Ethan and Bill sat all night talking in the sewer station. Ethan was trying to figure out where one story started and the other ended. Because Bill had been in his previous quest, Ethan was sure he would feature prominently in this one as well and what he needed to know regarding the quest would come from Bill.
“Do you mind telling me the events that lead up to you coming to New York?” Ethan asked.
“Well, in a lot of ways, we were fighting the same demons as you. Whitehead and his henchman Schneider. They wanted to start a garbage depot on our land. Not just any garbage depot either. Hazardous materials, plastics, even spent nuclear fuel rods they planned to bury in the ocean. Everything from everywhere around the world. They expropriated our lands to do it. We fought them in the courts, but of course that was a waste of time. In the end, in protest, we set up a barricade at the construction site and occupied the land.
Things escalated quickly. Usually with a protest there’s a process. Government and the law get involved to try to negotiate a settlement. Not this time.
Whitehead immediately ferried in about 100 goons one night while we sat unaware. All they brought with them were things like knives, clubs and hammers. They came to beat the shit out of us, not just kill us, and they did. We weren’t expecting them, and we weren’t expecting such violence.Almost every person there was either stabbed or bludgeoned to death.
Only two of us survived. Raven saw Tasha go down and saw she was dead. The fight stopped in him. He rushed over and carried Tasha away from the fight. That’s what saved him.
I wasn’t at the campsite at the time of the attack. That’s how I lived through it. I was feeling uneasy that night. Things didn’t feel right, and I felt something was going to happen. I decided to patrol the area and make my way down to the dock. A ferry was docked there. The goons were already disembarked and making their way to our campsite. At first, I was going to run to help the others, but I knew being there wouldn’t change anything. I was still going to go, but then I saw Whitehead himself, standing on the deck of the ferry. Watching over the proceedings. I said to myself, “There’s the enemy. Whitehead is the one I should be fighting”.
I boarded the ferry and made my way to where Whitehead was standing. Along the way, I found an axe someone forgot in the passenger area of the ferry. Not having a weapon, I grabbed it. I intended to kill Whitehead”.
“Excuse me,” Ethan interrupted. “Do you still have that axe”?
“I do”.
“Hmph!” Ethan snorted, as he was prone to do, when something worthy of consideration passed him by. “Continue please”.
“I reached Whitehead unnoticed. The axe in my hand had a nice, easy feel to it”.
“I bet it did,” Ethan interrupted again.
Bill looked at him questionably.
“Sorry,” Ethan said. “Continue”.
“I moved outside to where Whitehead was standing and used some lifeboats as cover while I moved towards him and came right up beside him. So close I could hear him breathing. I felt the brute power of the axe I held, and just as I was about to make my move, a bank of overhead flood lights came on directly above Whitehead. At the same time that brute Schneider and a bunch of his goons shows up.
“Boss,” he says. “We have intel there’s a hostile in the vicinity. We’re combing the area, but we’ll have to remove you from exposure for the time being”.
“They took him away. I lost my chance to kill him. I crept back into the shadows, and hid myself under the tarp of a lifeboat until we arrived at a port in Seattle. From there, I followed Whitehead here to New York. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to avenge my people ever since”.
“Well, you might get your chance,” Ethan replied. “But tell me. What happened to your world? How did you get to this state”?
“What do you mean”?
“I have to tell you Bill. I’m looking around. I’m not seeing a lot of promise here. Did civilization not come to a time when it said, ‘Enough!’ and together stood up and took the world away from the bad guys”?
“No. I mean there was the odd group out there making noise about one cause or another, but the common consensus was things were beyond our control. We didn’t know what we could do. Basically, we just watched the world fall around us. Last year everything got worse. This world became final and memories of our old world fade fast here. There’s no hope anymore. Just this”.
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“What do you mean you watched the world fall?” Ethan asked.
“Like the climate crisis. Right up until the end we accepted our leaders' promises that they were taking steps to make things better.Every year they gathered and came up with all these commitments and made a big show about how they were taking action. Then the oil companies, the very people who so hungrily drove us to the crisis point, came in and declared they would provide a measured reduction of human dependence on natural resources. They never did stop drilling. As a matter of fact, they started drilling more.
“This was going on at the same time the economy was falling apart. No one had job security anymore. Most didn’t have a job at all. If they did it was short lived. Even parents who had a little stashed away, quickly went through their savings. There was no money in the consumer economy, and billions of people were fighting just to survive. This happened almost overnight.
“All this was going on while a huge geopolitical shift was taking place. What we now call Eastworld was trying to change the world order. It formed colonial alliances with two thirds of all the countries in the world. Westworld sat and watched doing nothing for the better part of the process. Eastworld developed its own currency, trade routes and the day came when Eastworld had dominant influence over the world. They built a whole new world around and to the exclusion of Westworld.
“As I said, all this stuff came to a head last year. Everything’s broken, and there’s no way to change it. There are only two leaders now, and one’s as bad as the other. Same shit. Different asshole. Neither one wants to commit to fighting climate change for fear the other will somehow turn it into a strategic advantage over them. Things like that prevent any progress”.
“Do the people still have some fight in them?” Ethan asked. “It looks like you formed a resistance of sorts”.
Bill snorted. “Resistance? No. We band together to try to stay alive. Most people are shut out from both worlds. In Westworld, they create barriers to prevent us from entering their communities. Eastworld has an open society, but it monitors everything, and I mean everything. Every street, building and everywhere else you can think of. Their people are free to live anywhere, even on the street, but if you’re not of the aristocratic class, you don’t exist. They ignore you completely. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re not watching. If you are starving and try to take food, organize, or even approach an aristocrat, you are immediately publicly executed on the spot. They have autonomous robotic guns attached to their cameras. No human intervention at all”.
“Wow,” Ethan said, shaking his head.
“So, what does all this have to do with you?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know,” Ethan replied. “This world seems to have a reality of its own, but also incorporates the worlds of my first two quests. This is a post apocalyptic world, so it’s the alternative to the post actualization world I come from. I know this for sure, because we have a very accurate model created by AI if we did not transcend. An uncontrollable environment, collapsed economy and the near absolute division of worldviews make up what AI calls the perfect storm needed to create such a world. At the moment my world veered off and transcended into oneness, yours continued along the trajectory created by the likes of Whitehead. If the AI model is correct, and I promise you it is, the entire population of this world will die off within a decade. Die an ever increasing horrible death.
“That sounds about right,” Bill replied. “That was our actualization. The moment our world separated into two, we all knew there was no longer an opportunity to change things and our lives were going to become hell. Is there nothing to be done”?
“It’s not a good place to be,” Ethan replied. “As you acknowledge, you’ve passed the point of no return. I’m sorry, but that’s how duality works. Your world became an entirely new thing, and mine an entirely other thing. That’s not to say nothing can be done from your new starting place. Your world has its own duality now. It can go one way or the other just as was the case when our worlds were one. You could choose the alternative to what you have right now, and you would repeat the lesson of finding your purpose on earth, but that’s like going back to when our species first evolved. I’m sure you noticed people here are more animal than human in their attempt to survive”.
Bill nodded in agreement. “Mostly,” he said.
“There’s maybe something we can do to speed things along,” Ethan continued. “What’s the AI situation here? Do you still have it”?
“It’s here. I know that much. Eastworld and Westworld are using it to carry on a cyber war. I’ve heard it's replaced conventional war”.
“Hmph,” Ethan grunted. “What are the dividing lines between Westworld and Eastworld”?
“Westworld is made up of North America, the UK, most of Europe and Australia. Eastworld is everything else”.
“So by population and land mass, Eastworld is much larger. That would suggest Westworld's AI is superior. Otherwise it would have fallen by now”.
“We might be able to do something with AI,” Ethan suggested after a moment's thought. “Amazing things happen once you get AI on your side”.
“How are we going to do that?”
“I don’t know. Let me think on it”, Ethan replied. “There’s one thing bothering me. Your following Whitehead to New York makes me think my last quest wasn’t as successful as I thought. It sounds like the Dragon slipped past us while we were fighting off the fallen angels and Dark Angel. When I left, we thought the Dragon was sealed back in the Borderland and we had taken away his power by killing off his army. I’m not so sure that’s what happened anymore. I don’t think I did what I was supposed to do during my last quest”.