the TOCUs had been invented. Nothing else depicted so perfectly the pressure of hope and earnest desire for peace a pilot experienced while sitting in the cockpit of a machine designed for war, forever questioning whether they wanted to continue doing this thing that only they could do. Forever wondering whether they were actually a force for good.
He swiveled the screen of his seat computer to block it from the view of the BN corporate suits and the opening rolled.