|
|
|||||
Three:
The cold Martian Sun shone down on Jackson Todd as he ambled his way through the Martian
dessert, past rocks and Oxy-Gen Dyson plants (some two stories high) and several forgotten spider-like metallic probes
still clacking around on their solar cells. He knew if he didn’t get help soon that
he would die.
His Herbert Suit—nanomachined from Arachnoid silk, full of photosynthetic cells and
pressurized—simply could not sustain him for more than an hour more. That was in
violation of the suit’s warranty, but there wasn’t any way to prosecute even
back at the station, let alone out here in the Red Dust swirl. Even out here, Todd could
feel the faint slap of the free market’s invisible hand. But he knew that his chances
were better out in this excuse for Martian Air than branded as a heretic back at the
United States Pat Robertson Orbital Platform, where you were guilty until proven innocent.
The working version of his ideology wasn’t quite up to snuff here in 2018 and no one
cared that he was a bad-ass. As he started to fade from consciousness, he thought that he
saw an angel come down from the skies which was strange being that he was a closeted
agnostic. Times were not good for Jackson Todd and that’s all that mattered. One:
Just shortly after 2002, the Wild Shatner and Unfurled Jetsons future that everyone talked
about but never had shown up, arrived in a succession of loud breakthroughs and shockingly
elegant solutions.
Zyvex finally finished its first working assembler; a new synthetic copper process had
made solar cells much cheaper than what the plantation utilities were offering, and the
French car that ran on air not only worked, it could be modified to run on agriculturally
grown fuels. Moller even found he could use it in his aircar, which actually flew in the
air, and which went for a successful test flight that June. Utopia appeared to be right
around that corner. Bravely,
The Utopian Future walked around that corner and found itself flattened by a big fat
guzzling SUV. Oh, the injustice of it all. That Future, now broken-boned and limp, cursed
its bloody-lipped thanks to the Bush administration. The primary lesson of the 2000
election, that the Rich White Boy had stolen, is that he made it very clear that the
Republican Party uses ideas only to further its own interests and that of its poorly
disguised masters: Primarily Big Oil and generally Big Industry, the more old-monied and
uncompetitive the better. If state’s rights and pronouncements against judicial
activism got in the way of power, then there would be a quick conversion to federal
interventionism and the proper use of judicial activism until the power was attained.
Then, a conspicuous return to state’s rights and stern jeremiads against judicial
activism. A contradiction that no one in the corporate media seemed to catch as they were
more concerned by Hillary Clinton’s baggy eyes and her new Senatorial low-profile
hair. Similar
expediency reared its ugly head when the Miracle Tech came on the scene. The Federal
Energy Regulation Committee, for “safety” reasons, put the first working
assemblers, thought also to yield massive energy savings and efficiencies, under an
indefinite review. As for solar cells, Bush and his friends in Congress passed federal
laws that taxed states that used solar energy and passed prohibitive phantom taxes and
zoning rules that made alt fuels practically impossible to use at the home—where it
was most efficient to use. Bush pals Sam Fox and Enron—both of whom cleaned up big
time during the Californian energy disaster--paid for most of the lobbying. The
transportation department put the big kibosh on the French Air car and its wonderfully
modified engine. Energy Czar Spence Abraham cited the trumped-up reports—rumored to
have been engineered by a Big Three covert ops team—of spontaneous combustion of the
air-powered cars in Mexico in 2003 to force the American Licensees of the technology into
a “review” limbo. In 2004, the inventor of the French air-car died in a
mysterious car accident. His body was found at the bottom of a French ravine and a single
bullet had found its way into his forehead. More rumors but no one had been caught. By
the time Bush left office in 2008—his single-handed stoppage of all meaningful
election reform allowed the Republicans to keep buying the election cycle every four
years—things in the United States weren’t so good for the common man. The
minimum wage had pretty much been gutted by the new free trade agreements. You were lucky
to get a dollar an hour these days. There were new waves of crack, heroin and ecstasy
users thanks to the loosened Mexico border. There were also new concomitant waves of
prisons built to house mostly the white working class and poor minorities that used those
drugs. Gasoline had risen to $3 a gallon and utility bills often were the double of rent. Fully one half of black America was in poverty
and about a fifth were imprisoned. Homelessness was at a record height. The United States
now officially spent seven times as much on prisons as schools. Even the Klan made a great
comeback. Not only was a woman’s right to choose eliminated, contraception was
banned. There was even talk of mandatory “fixing” of men who weren’t saved
or had made public their love of Christ. It was pushed by the loonier fringes of the Pro
Life movement who now needed something more to do. Thank God prayer had been reintroduced
into the public square. But
these had been good years for Jackson Todd. Moller’s aircar survived the anti-tech
carnage that destroyed so many promising technologies in the double 0s. You could see
Jackson flying around Washington D.C. in one—an exact replica of Speed Racer’s
Mach 5—by 2007. The money was good for black apologists of the Republican onslaught
against the black community. When the Republicans worked to totally eliminate student aid
for higher education, it was Jackson Todd sitting in at Crossfire telling the
congressional son of Jesse Jackson that good hard work never hurt anybody—not
bothering to tell anybody that he had received a free college education. His position as a
professor was eliminated, but he was making good dollar as a hack for the National Review,
the Weekly Standard and Fox News. Rupert always sent Jackson a card at Christmas. Times
were good for Jackson Todd and that’s all that mattered. When
Dubya cloned his brother’s plan for completely eliminating affirmative action at the
federal level, it was Jackson Todd on Hannity and Combs who told them he was sick of the
paternalism that affirmative action conferred upon him—not mentioning how he had
benefited all of his life from diversity efforts. When affirmative action and the now
scant social safety net had been eliminated, it didn’t affect Jackson Todd. Speaking
fees and the sales of his book “Black Will to Power” were high, thanks to all
those Fox News appearances. True, his sister, newly divorced and part of the new poor,
died because she didn’t have health care insurance—like 50 million other
Americans—but that didn’t affect Jackson. Times were good for Jackson Todd and
that’s all that mattered. When the fight for a controversial choice for the Supreme Court got nasty and mean, it was Jackson Todd who said he was an all right fella despite the nominee’s public admiration of the Third Reich. The right to choice was eliminated a year later and the more draconian rules concerning speech on the internet were upheld by the Supreme Court. Todd’s cousin, Shire Philip, turned out to be a wanted man in the States because of all that soft porn he had been publishing at the website. Mandatory sentencing meant a five-year prison term for anyone publishing material determined to be harmful for minors—a standard that usually anyone could claim had been met. Yet Philip had made a decent buck self-publishing “Virtual Gods” and he fled to Europe where they refused to hand him over for what the European Union authorities had called “The Crime of Creativity”. He lived in a flat in London where he churned out his Orwell M. Skychom, radical space journalist, stories. He had already moved his sites to Europe. But that didn’t really affect Jackson Todd too much. Times were good for Jackson Todd and that’s all that mattered. But there was one disappointment: it turned out that Dubya hadn’t really done very much to push forward the space program. Dana Rohrbacher pushed for his Solar Array Satellite until Enron decided that it hadn’t yet figured out a way to get people to pay for the sun. But all that changed in 2010 when the Open Source anti-gravity movement found a way to get us off of the gravity well cheap and easy. Two: Zipping around Washington D. C. through the busy
streets and around the record homeless on his motorized Kamen, Jackson Todd turned his
thoughts to living in Space in 2012. When
the Indian and Japanese scientists were able to perfect their anti-gravity device through
years of an Open Source effort and posted the specs on the web for all to see and use, it
changed the economics of space instantly. No need
to figure out complicated propulsions to get off Earth or figure out where to cut weight
or even how to transport products down to Earth in a safe way or properly synchronize a
zillion and one redundant protocols to make sure you didn’t blow up during launch.
Successful anti-grav changed all that. The same Open Source movement that perfected the
drive also accelerated its development tenfold. Drive components swiftly mutated into a
means of propulsion. You could make Mars in an hour. Quickly, within several years of the
breakthroughs, two major exploration movements were started. The United States favored
orbital platforms and our president noted that it was God’s will that we ascend into
the heavens. It was named the Pat Robertson Orbital Platform. It was the size of a small
town and was built here on Earth as a giant Plexiglass Geodesic. Anti-grav made it easy to
transport beyond the Earth’s rim. The city was founded on strict free-market
principles and certain rules, such as the first amendment, were suspended because of what
the administration deemed as “space security”.
Meanwhile, overseas, the European Union had their own plans for Mars. As
a true patriot, Jackson Todd wanted in at the PR platform. Several were being built as
part of the Pat Robertson array that would house over 10000 people. It was time to call in
those favors to the right-wing that ran the country. He knew a Powerful White Man who
could get him on the platform. Jackson Todd was right. Even though he was 51 the new super
anti-oxidant and slow-telomere drugs made him feel as if he was trapped in his 30s. He was
healthy enough to go. He was assigned the high-prestige job of Minister of Truth, a public
relations job. Lift-off
in 2015 was the most exciting day of Jackson Todd’s life. He watched from the highest
point in the city—powered by massive anti-grav engines—as it floated silently
above Earth’s atmosphere. After the epiphany, everybody started to concentrate on
their work. The business of the United States Pat Robertson orbital platform was going to
be business. First, a number of near Earth objects were to be salvaged and mined outside
the station. Second, solar energy arrays were going to be set up in a cooperative
agreement with the oil industry to funnel energy not just to the Earth but the Moon.
Theoretically, with the materials in near Earth orbits and the resources on the moon this
could have been the start of the next great American expansion. Yet a funny thing happened
on the way toward the new Manifest Destiny: Not many people showed up. Or at least they
didn’t show up to live at the Pat Robertson orbital platform. The
masses of Earth were headed to the Free Societies of Mars sponsored by the European Union.
It really was kind of a no-brainer. The deal offered to Neo Martians—whether on the
orbital stations surrounding the planet or on the planet itself—was just much much
better. In an effort to draw inhabitants, settlers were offered land in an American west
kind of vein—something less than 40 acres, but substantial—several easy to build
geodesic homes for free, no property taxes—yet—and almost unprecedented personal
and civil liberties. Scientists, at the forefront of both the nan and biotech revolutions,
moved their operations to Mars. Some of the dangerous nan stuff still had to be regulated,
but you could do it at the Science City orbital platform near one of the Martian moons and
unlike on Earth you got to do it. Cloning wasn’t just allowed in the Martian Free
Societies, it was encouraged. The
founders of the Free Society, based on snatches of extroprian, compassionate democratic
capitalism and bits of socialist theory (state subsidized health care), wished to create a
society where the citizens were completely self-sufficient. Each city of 10000 inhabitants
built massive forests that not only provided oxygen for the colonists, but was full of
food stuffs that could be harvested. Everyone farmed their land using Fast Grow
hydroponics techniques. What
this meant is that the Martian citizen was independent. He didn’t need the state for
food or housing or property. It was a compromise between the Zubrin capitalist vision and
the Kim Stanley Robinson people’s collective. The idea being that you turn every
citizen into a property owner. Now, to get the free stuff, the citizen did have to sign a
contract saying that he or she would abide by the constitution—which was pretty easy
being that there were no rules in terms of personal conduct. The only rule is that you
couldn’t hurt other people and just about everything consensually agreed to was
allowed. You could shoot heroin until you turned blue and many did, but it was legal as
long as you didn’t hurt anyone else. Not only that but you could grow your own drugs.
But the drug culture was much less lethal than on Earth because people were honest about
it here and the scientists could build better drugs, so you got fewer impurities and only
slight hangovers. Shire Philip, one of the original writers of the first constitution,
lived in the Martian city of Metropolis, where he worked on his full-immersion vr novel
and worked as a consultant on creating an appropriate Rule of Law for the new society. The
free societies attracted everyone. Artists liked the freedom that allowed them to work on
their craft. Scientists and engineers also liked the freedom and challenges that the new
frontier offered. Middle Class and Poor people came because it offered them the chance to
own property and build a new world. You could get laid and do drugs and nobody would try
to arrest you. By 2018, the Martian free societies had over 10 million residents and a
thriving anarchic economy. It was the most democratic, free-thinking society ever created
in the solar system. Meanwhile,
Shire Philip’s cousin, Jackson Todd, wasn’t having as much fun at the United
States Pat Robertson Orbital Platform array. First of all, they had to fight to keep
people on the platform. People weren’t stupid. Give the average person a choice
between personal freedom and wealth and underclass servitude, most folks choose freedom
and wealth. The religious aspect to the platform turned out to be a disaster. Despite
Jackson Todd’s fervent plea against turning the Platform into a Christian Nation,
platform president Bauer Gary went right ahead with his plans. Todd’s job as the
official liar for the state was hard enough. Now, he had to try to shade the information
flow that went out through the platform in the same way as the Christian Broadcasting
System. The ironic thing is that there were all kinds of religious conflicts. Catholics,
the handful of Jews and devout Lutherans faced routine discrimination. Even among the
“saved” fundamentalists who ran things there were conflicts as to who was the
most “saved” in the Lord’s eyes. There wasn’t a single Mormon at the
array. Scientologists, if they ever made it on the platform, were to be stoned on sight.
In fact, most religious people went to the Mars colonies, where discrimination on the
basis of creed was strictly prohibited and the laws were enforced. Religious people just
had to understand that the separation between church and state meant just that. Women
were treated as second-class citizens at the PR platform. Their most prominent anti-grav
specialist, who happened to be female, died during childbirth. The doctors knew that she
would probably die during childbirth but she wasn’t able to get an abortion even to
save her own life. There was even a prohibition against a new technology that would have
allowed her to transfer the fetus to an artificial womb—it was developed by
scientists at the Martian orbital platform of Science City—because it was against
God’s Way, whatever that meant. Being that the dead woman in question was Rachel
Todd, Jackson’s wife of one year, it made him question his place on the platform here
in 2018. As
the Minister of Truth, he was getting the blame for the station’s woes because the
workers, who could more appropriately be called indentured servants, were learning about
the comparative and overwhelming benefits of the Martian Free Societies despite his many
attempts at censorship and out and out propaganda. He ordered stories about the crazed and
anarchic Martian society to be posted on the public portals at all times. “Homeless
everywhere”. “Sex for sale” and the like would be pumped like mantras from
the platform’s feeds. But the message wasn’t sticking. The internet was really
hard to censor thanks to ultrawide broadband and the thousands of Picosats—put there
by Open Source Anarchic Front members—that were floating around the solar system.
They offered uncensored feeds. People were watching the 70 or so Mars Survivor series and
they knew that life in the Martian colonies was Cool. The
final straw came when The Powerful White Man, who had assigned him his ministerial
position, knocked on his door one day. Jackson had been sipping his weekly dose of anti
aging therapies which had probably reduced his 57 years in age to his early 20s. His
patron had told him that there was a new law against the anti-aging therapies. Bewildered,
Jackson sputtered that without the drugs not only would his standard of living decline, he
would probably be dead in five years knowing the lifespan of males in his family. The
patron explained that whatever was United States law applied here and that was now the law
in the Platform. He had watched the campaigns in the United States to eliminate anti-aging
therapies. The Fundies, radical fundamentalist Christians, led the charge, which was
signified by the stirring cry of “Long Live Death” and “Christians believe
in Death” and so on. Jackson ignored this stupid new rule of course, until he got
caught. The only reason he was allowed to pay the exorbitant non-refundable bail was
because he was a ministry hotshot. But the new law carried with it a mandatory five year
sentence back on Earth, which without the restorative powers of his therapies meant a
death sentence. That’s
when Jackson Todd thought it might be a good time to leave Dodge. He took his Mach 5,
which had been modified for short space travel and had new anti-grav engines, on a
seemingly routine flight—he often took short 30 minute jaunts around the array
because it was quite breathtakingly beautiful--around the station and made a straight
beeline to Mars. He couldn’t go back to Earth because he would be charged and
extradited. Mars would allow him to stay. The citizens there had a healthy loathing for
most Terran law. He had a cousin there. Perhaps he could help him. Should take him about 5
hours. He
actually wasn’t qualified to drive in space. Long ago, he had to obtain an airplane
license to fly the airca. He simply uploaded a Windows GUI to his car computer which
reportedly would allow a 5 year old to operate a ship in space. The Free Society
authorities scanned his ship with ultra wideband sensors to make sure he wasn’t a
Fundie with a pocket nuke as he zoomed in on the Martian atmosphere. That’s when his
software failed and his anti-grav started to work only intermittently. He used an
assortment of anti-grav and traditional flying techniques just to skid to a stop on a
desert patch some 15 miles away from Metropolis. His craft wasn’t flyable so he had
to walk. He had sent out a few PDA alerts to his cousin. He hoped that he still had that
old Yahoo address… Four:
Jackson Todd awoke to the Martian sky refracted through a geodesic pattern. Five meters
away his cousin was cooking vegetables. Shire Philip had rescued him from death. He must
have kept that old Yahoo address.
“Oh, I see you’re up. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,” his cousin
said.
“Wha-what happened?” asked Jackson.
“You had collapsed out in the Martian dessert. It’s kind of funny. If you
had continued onward for about 50 yards and made it over the hill you would’ve made
it to the entrance of the Sweet Thang Brothel. Perfectly legal here of course. Ever see
the Rain Story in the film version of The Illustrated Man?….Well, I guess you had to
be there…”
“Shouldn’t I be getting medical care or something?” Jackson asked,
as he let his eyes roam around the premises. He seemed to be in the middle of three
geodesic domes. They were pretty massive structures. The highest point seemed to be about
fifty yards up and the structures were just as wide. It was decked out with all kinds of
exotic electronic stuff, autonomous droids and one or two sex robotic sex dolls (Looked
like Courtney Love and that bespectacled woman in the Lesbian hit “Go Fish”) and
dozens of plants. He thought he saw a football sized farm covered in plastic shielding
about 100 yards away from the domes.
“Well, you have received care,” said Philip. “I did an ultrawide
scan on you and four or five online doctors pronounced you healthy and fit. I did lower
the Gs in here so that you could breathe a little easier. See, out here we don’t let
anyone die for lack of health care, even sainted defectors from the PR Platform.”
“Defector? Already?,” inquired Todd.
“Well, you were out about a day or so. And PR Attorney General Keyes
Allan—you remember him, right, the other black man on the station—he’s
already upped your sentence to public hanging. So I wouldn’t be traveling back to the
platform or the United States anytime soon.” He handed Jackson a big bowl of fried
broccoli and onions, covered in some kind of soy sauce and melted swiss cheese. It was
actually kind of tasty thought Jackson.
“You know, how did it move so fast Shire…If I was writing science fiction
20 years ago and I imagined all this nobody would take me seriously. How did this fiction
become real?” asked Jackson as he munched on his broccoli.
“Well, we owe it to the Open Source movement,” Shire mused. “It got
scientists working in tandem on a lot of these issues. And they solved them. Artificial
gravity was the big one of course. But the big product assemblers helped a lot. Turning
the grav into a propulsion system. Artificial photosynthesis. Added up.”
“Hey, uh, why were you the one who found me out there,” countermused
Jackson. “I sent word out to the authorities and you…”
“I am the authorities out here Jackson. I been deputized,” said Shire
matter of factly.
“A shameless commie pinko like you…a cop?”
“Orwell was a cop. And there are lots of shameless pinkos out here who
don’t want to be cops,” Shire conceded. “On the other hand, there’s
real crime on Mars. It starts with murder and gets worse. We know there’s a slave
trade ring out in the belts. All kinds of experimentation with rogue sentient AI’s
and bio dolls. Some of its quite legal. Some isn’t.
“Plus, I actually believe in this society. I don’t mind fighting to
protect it. We asked for volunteers for a protection force and we got more than we could
handle. We had to turn people away. People love this society. Once you’ve set up the
farms you have plenty of free time, but the solar cell droids can do most of the work. You
know, you were always against societal satisfaction and comfort because you believed that
it blinded the masses to the potential of space. When it was just the opposite: the misery
of grinding out your life blinds you to the potential of space. It takes a certain amount
of free time and leisure to dream.
“People here use that free time to create. Martian society is an arts
generator. The state provides for a militia and health care. The funding all came from sex
and gambling of course. And there’s a one percent sales tax on all transactions. But
that’s a pittance compared to what people pay on Earth.
“We’ve created a free and intelligent society here. We also know that
we’re going to war with the Fundies eventually. Our whole way of life challenges
their repressed and limited view of the world. That’s why I’d like you to join
the Martian forces.”
The offer startled Jackson. “A fascist like me…?”
“Well,” said Shire, “Fascists do believe in law and order.
Especially when they get to do the law and ordering. You’ve always expressed the
fascist admiration for police states and militia officials. Well, here’s your chance.
Mars needs cops…”
“What about my age?” asked Jackson, who was beginning to find the aspect
appealing. “And would I get to beat up
homeless people?”
Shire clicked on some television, which was a
3 dimensional cube 6 by 6 feet and responded: “Out here age therapies are not
only legal, they’re encouraged. Actually, it is unfair in a way. I have almost 60
years of experience and the body of a 20 year old. I
really don’t need the sex droids anymore. I use Courtney and the lesbo chick mostly
for farming. They’ve got great sensitive hands,” explained Shire. “As for
beating up our homeless, no. In fact, we import them. Out here, even your crap is
important. We recycle it for both methane energy and fertilizer. Some of our forests are
already miles long. Plus, we have a rat and vermin problem. The homeless are great
scavengers. We just let them loose. We even put up tents and toilets.
“You know, the United States has become a real Hell hole. The Jackson Todd
Continuum has really f___ed things up down there. Dickens would be aghast at the gulf
between the rich and the poor. So many people are leaving for Mars that they’re
thinking of closing down the borders. But anyone with a modified aircar can make the trip,
just like you did with the Mach 5. We and the droids salvaged your vehicle by the
way…so what do you say?”
Jackson Todd put his bowl down and took a few steps around. He was a true patriot
and there was something about all of humanity having dignity and the potential to reach
self-actualization that sickened him. The free society was like the face of a smiling
child that he wanted to kick in. Still, this was better than death. He could get his own
land and farm. He had one question though:
“Do I get to use my Klingon sword?”
“Down here, you could use any weapon you want, except a gun. That’s a
coward’s weapon. They’re banned here,” said Shire. “Not that a gun
would do much good against spider silk clothing anyway.”
“Cool,” replied Jackson Todd, as they shook hands on it. Times were hard
to discern for Jackson Todd, and he wasn’t sure yet if that was all that
mattered… Next on Martian Law ‘N Order: Todd and Philip fight an infamous Fundie terrorist known as the Dogmatic Man…
|
|
||||
