Kensi Patton:
My brother had an end specialization performed three months ago. He was thirty. That wasn’t his cure age. That was his real age. Thirty with a cure age of twenty-six. And when he decided to end his life, the state was more than happy to send two people over to assist him.
I can’t help but think he died not only because he wanted to, but because everyone else wanted him to. That’s what this is really about. We spend forty minutes waiting in line at the charging station, we spend an hour looking to park, we share a one-room apartment with three other people, and we’re wishing everyone else would just get out of our way.
And now we’ve agreed, as a society, to implement a program that performs assisted suicides without any consideration of whether someone has been here thirty years or a hundred years. Aren’t there some people out there worth saving? Karl Olmert tried to commit suicide as a teenager, and now he’s one of the finest architects on earth. Now that wouldn’t happen. Should we simply let people like him vanish because we aren’t willing to share?
I heard a rumor recently about a fire department dispatcher in a town in Massachusetts. Sometime last year the dispatcher got a call in the middle of the night. It was a relay from a 911 operator. There was a fire in a housing project. One of the really bad ones—drugs, gang members, all of it. When the operator told the dispatcher about the fire, he refused to send a truck to put it out. “Spontaneous end specialization,” he said. Then he hung up and went back to playing solitaire on his WEPS while the firemen slept upstairs. They just let the thing burn. No one ever reported the fire on their feed. No one ever figured out how many people perished or how the fire began. No one cared. That’s how cheap life is now. We get a surplus, and we burn it off.
I wonder if those firemen would have rescued my brother. Clearly, no one else wanted to bother.
DATE MODIFIED:
3/8/2059, 4:09 P.M.
A Few Minutes with the Worst Domestic Terrorist in American History
Randall Baines is still ranked number one on the FBI’s list of most-wanted fugitives. He’s been implicated in the July 3 bombings, so I know all about him. I see his face and I find myself again chased out of that hallway by the FDNY, forced to sit in a cold, gray stairwell while my best friend burns alive.
An anonymous journo who uses the pseudonym Flywheel was able to score an iFace interview with the guy. Everything about the video appears to be real. Here’s a section of the transcript :
Flywheel :
You’re sick?
Baines:
I am. I’m very sick.
Flywheel :
Cancer?
Baines:
I’m not going to go into details. But suffice it to say that my time here is nearing an end, which is as it should be. As you can see, I’m quite old.
Flywheel :
You never got the cure.
Baines:
No how, no way. True organic to the core.
Flywheel :
Never tempted?
Baines:
No. The people who have gotten it are fearful and weak. The average man—and I mean the truly average-inevery-way man—is led by a set of profound, animalistic urges that forever enslave him. And the cure has amplified those urges. That’s why you’re seeing the secessions. That’s why more and more walls are going up around homes and towns. That’s why the D36 gangs are raping and looting all over the place and why kooky Texans are shooting at trespassers with their bows and arrows. This is an epidemic of living.
Flywheel:
What about you? What about the lives you’ve taken?
Baines:
Everything I have done for this cause has been motivated by a single goal: saving lives. That’s what people fail to understand. Without death, we don’t learn a goddamn thing about life. I’m trying to
help
us here.
Flywheel:
Explain how killing over five hundred people helps.
Baines:
Because the people I have helped kill are facilitators of spreading the human virus across this planet. They are reckless people who are endangering the lives of everyone alive just so that the so-called luckiest generation can go around eating and drinking and having sex for an extra millennium.
Flywheel:
Well, wait a second. Wait a moment. Let’s get more specific about the people you have killed. In 2035 you helped orchestrate the bombing of a Vectril processing plant, an attack that killed over seventy-five people.
Baines:
That’s correct.
Flywheel:
Of those seventy-five people, fourteen were children who were attending a day care center in the plant. And the rest of the victims were plant workers and administrators who were simply trying to earn a living.
Baines:
Let me ask you a question. When we were in Afghanistan, did we kill civilians? Did we kill children?
Flywheel:
Yes. But that’s war.
Baines:
So is this! This is a war! This is the
only
war! In your so-called useful war, strategic targets, such as enemy arms stockpiles, are taken out. If there’s a kid killed in the blast, what does the army say? Well, that’s too bad. We’re sooooo sorry. But this was something we had to do in order to protect ourselves. Same logic here. Every doctor that prescribes Vectril and every store that sells it is a weapons stockpile.
Flywheel:
So is that how you justify having, in 2045, one of your colleagues walk into a CVS store in Chicago wrapped in C4, blowing it up and killing two dozen people?
Baines:
Yes. It’s justified because it helps contain the damage the cure is causing. I know much of this insurgency is powered by evangelicals and more extreme religious groups. But that’s not why I’ve taken up this cause. I have pragmatic reasons for trying to end postmortality in this country and the world at large. We’ve already seen the devastating effects of it, haven’t we?
Flywheel:
But how does killing hundreds of people change the situation? Isn’t it simply a drop in the bucket? You haven’t stopped the cure from spreading, and you aren’t going to. So why not face reality and look for solutions that don’t include shooting up a medical school or planting a pipe bomb in a testing facility?
Baines:
Excuse me, you’re saying
I
should face reality? Me? I am practically the
only
person in this nation who has any grasp on reality. I could have told you forty years ago that this cure would turn the Congo into a permanent slave state. I could have told you that it would deplete, entirely, the world’s supply of fish. I could have told you that it would cause India to instantly revert to abject poverty and despair. Look at that nation. It was on the brink of becoming one of this century’s great powers. Now it has two billion people and no possible way of accommodating them. That’s reality, and no one out there seems to give a shit because they’re too busy jumping around all excited and saying, “Whee! I get to live forever!” That’s why this cure is so insidious. People are endangering the entire planet simply by sitting there and
being
. What I am doing is providing the only jolt of reality left. Everyone thinks that they can’t die now. Well, they can. And they will.
Flywheel:
But now you’re going to die.
Baines:
I am.
Flywheel:
Don’t you fear that the cause dies with you? I’ve seen your face on the shirts. You’re the spiritual leader of this movement.
Baines:
That’s a load. I’m nothing. I am insignificant. The insurgency lives on with or without me. That’s the beauty of it—how decentralized it is. I didn’t plan the killing of Graham Otto. I didn’t plan the T. J. Maxx massacre in Houston. Those were all independently conceived and executed. And that’s why this insurgency will succeed. It needs no leader. The cause itself is strong enough to attract followers on its own. That’s why you’re seeing more people take it up, including those too poor now to afford the cure. You can’t kill the insurgency simply by killing one person or even a thousand. You can’t kill an idea.
Flywheel:
Will you kill again before you die?
Baines:
Yes.
Flywheel:
Would you kill me if I were sitting directly across from you?
Baines:
Did you get the cure?
Flywheel:
I did. I got it twenty years ago.
Baines:
Yes, I’d kill you. I wouldn’t even think twice about it.
DATE MODIFIED:
3/12/2059, 7:12 P.M.
Exit Interview:
Edgar DuChamp
Matt called me into the back room. I passed the giant orange boat and sunk down into the pit of couch cushions. I noticed a giant stuffed rooster in the middle of the coffee table. This was a decidedly new feature. The pictures on the wall had also been rearranged. Ernie says Matt does this at least six times a month.
I pointed to the rooster. “What is this?”
“It’s a rooster. I found it in a dumpster. The little auction house down the street was gonna toss it. You believe that?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Listen, we’re going full-time freelance with you.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”
“Look, do you want the job or not? You’ve done just fine with the alkies and the old cripples. Time to take you off the bunny slopes.”
“Are you sending me to a compound?”
His eyes sparked. “Yes. I am. Prepare yourself for the very mysterious, extremely dangerous slum known as Potomac, Maryland! You may never get out
alive
.”
Ernie and I got into the plug-in, sat on the Beltway for ninety minutes, crossed over the American Legion Bridge, and soon found ourselves in Potomac, a slice of lily-whiteness that remains unaffected by the general lunacy of the rest of the DC area. It doesn’t matter what happens in the future—wars, epidemics, whatever. I’m all but certain there will still remain these little bucolic footholds dotted across the land. Flawlessly landscaped country roads featuring one oversized house after another, all occupied by people who possess inexplicable amounts of free capital to spend as they please. Protected by walls and by the inherent charm of their existence.
I stared at the houses and compounds and considered an alternate version of my past that would have brought me to a place like this. A life where I had never stopped being a lawyer, where I married the mother of my child and settled down in a pristine burg, sealed cozily in a life of mild content. Each house we passed felt like a reflection of the finality of my own choices. I will never live in a place like this, and I have no clue if that’s a tragedy or not.
We cruised along one of the back roads at a crawl and came upon a white gravel driveway leading into a flat, wide crest of land that overlooked the far-stretching county below. The entrance to the compound was blocked by an enormous gate supported by a giant, whitewashed brick arch. At the top of the arch was a coat of arms featuring Mercury’s winged shoes. The gate itself was a set of huge cast-iron doors. No bars. Impenetrable as the darkness in a windowless room. We pulled onto the lip of the driveway.
Ernie stared at the crest. “I’ve seen this gate before. Like on TV. That coat of arms.”
“It’s the RideSwift logo,” I said.
“RideSwift?”
“Yup.”
RideSwift. The record label. The clothing label. The boutique mescal label. I once bought RideSwift sheets at Daffy’s. It was not a wise purchase.
I looked at our case file on the WEPS. The name was Edgar DuChamp. I hadn’t even bothered to glance at our client’s name before we left. But there it was: Edgar DuChamp, the Swift. Ordering himself a deathgram.
We pushed the button on the intercom in the archway. A stern voice immediately asked us what we were doing in the driveway. We told the voice who we were and where we were from. The voice angrily dismissed us and told us to leave. But just as it was finishing berating us, another voice in the background started yelling at the first voice. “Charles!
Charles!
Those are the guys! Those are the guys he asked for!”
The intercom went dead and the gate opened. Two very large men were standing behind it. Both had guns. They approached our plug-in, dressed in black suits with orange bow ties. Official uniform of the black collectivist movement. I know very little about the Church of the Black Man, only that I have never been invited to any of its functions. The two men flanked the car and knocked on our windows. Ernie rolled his down. One of them leaned into the plug-in and pointed ahead. “Drive to the end of the road,” he said. “There’s a parking circle in front of the house. Park at exactly nine o’clock on the circle—that’s nine o’clock if the front door is at twelve. Do
not
park right in front of the door. It messes with the aesthetic. And leave your keys with Terry, at the door, in case he needs to move your car or go out for snacks.”
We did as instructed and got out of the plug-in. The wall of the compound ran along the driveway and down the hill like a giant white zipper. Another man in a COBM uniform walked our way and immediately escorted us through the huge wooden portico and into the house. I expected to be blinded with opulence upon entering the Swift’s home: framed movie posters, gold banisters, stripper poles in the kitchen—every cliché fast money can purchase. It was nothing like that. Instead we entered a deluxe log cabin. Stacks of notched tamarack trunks lined the walls and met in cog joints at every corner. Thick log rafters strutted end-to-end across the tops of the stacks. Fleecy blankets were draped over every handrail and easy chair. Big, soft, smushy sectionals dominated the vast main space that lay below the foyer. A butcherblock island the size of Manhattan was all that separated the open kitchen from the main room. Hanging overhead was a chandelier made entirely of reindeer antlers. It was the kind of house the Texan’s gun felt at home in.