The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (19 page)

J
on Replogle
and his two new friends ate a hearty breakfast at a table beneath the fragrant citrus trees. Jon really liked Max and assumed he’d been raised by good people. MacIan he could easily see was the product of war. A wild card. But he saw in these two a similar spirit, and they even seemed a bit brotherly. A good pair. Balanced. In the end, he considered Max an innocent, and believed he could rely on MacIan. Reliance was everything for Jon Replogle.

“This place is amazing,” said Max. “We built stuff like this back home, but jeez.”

“We’ve been tweaking these systems for years,” said Jon. “For the engineers, there’s no end to fixing stuff. They change things, and as soon as they like what happens, they change it again. They’re always on to the next argument. Especially Mendelssohn.”

“Who lives here?” asked MacIan.

“It changes day-to-day. We have several buildings like this all over the South Side. Old factories, warehouses, a couple small office towers. People come and go, move to where they’re needed, or just feel like being for a while, but an awful lot gets done.”

“Real engineers?” asked Max, assuming all new engineers were self-taught amateurs, like himself.

“Yeah. Real college professor type engineers. This Brewery was our first repurposed factory, sorry — engineered habitat. That’s the only term they use. Their families, their children, all live here. And, of course, the school. They built this place around the school.”

“Whole families live here?” asked Max.

“Oh yeah. Including mine. The engineers joined us because they needed security. That’s all I had to trade at the time. They needed some hoodlums, we needed adult supervision. You can’t do engineering if you don’t survive. But, for them, surviving isn’t enough. They’re all about marginal productivity and that kinda stuff.”

A young girl pushed a noisy metal cart through the side door and into the brew-room. She waved to Jon across the expansive floor.

He dipped his chin.

She pushed the cart halfway down the floor, then abandoned it and its rattling, swirled from the cart, big canvas apron flowing in a wide spiral, and skipped toward them.

“Haven’t seen you in days,” she said, to Jon.

“This is Molly,” Jon said flatly. “Max and MacIan.”

Max guessed her age at fourteen, maybe more.

Molly obliged with two confident nods.

“Molly designed this aquaponics system,” said Jon.

“I monitor the monitors,” she said, hoping for a laugh. “I’m doing a couple of experiments.” She tilted her head at the boxed citrus trees. “Grafting for cold tolerance . . .”

“Citrus trees?” said Max. “Unbelievable.”

“I got buds in the dead of winter.” She pointed at them proudly, then swirled away. “Bye-bye.”

It took a moment for them to reset, and MacIan asked, “Is it safe here?”

“It’s dangerous everywhere. Even here. People who live on the edge, for whatever reason, are doing exactly what you’d expect. If it’s a matter of watching their child starve or putting a gun to your head . . . which one would you pick?”

MacIan didn’t answer; instead, he asked, “Where’d you get all these engineers?”

“Oh, back when it was really bad. When the local government started to crumble. I was one of the young idiots who made things worse. We didn’t know who to blame, but somebody caused this mess. What little promise we once had for a future was gone. We didn’t know what’d ruined our lives, so we lashed out at everything.

“I had my little band of vandals roaming the South Side. We’d rage all over the place smashing things up. We took over this building, that was a helluva fight, and soon found ourselves out of food, water and — rage. We had busted up all the irrelevant shit we thought worth busting up, and now we had to survive. But then something happened, you know how it does — some unexpected thing that changes everything.”

They knew.

“One night a couple of our guys came back with two girls. Pitt students they found washed up on the river bank. They were half naked and terrified. As best we could make out, they had to swim the river to escape a mob of convicts who took over the university. When the county went bankrupt, the company that owned the jail stopped paying the guards — so they quit. All of a sudden, the streets were filled with monsters.”

Max knew exactly who he meant. Some of them had made it to Lily.

“Long story short, the county jail is only a few blocks from the university. They swarmed the girls’ dorm and were keeping them, like sex slaves.

“We couldn’t live with that. When we heard those girls tell us that, we were never so fuckin’ pissed off. Those bastards were destroying lives. We were destroying the symbols of what had betrayed us. They were evil,” he grinned. “We were philosophical.

“So word goes out and by morning there’s four hundred men out front of here. That’s when we realized that if we were doing something good for everyone, everyone wanted in. So we all went over to Pitt and we set those girls free, then we beat the criminals to death out on the big lawn between Heinz Chapel and the Cathedral of Learning. Execution style. It was harsh, public, appropriate. Clear message.

“For the first time since the collapse, it felt like we’d found something more important than our disappointment. During the executions, a group of bow-tie and pocket-protector types approached us. Professors. Scientists. Seeing a man beaten to death with a two-by-four shocked the fuck out of ’em, but that’s what made them throw in with us. A symbiotic relationship, that’s what they offered. They were builders, makers, not ass-kickers. They needed us. We needed them.

“So one of them, Mendelssohn, said he and his fellow geeks could build systems for us that would provide all the food and energy we needed, if we gave them sanctuary. His term — sanctuary. They needed a safe place to raise their kids. To build . . . an engineered habitat. They were dying to do it.

“We had nothing to lose. We were only using a tiny fraction of this place, and it was a mess. It was a good deal for everyone. So with our newly discovered purpose, the women, and a handful of geeks, we put this place together.”

MacIan had missed this phase of the collapse. “How’d it work out?”

“Better than we guessed. But one thing is obvious. One thing made all the difference. The women. The women civilized this place. Women are civilization. The less they’re involved, the more monkey-balls things will be. Without them we would’ve survived, but we’d never have even one moment of happiness.”

MacIan said in a misty tone, “‘Women are women — in nature. Men are only men — in society.’”

Jon cocked his head. “And we never stop trying to prove it.” He raised an imaginary martini glass.

All three toasted, “Women.”

Molly pretended to be out of earshot, but clung to every word.

“Mr. Jon,” said Max. “I have to call my father. They’ll want to know what’s happening with the hospital.”

Jon yelled over his shoulder, “Molly!”

Molly came running.

“Take our new friend over to the hospital.”

Molly smiled.

“Make sure nothing happens to him.”

Molly grabbed Max’s arm and towed him away.

Jon watched them go with a smile.

* * *

C
amille settled
at her desk and launched a search > Tuke’s speech. It turned up four billion hits. That seemed high. And it was available in every language. Who paid for that? She clicked on the first listing, Official Nobel Broadcast, and sat back warming her hands on a coffee mug wafting vanilla.

A hollow feeling swept Camille as the camera dropped into the Ceremonial Hall. So many empty seats. She assumed a certain amount of pomp would accompany this circumstance. An old man, shrunken into a shiny tux, had the podium. “. . . this year’s Nobel Prize in economics, for his work in artificial intelligence and game theory — Dr. Levi Tuke.”

Tuke joined the podium and took his award, nervously scanning the room, then gave a hurried speech:

“I am here because of my work in Game Theory. So let me tell you what a game is. It’s the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles in pursuit of a common goal. So life is definitely not a game. We didn’t volunteer for it. And a common goal has never been established.”

His eyes darted around the room and he sped on even faster.

“But society . . . society is a game. That’s where the ‘unnecessary obstacles’ come from. Society is a game, and we are all players. Like it or not. We are all gaming each other, all the time. Whether we know it or not. So if we’re going to play, let’s give it a worthy goal. The goal defines the game. So I will, right here, right now, set the goal for the game of human society. For the whole planet.” His fears seemed to vanish and he smiled broadly. “Heaven on Earth. A goal that will take the kind of cooperation only found in games.

“Unfortunately, the goal of our current society is to — win. It doesn’t matter what. It’s just a mindless competition for competition’s sake. A zero-sum, winner-take-all game that pits us one against the other. It began thousands of years ago, and the brutes who had an advantage then have an even greater advantage now. Advantage accumulates! That’s an indisputable fact.

“There are two teams. The billions of us who only want to raise our families in peace and sufficient abundance, and those few for whom too much is never enough. Modesty versus arrogance. Need versus want. Universal happiness versus personal ambition.

“Heaven on Earth? It sounds so naïve. But we know it’s possible. We feel it. We know it. Heaven is possible, right here. On Earth. But we have to build it ourselves. And it has to be for everyone, or it won’t work.”

The crowd became restive, as did Camille.

“The power of the purse buys only tyranny, my friends, and representative democracy was an easy sale. Broken things come cheap.” He prepared to bolt. “But we now have the technology to create a direct democracy with truly free enterprise . . . without the interference of big government and big business. Heaven on Earth!”

He jumped off the stage, ignoring the ushers, and made his way out a side door.

Camille stared at the blank screen, jaw to the floor. “He’s as good as dead.”

* * *

T
he sidewalk
in front of the Brewery was a collage of half-assed patches running along railroad tracks that cut straight through the neighborhood. The street had originally been paved in cobblestone, but after two hundred years it had become mostly splotches of asphalt, broken concrete, or gravel. A footpath had been pounded into the mix between the tracks and a long row of loading docks. The sun rarely touched this street in winter, but the shadows raking up the sides of these buildings marked time as accurately as Stonehenge.

Molly jumped down from their stoop and landed a là super-girl with her canvas apron flapping like a cape. “Daa daah! Oh! It’s colder than I thought.”

Max stood on the stoop checking up and down the unfamiliar street. This would make a perfect location for a detective story; bluesy saxophones were already playing in his head.

“Come on,” yelled Molly, “it’s cold!”

“Why didn’t you wear a coat?”

“Two blocks?” She tucked her arms inside her canvas apron and dashed away. “Let’s go.”

Max caught up in a few strides.

Molly groaned, “Yayayaya . . . Ya! It’s cold!”

A corner filled with armed men stood up and nodded to Molly. She nodded back, politely.

“Why are all these guys looking at us?”

“They’re watching us.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re the Watchers.”

“Who?”

“The Watchers.”

“What do they do?”

“They watch the children. Everything else takes care of itself,” she said with a convulsive shudder.

Max swept off his big red parka and draped it around her.

“Oh, yeah,” she purred, snuggling the huge body-pillow still warm with Max’s heat.

They reached the intersection where the hospital entrance stood at mid-block. A shoulder-to-shoulder crowd was milling about, waiting for news of their loved ones. The vast majority didn’t notice Molly, but a particular few nodded with a subtle tip of the hat or a knowing look. This was the only hospital in the entire region, thousands of square miles. Most of this crowd was from somewhere else, but the Watchers, the locals, marked themselves out by their deference to Molly.