Authors: Jeremy Bates
New America
Copyright © 2015 by
Jeremy Bates
First
Edition
The right of Jeremy Bates
to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.
All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of
fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
ISBN:
978-1-988091-03-7
One of the great, and often
overlooked, perks of life is choice. Most people don’t think about how many
choices they make in any given day, let alone over the course of a lifetime.
But you make millions, likely billions…which means you’re of course going to make
a few stinkers along the way. However, another great perk of life is that you
often get to fix some of said bad choices. You drive through your neighbors’
fence because you thought it was a swell idea to pop down to the corner store
to pick up some more mixer for the vodka you were swilling—well, you can
rebuild the fence, or at least fork over some dough to have someone else fix
it. No real harm done. Yet sometimes there are choices that lead to
consequences that cannot be so easily fixed or forgiven. Society labels these
choices “crimes.” You often go to prison for such choices/crimes—where, because
of your questionable judgement in the past, you are severely limited in what
other choices you are allowed to make in the future.
Bob Smith did not commit a serious crime from which there
was no turning back. His choice was perfectly legal. And in fact millions of
people had made the very same choice before him in recent years. Unfortunately,
this doesn’t necessarily mean it was the right choice to make, and whether
right or wrong, it will be one he’ll have to live with for the rest of his
life.
☼
“Are
you sure about this?” I asked Maureen, my wife of fifteen years. We were seated
side by side in front of an empty desk. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was
a three-foot-tall print of a sun rising over Los Angeles—or was it New Los
Angeles?
“We’ve already decided, Bob,”
she said.
“We can still back out…”
“We’ve already decided,” she
said, and there was a hardness to her tone, and what she really meant was:
You.
You’ve already decided. You got this idea in your head, you convinced me, and
now we’re going through with this if for no other reason than so I can say
I-told-you-so when it all blows up in our faces.
I opened my mouth, but no words
came to me, because she was right. Regardless of who was the impetus for the
decisions that led us to this office today, the decisions were made. It was too
late to turn back. Too much had been set in motion. We had no choice but to
continue on the path we were on.
“It will be fine,” I told
her.
She stared ahead but didn’t
say anything, and I could see the tightness in her face, the fear.
I slipped my hand into her
lap and took her hand in mine. I squeezed reassuringly. I didn’t think she
would return the affection, but she did, she squeezed, so tightly it hurt.
Then the door to the office
opened behind us, and a woman’s voice said, “Sorry about the interruption,
folks. That was my daughter’s teacher. She’s fallen sick, my daughter, and—and
what do you care, right? Today’s your big day! Gosh, I’m so envious. I really
am.”
☼
The
office was small, not much of a step up from four partition board walls and a
door. Sara Malik settled her curvy body into the empty seat behind the desk and
smiled at us. She was in her early thirties. She had brown skin, though no
trace of a foreign accent. Black curly hair framing a meticulously made up face
tumbled past her shoulders, the ends resting on a pair of large breasts. Her
pink top didn’t reveal any cleavage—the neckline rode up to her throat—but it
was made of a thin material, and tight, revealing the outlines of said large
breasts.
“So,” Sara said, “you guys
must be so excited about today. Are you excited?”
“A little nervous, to be
truthful,” Maureen said. She’d released my hand and now clasped hers together
on her lap.
“Scared as hell,” I said.
Sara nodded. “Which is
perfectly normal. Everyone experiences apprehension to some degree. It would be
unnatural not to, wouldn’t it?”
She smiled again, waiting for
us to smile back. We didn’t. We were too anxious, I suppose, even for a nervous
smile. Also, there was something about Sara that bothered me. She was too
happy. No, correction: she was too happy for
us
. I felt a bit like I did
when Maureen and I sat through a timeshare hard-sell while we were vacationing
in Las Vegas a couple years before. All I kept thinking at the time was if the
units the sales guy was pushing were so fantastic, why didn’t he own one?
“So,” I said, getting to why
we were there, “everything’s on track? No…delays…or anything?”
“One hundred percent on
track, Mr. Smith. This meeting is only a formality so I can answer any last
questions you might have. Your wife and yourself are still scheduled for two
ten this afternoon.” She checked her watch. “Which gives you, oh, four hours to
sit back and relax before you begin your lives in New America.”
I glanced at Maureen. She
finally cracked a smile, and I was about to smile too when I noticed her bottom
lip trembling. The smile was a pretense, an attempt to hold back tears.
It worked on Sara, however,
because the woman sighed whimsically and fed us her “I’m so envious” line
again. I wondered how many thousands of times she had used it before.
“What do we do until then?” I
asked.
“Whatever you like,” Sara replied.
“The museum is on the second floor. You can learn everything you want about
miniaturization and—”
“I’ve done my research,” I
said, perhaps a bit too harshly. “We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”
“Of course, of course.
Nevertheless, it’s a great place to pass some time. The New Miami wing has just
been completed in anticipation of the city’s opening next year. The cafeteria
is on the third floor, and the Experience Project is on the forth, where you
can enjoy a variety of virtual tours of New America.”
“I think we’d just like
someplace quiet where we could wait,” Maureen said.
“Then I would suggest the
botanical gardens. This floor, just follow the signs.”
“To smell the roses one last
time?” Maureen said.
Sara frowned. “Excuse me?”
“To smell the roses one last
time.”
Sara chuckled. “The roses in
New America smell just like real roses, Mrs. Smith. No, what am I saying? They
are
real roses. Everything’s real. The sky’s the same sky above you right now. The
sun’s the same sun, the air’s the same air—”
“It doesn’t rain,” Maureen
said. “I think I’d like it if it rained.”
“It still rains, of course—”
“But the dome stops it.”
“You can’t have rain drops
the size of boulders falling on New People now, can you?” Sara chuckled again,
though this time uncomfortably. She looked at me to step in.
“You won’t even notice the
dome, dear,” I said. “No rain—that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?”
“I know, I know… It’s just…”
“It’s okay, everything will
be okay.”
Maureen nodded, pulled
herself together, and stood.
Sara and I stood as well.
“Is there anything else I can
help you with today?” Sara asked.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I
think we’ll just walk around for a bit. Thank you.”
Maureen was already opening
the door to leave. I pushed in my chair and followed.
☼
We
didn’t go to the museum or the cafeteria or the fourth floor for the virtual
tours. We took an elevator underground to where the miniaturization occurred.
The cab, one of several, opened to a space the size of an airport departure
lounge. And that’s exactly what it looked like. Large-screen monitors
everywhere displayed ID numbers and miniaturization times. Check-in counters—or
whatever the hell they were called—lined the far wall. They were lettered A
through Z. Queues of fifty to a hundred people snaked back and forth before
each. Unlike at an airport there wasn’t any luggage in sight. You entered New
America as naked as a newborn. There weren’t any children either as it was
illegal for anyone under twenty-one to miniaturize—at least in America.
Maureen and I went to one of
the lounges scattered about and sat in claytronic seats that molded to our
bodies. Our check-in counter was K. It was so distant I had to squint to make
out the letter. “Shitty if you got your letters mixed up,” I said. “Might end
up in New China.”
“Don’t joke about that,”
Maureen said.
“You know that’s impossible,
dear.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“There’s never been—”
“I don’t care!” she said. “I
don’t want to hear it.”
I turned my attention to the
other people sharing the lounge with us. Blacks, Asians, Latinos, whites. Many
were a similar age to Maureen and I, mid-thirties, and many appeared to be
couples. Some were speaking softly to one another, while others stared at
nothing, their expressions ranging from frightened to excited to bored.
My eyes drifted back to the
check-in counters, the queues. It was an efficient process, miniaturization.
According to the figures, more than two thousand American citizens were
miniaturized each day, fourteen thousand a week, more than fifty thousand a
month, or roughly six hundred thousand a year.
New America had a current
population north of twenty million.
The idea of miniaturizing
human beings had been around since the middle of the last century, yet until
relatively recently scientists had always believed the rules of quantum
mechanics prohibited the shrinking of organic matter. The problem had been that
atoms, the particles that composed the world and everything in it, did not
scale. They were a fixed size. There was no way to reduce the size of a proton,
neutron, or electron. Moreover, there was no way to reduce the number of atoms
in a human body, or the distance between them, without dramatically altering
the body’s chemical characteristics.
Nevertheless, twelve years
ago Daniel Mathews, a British physicist and systems design engineer, proved
conventional science wrong when he successfully shrunk a dog by ten to the
minus two, or to half an inch tall, through a revolutionary process that
avoided quantum mechanics altogether, thereby allowing regular matter and shrunken
matter to interact in a symmetrical and invariant way.
Matthews coined the process
dimensional shifting, and within the year a world body was convened to discuss
the possibility of miniaturizing segments of the human population to alleviate
overpopulation and humanity’s carbon footprint, which had been responsible for
the planet going to hell in a handbag over the previous two decades.
China was the first county to
create a New City, followed by India, Germany, and The Netherlands. There were
already two dozen New Cities around the world before US lawmakers approved the
creation of New America—which, I should note, was a misnomer, as there were
only three cities up and running thus far: New New York City, which everyone
called NY2, New San Francisco, and New Los Angeles. NY2 and NSF were currently
at maximum capacity, while NLA was at close to eighty percent, though it was
scheduled to be fully occupied by the time New Miami opened its doors next July.
I rested my elbow on the back
of Maureen’s seat and massaged her neck with my hand. She was stiff as a board,
though as I kneaded the knots from her muscles she loosened up.
She wasn’t afraid of the
process of miniaturizing, I knew, which governments liked to tout was safer
than flying. She was more concerned with the fact shrinking yourself was a
one-way journey. That was the caveat with the technology. Scientists could
shrink you to the size of a cricket, but they didn’t know how to reverse the
effects, or supersize you, for that matter. Not yet, anyway.
What this meant, of course,
was that if you chose to become a New Person, you had to say goodbye to your
old life forever. You could still communicate with friends and family digitally,
where size and mass were translated into ones and zeroes, but you could never
touch them in person, never see them in person. For me this wasn’t such a big
deal. Friends could be replaced, and my parents died when I was so young I
didn’t have any memories of them, and I didn’t have any siblings. Maureen’s
situation, however, was different. She had great parents, three older sisters,
one younger brother. She was close with all of them.
Even so, sometimes you were
called to make difficult decisions and sacrifices. We were bankrupt, jobless,
destitute. Our only child was dead. We needed a new life, a new start.
And New America offered that.
☼
At
exactly 2:10 p.m. I said to Maureen, “It’s time.”
We stood and made our way
down the concourse to check-in counter K. We joined the quickly forming queue
behind an obese Caucasian man and a stick-thin woman.
“I hope the chicken tastes
like chicken,” the man grumbled.
“Of course it will, John. Why
wouldn’t it?”
“By the look of this line,
maybe we’ll no longer be the minority. Wouldn’t that be something?”