Feb 21, 2057, 2136 Hours (UTC -5)
Arlington VA, United States of America
Baron Nucleonics Research and Development Facility, Meeting Hall A
Nicholas Johnson was the second-to-last pilot to arrive. Most of the older pilots like Elijah Robichaeux and Anna Vargas were already in the DC metro-area, since the only thing required of them to keep up their multi-million-dollar salary was to show up for conditioning once a month to brush up on their piloting skills. Others, like Apple, Xolani, Hector, and Camilla were on-duty at the R&D Facility training. There were a few pilots at any given time which Baron Nucleonics took around the country on a campaign of public relations, lobbying, and fundraising. This was what Nicky was doing when the all-pilot call was sent out.
The farthest afield was Tiffany Fontaine who was returning from joint alpine operations training with the two Canadian pilots in British Columbia. Nicky entered the meeting hall as a BN staffer was informing everyone Tiffany had landed in Ronald Reagan twenty minutes ago and would be there momentarily.
Meeting Hall A, the largest in the R&D facility and the one used exclusively for the big important meetings, was done in a modernist-classical style. Ttinted, bulletproof glass formed a greenhouse-like structure from floor to ceiling broken up by marble columns that held up nothing. The floor was American chestnut that creaked luxuriantly underfoot. Seating resembled a college lecture hall or a legislative assembly, with two tiers of half-moon tables with space for thirty seats and a stage and podium in front. Behind were two neatly-ordered squares of folding chairs for the less important BN employees and a gallery running the length of the room with more comfortable chairs for the important ones.
Breaking off from Graham, Nicky took his seat at the front of the pilots’ section a couple seats away from Xolani Jefferson who had her arms folded and was bouncing her leg with a look of irritation on her face. Combat boots squeaked against the floor and beneath her folded arms she wore her favorite tank top which had a graphic of the HDU Maryam against an olive background.
“You wanna tell me anything?” Xolani asked Nicky as he sat down.
“I know as much as you do,” he replied.
She pursed her lips. “I’m not talking about the all-pilot, I’m talking about the fucking Damien Castro interview.”
“Huh? What about it?” he asked, feeling his temper rise. The last thing he wanted was an argument. They all had roles to play, and his was doing interviews with shitheads like Damien. He wasn’t even sure how she’d seen it so fast.
“What about— bruh you fucking threw us under the bus! Calling me an extremist, letting him go off on a racist-ass rant about—” Xolani looked to where the other pilots, including Apple, were watching her. She dropped her voice “—about Apple… I don’t expect your ass to go there and pledge allegiance to Maublanc, but show some goddamn solidarity, man. Shit.”
Self-conscious of the noise level and the other pilots and BN suits, Nicky kept his voice low. “Listen, the point of that interview was to get a different perspective in front of Damien’s viewers. To break up their echo chamber. They’re not going to stop being centralists overnight—”
“They’re not fuckin’ centralist, Nicky,” Xolani said. “The Chinese are centralists. The Indians are centralists. The Russians are centralists. Centralists have a goddamn political project, even if it’s a stupid one. Damien’s audience don’t, they’re just reactionaries. Don’t dignify them by calling them centralists.”
Xolani was wrong, Nicky thought. They did have a political project and it was a dangerous one. Re-nationalizing the TOCUs was all about returning to force projection and playing world police. Half the reason Tiffany had gone to Canada was to assuage their concerns that the US was interested in invading, because if Jas Dawar and the Neo-Republic Party won, that was first on their agenda. “America From Panama to Pole” was the slogan. It was like a nightmarish perversion of a Pan-Democratic unification project, which were already violent nightmares.
“Xolani, I agree these people are dangerous. I did that interview because I wanted to show them that Liberal Democracy still—”
“No, you did that interview because Graham told you to do that interview.”
“And both of us agreed it was for a good reason and would have a good outcome,” he replied calmly.
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh yeah? By good outcome you mean another term of Peterson, the fucking corporate puppet?”
“Who is far better than the alternative, yes.”
“If someone offers me a plate full of piss and a plate full of shit I say take the fucking plates back, I’m gonna cook for myself,” Xolani said.
Nicky let the conversation drop there. This was where it always returned: Xolani was a revolutionary and wanted to topple the US government and install Pan-Democracy. Anything shy of that didn’t count as real political action for her which made it impossible to have a discussion about how best to utilize the amplified voices pilots had been given for real, actionable policy. Not that Xolani did anything besides post on social media. When the United States invaded the FRCA, she had served in a combat role, killing Central American Pan-Democrats, same as the other pilots. If he wanted to be cruel, he could’ve brought that up, but he never would. After all, it might be him some day having to make the same awful decision.
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Not long after Nicky and Xolani’s public argument Tiffany Fontaine arrived, still in her nylon pilot suit, though she had let down her long blonde hair and traded her boots for sneakers. As a public face, she was #2 behind Nicky because, although attractive and mainstream, her blemish was that her face was sharp and her resting expression bitchy. She looked like an unapproachable, arrogant, and self-important diva, which led to the media and public forever searching for a way to knock her down a peg. From BN’s perspective, it was also a problem that she was most popular with the LGBT demographic, which was not ideal from a marketing perspective since her target audience were females aged 15-24.
That impression, however, was wrong. Tiffany, like all the pilots Nicky knew, was fundamentally good-natured and soft-spoken. Even putting up with the deluge of critics and paparazzi and vile comments both on and offline, she never became angry or bothered. She was a study in sainthood as far as he was concerned. He even sometimes wished she would be a little meaner to her detractors.
Tiffany sat between Nicky and Xolani and slumped into her seat with an exhale.
“Long day?” Xolani asked.
Tiffany rubbed her face. “Ugh, yeah. Long flight, long training session. Have they told us what’s happening yet?”
“Nope. Waiting on you, sweetie,” Xolani said.
“How are the Canadians?” Nicky asked.
“Getting better. Still not great. No institutional expertise and the DoD and BN keep telling me to play things close to my chest so we don’t accidentally give them anything useful. Makes the training sessions completely pointless, honestly.”
Xolani’s eyes looked like they were full of opinions about the international joint training, but before she could offer them a contingent of military officers and Department of Defense officials strode into the room and took up chairs on the stage. Among them was one Nicky had personal beef with: Captain MacReady who commanded one of the naval carriers tasked with transporting the TOCUs. MacReady was publicly against not only TOCUs being privately-owned, but their being part of defense policy at all. And as the American face of the TOCU pilot program, Nicky represented everything he disliked about it, including and especially the airbrushed commercialism.
“Good evening, everybody, and thank you for coming on such short notice,” said Lieutenant General Polonsky, gripping the podium with two hands like he was wringing its neck. This was usual for the large man who was the DoD liaison with Baron Nucleonics. What was unusual was his serious tone. Usually he opened meetings by cracking a few jokes and thanking the BN board members and executives.
“I am sure you all are anxious to know why the Department has called an all-pilot meeting. I want to begin by saying that the United States and her interests, as well as your loved ones, are not in any danger. We are calling this meeting because yesterday morning we were notified by US intelligence about an ongoing geological disaster in Sudan. Now, you may be wondering what is so important about a geological disaster…”
Polonsky picked up a remote and clicked it, projecting onto the screen behind him one of the strangest images Nicky had ever seen. The screen displayed a giant stone alcove in the desert like something you would see out in Utah or Colorado but with artificial-looking proportions.
“What you are looking at is something the Sudanese have taken to calling a “jinn.” As you can see by the motion blur, this thing moves, and it does so at about 20 miles an hour. Now, compared to a sports car that’s not exactly hauling ass, but when we’re talking about a 500-foot walking mountain weighing almost four million tons, that’s pretty quick. As for why it’s a problem…”
He clicked to the next slide, showing a city-sized pile of rubble and flooded and mangled vegetation beside a river.
“Around 1100 hours local time, that’s 0300 our time, this thing rolled up to a town called Go-shabby on the Nile River. This is the aftermath. According to the Sudanese military, they met this big ol’ nasty jinn with heavy ordnance and it rolled straight through ‘em without flinching. As for how this pertains to you all… we don’t know yet. Knock on wood it’ll be completely irrelevant to you. But we’re working with the Department of Homeland Security to draw up contingency plans for if something similar shows up in, say, the Mojave. Because of the severity of such a disaster, we are recruiting Baron Nucleonics and its TOCUs and pilots to our planning process. As always we have an open line of communication at all times, but we will answer any questions you may have at this time.”
Tiffany raised her hand and Polonsky pointed to her.
“Where is this jinn now?”
Anticipating the question, the general clicked to the next slide which showed a satellite image of a dark circle near a rocky, uninhabited stretch of river.
“In the 40 or so hours since it hit Go-shabby, our jinn has been wandering in and out of the desert, leveling several towns in the process, including the capital of the province, Dongola. But it seems to be sticking closer to the river now and heading northwards. By midnight tonight, or around 0800 local time, we expect it to cross the border into Egypt. That’ll be our first chance to see what this thing does against an army with its shit together. Egypt has already deployed both their TOCUs to Abu Simbel,” Polonsky said, pointing to a gray patch North of the Sudan-Egypt border.
“Are we gonna help them at all?” Xolani asked.
Polonsky looked at her as though she’d asked if they would offer the jinn ten billion dollars to go away.
“The US military does not have the resources to send billions of dollars of military hardware and expertise halfway across the planet to fight a force of nature,” he said.
Xolani crossed her hands and shrugged. “Why not? We’ve got enough fucking money to send that hardware to lithium and silicon mines, why the hell not Sudan?”
“If one of the affected governments asks for foreign intervention, we will consider it. Are there any further questions?”
Elijah Robicheaux raised his leathery, wrinkled hand.
Eli was an elderly black man who had first been a furniture restorer and then a Buddhist monk before his mutation was discovered, and if Nicholas Johnson was the face of the TOCU pilots, Eli was its heart. He defused arguments, mediated disputes between the pilots and BN, and generally served the role of binding together a group of people who had almost nothing in common besides their shared brain mutation. It was from Eli’s example that Nicky got his theories about how to fix America.
“Yes, Mr. Robicheaux?” General Polonsky said.
“What has the international reaction been, may I ask?” he asked, lowering his trembling hand.
Polonsky put his hands behind his back. “We know for sure that China, the United European States, South Africa, the African Union, and PRH are aware of the jinn and preparing responses, and we can assume any country with a halfway-competent intelligence apparatus knows as well. However, as yet, there has been no international response. Any further questions?”