Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them…It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
--Adam Smith - 1735
* Chapter 1 - Not with a bang but a whimper.
“If Dad doesn’t let me get Renegade Revenge, I’m going to kill myself,” T-roy stated flatly – very matter of fact, without turning his attention from the screen.
“Don’t say that, Choy. You go to Hell if you kill yourself, you know? It says so in the Bible,” I was only slightly more interested in his comment than the act of needling his insecurities over the pronunciation of his name. He took after Mom, which somehow made me want to tease him endlessly.
“It’s Troy, damnit T-Roy! T-Roy! And…No, it doesn’t say that,” he shot back without even turning from the commercial.
“Yeah, it does, T-roy” I sounded very official and wise.
He didn't like my over-pronunciation, but it avoided spurring his friends to call him "Bok Choy" and the like, and thus was marginally acceptable. “Well, what if you were going to kill yourself, like jump in front of a transport. But on your way you…,” he searched for something reasonable. “On your way, you fall down some stairs and get killed by accident?” I guess it sounded reasonable to him.
“Well, that’s an accident. You didn’t kill yourself. Maybe you would have backed out at the last minute with your little plot to improve the gene pool. Even if the initiative was there, you wouldn’t go to Hell,” I felt quite proud for navigating his juvenile obstacle.
“OK then,” he resumed thoughtfully. ”You were going to throw yourself in front of a transport coming from the right, but on your way into the street, you don’t notice a different transport coming from the left, and it hits you?” he raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Now I’ve got her!” his eyebrows betrayed his premature celebration.
He would continue this way all day, or possibly all week. I regretted ever opening my mouth now. “It’s the same as the stairs. Perhaps you would chicken out at the last minute, and so you wouldn’t go to Hell.” He looked skeptically at the repeated answer, so I knew I would have to develop it further. “The intent is important. If you die, Mom and Dad will miss you and they will mourn for your loss. Why? I don’t know. But if you intend to kill yourself, then it would be more like an attack on them, and it would hurt them differently. The guy in the transport that hit you would say you were looking the other way and you didn’t see him coming. So your death certificate would read ‘Death from Stupidity’.” I gave myself a little pat on the back for the double score of successful defense plus bonus insult.
“But…when you left the house, there would be a suicide note, saying that you intended to throw yourself under a transport,” he grinned wide with the realization that victory was within his grasp.
I was tired of the game. “You’re right, you win. You’re definitely going to Hell.”
I was distracted from our quibble when Dad walked in the door earlier than normal, without his normal energy. So it drew my attention as he walked haltingly over to my mother. They began talking deliberately and quietly. I could hear the rumble of his timbre in their secretive whispers, but the words evaporated from the air just before they reached my comprehension. It was clear that it was alarming Mom, as a wave of panic flowed from her eyes and her spine stiffened. A choked, "You what?! James, we talked about…" escaped from her before she could get control and return again to the hushed tones beyond my hearing. I remember her trying to hide her sobbing as she helplessly watched my father pull my brother and me together on the couch to share the news.
Thoughts of divorce or a family death raced through my mind as we sat there in the awkward silence waiting for someone to open it up. Oh God, I hope T-roy doesn’t ask for Renegade Revenge now. The little twerp never reads these situations right.
"I quit my job today," my father began bluntly with a heavy sigh. I wrestled with that idea for a few moments. It didn't carry the weight of what I had feared. It didn't sound that bad. My mother was clearly wounded, but Dad seemed very much the opposite, almost relieved. "I also liquidated my retirement plan," his voice becoming lighter ".. investments," his shoulders lifting," and I’m putting the house and cars up for sale." Holy shit, that sounds more serious! I could feel my heart aching in my chest and my neck throbbing to my heartbeat.
“Are….are you leaving us?” I stammered.
"No, we are leaving, all of us together, as soon as the house sells. We are going to Sub 42." A quick glance passed between Dad and Mom, telling me that this wasn’t the first disagreement over this plan.
I had a biased idea of what Sub 42 was, from the news coverage. The early days were more clear. It was created by a successful entrepreneur named Hans Gherlich, a self-made man who found himself and his resources perfectly poised to take advantage of the second space boom, where humans left Earth, and pioneered the moon, and then beyond to Mars. Although the galactic travel was still going strong, it became apparent that extra-planetary existence would only be sought by those to whom the quality of life was less important than niche tourism, scientific curiosities or precious material mining. When the confetti had fallen, and the champagne ran out, the media glitz faded over these simply desperate places to exist.
Hans became a recluse as the second space boom was winding down. Around the time I was born, Hans returned to the public spotlight by announcing his bold view for the future embodied in a project he called Sub 42. This new endeavor was to purchase the subterranean space, minus mineral rights, beneath Southeastern Africa. Fossil fuels were no longer significant commodities in the developed nations, but they still had primary usage in poorer countries, such as Africa. Hans intended to turn this subterranean space into a fully self-sustaining habitat.
This was not earth-shattering news, as many self-contained surface habitats already existed. What made Sub 42 such a controversy was that it was not within the rule of any sovereign nation. South Africa had been ravaged by plague and poverty for over a century. Neglected by the rest of the world as a wasteland of people and resources, this pariah proved the perfect foreground to Hans' forage underground.
“This is a chance for us. An opportunity to zero our debts and start over in a place where the cards aren’t stacked against me,” he cut the word off short, “against us,” he corrected. His shoulders seemed large and gave an air of confidence. Only the thin line of his eyes drawn tight betrayed his pleading need to be validated by followers.
Normally, I would feel perfectly comfortable interjecting my own opinions into a family discussion about what’s for dinner, a major purchase or even how T-roy should be punished. But these developments felt too large and far too risky for my contribution. I pursed my lips and cut an eye to T-roy to do the same. He seemed to catch the hint and remained motionless with a trepid countenance of guilt that he was somehow to blame for all of this.
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As I said, the early days had a clear vision and drove a clear divide between those early adopters and the rest of us. Only the wretched rabble clinging to the outer fringes seemed to, thankfully, vanish. A pop phenomenon, Sub 42 had been simultaneously the butt of jokes and lightning rod of political discussions for as long as I could remember. But over the years, it became shrouded in the hushed rumors of increasingly close acquaintances that had allegedly made the forlorn journey. Nobody close to us, mind you…but people the people you know of knew of.
It took a surprisingly brief five weeks to find my mother, father, brother, and me in a taxi to the Salt Lake City International airport in Utah. Disassembling our lives was a whirlwind affair. The house sold quickly, amazingly. The car and all our furniture and belongings had been sold off in the short weeks prior. There was no floor to where the price mattered to Dad. “We won’t need this where we’re going,” he would say in a tune like it was the punchline of an inside joke we shared. It was all happening so fast, I didn’t even question it at first.
This is when my memories really came into focus for me. Before, my life had been an existence. I had friends and experiences, but they are all kinda murky to me now. Most of it, I am sure is due to the cloud of youth, but a good amount was due to the absolute un-eventfulness of my life. Outdoors was too harsh to spend any significant time, and we weren’t really wealthy enough to belong to the ultra-nodes. The ultra-nodes were enormous structures where fields for polo, soccer or football could be had or with natural-looking lakes, all completely housed indoors, were sealed from the elements of earth, wind, and solar maelstrom.
Outside wasn't the dystopian drab grey against black ash the media had projected. It was quite beautiful. Many species of animals flourished in the absence of us, and the green tendrils of Mother Nature were voracious. It was just inhospitable for…”us”. The prep-work and risk of spending any time outdoors were easily outweighed by the fact that you had quick and riskfree access to the nearly indistinguishable VR. Well, not indistinguishable so much as not worth the effort to pay attention to details you couldn't change. It seemed to me that our relationship with nature was turned on its head. Where we once ruled out there, we now were sequestered to the protective shelters of the nodes, and all of creation now roamed freely.
Well, not all of “us”. On the opposite side of the ultra-nodes were the night stalkers. They weren't really stalkers or zombies or anything, but they came out as the sun faded. Less prep-work was required to protect from the sun’s rays. But it was still hot and dangerous as hell. They were just poor souls that didn't work for a corporation that could provide access to resources, so they lived on the edge of civilization and on the fringe of daylight. The police had given up on patrolling out there long ago. It was more efficient and cost-effective to protect the nodes. If the night stalkers found something useful out there, they were welcome to it. Nobody had left anything out in the free range for a long time.
We were the in-betweens. Dad had a good job and, while T-roy and I could always find something more we needed, we were very comfortable. We weren't ultra-node class or night stalkers. We spent most of our time in our house, or the neighborhood node. While a good effort to give us community kids a place to play, neighborhood nodes were boring and made me feel more like a caged animal than a playful youth. Even if they look pretty from the pictures, 20,000 square feet is 20,000 square feet. Once you have explored it a dozen times, there is just nothing exciting left, even with the people. So I wound up spending most of my time in the picturesque sunlit fields of my VR.
Then, as struck from a dream, “Dad, what about school?”
“Sam, you know you can study with your friends from anywhere,” He said with a reassuring smile. It was true, all of our classes had been online after primary school. I did still see my friends IRL from time to time, but it was a giant hassle. Once you got there, it wasn’t all that different than your own neighborhood and not really worth the effort as compared to just connecting with them in seconds over the verse.
“Mom, what are you and Dad going to do, you know, make money?” I asked.
“Why don’t you ask your Dad, hon.” she said over her shoulder as she packed some heirlooms she planned to ship to a cousin of hers.
Dad had become a servant to debt. The cost of our home and various collections of things consumed the bulk of his paycheck. The rest was taken by paying for our future education and their retirement. There wasn’t any government-subsidized education or retirement plans, all of that had gone to private companies before my parents had begun their working lives and the responsibility of it all had aged him. Not so much in the creases of his middle-aged face but in his energy and his attitude. I could see it plainly now in such stark contradiction to his newly developing attitude. Mom on the other hand seemed more weighed down with each asset we unloaded.
On one of the last days, Dad stopped from one of his merry chores and looked sympathetically into my eyes. “I know this may seem scary, Sam. Believe me, I have considered so many options for a very long time now.”
Dad was a chemist, or at least he had been a long time ago. Now he was in management at a company that designed chemicals targeting the recycling of the toughest hazards, like cobalt.
He continued, “When the Woods Group consolidated the biometalurgy market last year and purchased Soliant,” whom Dad worked for.” It really closed down my options.” he paused thoughtfully. “The company is able to keep more money if they can produce at the same level, without having to pay as much out to do business. Such as, investing in the maintenance of our factories. I discovered several months ago that a lot of the waste byproducts were being shipped out there,” the thumbed over his shoulder toward a bulkhead of the node. “You see, nobody is really paying close attention out there anymore, as long as we are maintained well-off in here. And processing that waste byproduct of the recycling is somewhere near 10 times more expensive than dumping it.”
“What’d you do?” I asked with a sense of urgency.
“Phillip, honey. Do you really need to drag her into this?” Mom had been listening.
“She deserves to know, Sylvi. This affects her too,” he was firm, but not mean. “I was reviewing our metrics for my division and noticed that we were far more profitable than expected. At first, the Woods executives were congratulatory. They celebrated our acquired division as a leading example of why the purchase of Soliant was a win-win for both companies. But the more I dug into the numbers, the more they turned from rewards, to keep me from wanting to look too closely, to warnings. A couple of weeks ago, those indirect suggestions became a direct threat when they told me we would lose our benefits and I would find myself driving one of these transports to the dump myself if I didn't stop digging.”
“But, couldn’t you talk to someone? anyone? The media?” he was already shaking his head as I raced through options.
“No Sam. I don’t believe I can change this, at least not in time to take care of the needs of raising this family,” he said defeatedly.
“You’re not blaming me for this!” I was suddenly heated. “We’ll be fine. I don’t need all this stuff. we can…”
“I’m not blaming you. I couldn’t be an anonymous whistleblower. I was too naive and they knew I had discovered this situation. I don’t have enough in savings to sustain us here while I fight some legal case. And I don’t know how quickly I can find another job where Woods couldn’t tarnish my reputation before I get an interview. So much is about who you know.” He looked down and wrestled with the other thing on his mind. The real reason. “And to tell you the truth, Sam. I don’t know that’d I’d want to find another job. It’s the same mess, just a new brand. I want to give you and Troy a different option in life. An opportunity. Look, I don’t know if it’s any better, but I want to see it for myself. If it’s not better, we don’t have to commit.”
Mom never appeared from where she was listening to us. Never pouring on when I was pushing, and never defending the decision. Just listening.
We managed to make over a million global credits after selling everything, which thoroughly impressed T-roy and me. We took that, a week’s worth of clothing, our personal visys (nicknamed for vitae systema because they connected us to everything and went with us everywhere) and boarded the A780 for Maputo, Mozambique Africa.
I looked back at the airport tunnel as we boarded. Dad walked straight ahead with a smile and his arm around T-roy's shoulder as he blathered about something. Mom paused and straightened up as a tear rolled down her cheek, betraying her smile to urge me onward. I turned towards the heat of the plane at the end of the ramp.
I found myself sharing both Dad’s contagious excitement and Mom’s exhausted angst.