Tomorrow
Text copyright © 2013 Caro
lyn Martin (C. K. Kelly Martin)
Jacket art: Armageddon photograph provided by
Ig0r_Z
/Pond5.com
;
close-up portrait of young man looking at camera photograph provided by
1@malyugin/Pond5.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under international copyright laws. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without express permission from the author.
For those who wanted to know what
came after Yesterday
Rage on
Because things are the way they are
, things will not stay the way they are.
—Bertolt Brecht
We made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender.
—Bruce Springsteen, “No Surrender”
also
by C. K. Kelly Martin
:
I Know
It’s Over
One Lonely Degree
The Lighter Side of Life and Death
My Beating Teenage Heart
Come See About Me
Yesterday
Table of Contents
2063, United North America: Climate change has rendered great swathes of the country uninhabitable, the rise of robot workers has created mass unemployment, eco-terrorism is a constant threat, and a 2059 nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India has torn large holes in the world’s ozone layer and pushed humanity’s existence towards a cliff.
While unwanted eco-refugees roam the globe, an army of robots defend the U.N.A.’s closed borders and a network of
nanites (the Bio-net), operating inside the bodies of U.N.A. citizens, has eradicated many of humanity’s old illnesses. The majority of citizens prefer gushi—the nation’s full-immersion virtual reality system—to real life, relying on it for information, entertainment, simulated travel, and sex.
This is the background sixteen-year-old Freya
Kallas and eighteen-year-old Garren Lowe live their lives against until two biological weapons converge to form a new threat. With no cure on the horizon, the highly infectious Toxo plague threatens to overcome the population of the U.N.A., turning the infected blind and aggressively rabid until they perish of dehydration.
When Freya’s brother and
Garren’s sister are among the first wave of infected, their parents’ privileged positions make them privy to a secret that saves Freya and Garren’s lives—the existence of a naturally occurring phenomenon located deep within a remote Ontario lake. The time phenomenon hurtles anything that comes into contact with it seventy-eight years, seven months, and eleven days into the past, with its physical end point being a salt lake in Western Australia.
The U.N.A. government has been covertly sending people back in time via the
‘chute’ for years. A shadowy network of support workers led by ‘directors’ carry out the U.N.A.’s twin aims of preventing the catastrophic global warming of the future via political means and evacuating influential citizens’ loved ones to the 1980s. Fearing that the truth about the time chute and the dystopian future could destabilize 1980s society, the U.N.A. government staunchly protects both secrets, installing memory wipe sequences within its own personnel that prevent them from breaking their code of silence. Meanwhile, civilian time refugees’ memories and identities are erased and replaced with counterfeit ones in a process called ‘wipe and cover.’
Unfortunately for Freya, once in 1985
, she swiftly begins to remember snatches of her real identity and recover her gift of second sight. When Freya spots fellow time refugee Garren on a Toronto street, she can’t shake the feeling that she knows him. Soon they’re both uncovering who they truly are and must run for their lives or risk having their minds butchered by U.N.A. security forces in a second memory wipe. In the dead of winter, Freya and Garrenleave Toronto behind them and head west, determined to evade the U.N.A. and lose themselves in 1985
.
I’m not gifted like Freya. I never saw what was coming back then and if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t remember my true past now, either: what happened to me in the summer of 2063, before they sent me through the chute and my life started over.
Back then things were very different. Every morning began with the Dailies
, and in late July they were full of the usual propaganda—stories stressing the U.N.A.’s continuing strength in the struggle against terrorism, items highlighting environmental recovery projects, those glorying in the nation’s past and ones showing its citizens what a disastrous mess most other counties had made of themselves. In France riots had been raging for weeks, great expanses of Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon burnt to ashes by French defence forces intent on killing the rebels. French citizens were laying down their lives for freedom in a struggle against an authoritarian government, yet the Dailies portrayed the protesters as lawless and France as being rife with corrupt sentiments, unlike the
superior
U.N.A. and its civilized, patriotic population.
But n
ot all of the U.N.A. equated patriotism with unquestioning allegiance. The U.N.A. grounded movement was seventy million strong. It supported truth over propaganda; employment for people over reliance on robots; real-life experiences over immersion in gushi; and the idea that eco-refugees should be given sanctuary rather than be turned away from our borders or enslaved by the U.N.A. government.
My mothers,
Rosine and Bening, were members of the grounded movement. So were my sister, Kinnari, and I. The official movement was popular and non-confrontational enough that it held on to its legitimacy, but it had to tread carefully. The state came down heavy on anyone who broke its laws or opposed its government in anything but the gentlest, most optimistic tones. Take too tough a stand against them and you were liable to wake up in some forsaken part of the country that was flooded with carcinogen and toxin-laden soil and water, your memory scraped clean, and your soul humming with an obsessive dedication to doing the state’s bidding until you keeled over dead, your Bio-net unable to keep up with the extreme contamination your body had suffered.
My
mothers never let me or Kinnari forget the thin line we had to walk as members of the movement. They took us to official meetings, signed petitions, assembled for peaceful demonstrations, and encouraged our participation in the youth group, but stayed away from the hard-core fringe faction. Bening always stressed that we had to change the system from within, unlike the grounded devotees who bombed the Ro factories, periodically hacked their way into gushi to distribute anti-government messages, and sheltered refugees.
The future sounds
bleak, I know. But I was used to it. Feeling rebellious on the inside, but playing it safe outwardly, for the most part. My mothers used to say that when there were enough of us, things would change. There’d be a tipping point not even the government would be able to deny and they’d be forced to bend to the will of the people, like in the past when there was authentic democracy.
Until that day arrived,
I intended to do what I could. Learn things that would help me protect the illegals and the unemployed, who had few rights. I’d already been accepted into a pre-law program and was set to start in the fall. Columbia in New York City. Most of the coastline had been abandoned, but not New York. The U.N.A. had built flood barriers to protect the city from sea level rises and storm surges over forty years ago. Because of its uniquely exposed position after the coastal evacuation of the thirties, New York was always swarming with DefRos, and even so, there were more attempted terrorist attacks there than anywhere else in the country. People hated the West for what it had done to the planet; they wanted to make it pay.
Rosine
wished I would go to law school somewhere more inland so she could worry about me less. She’d say that in the same breath that she’d declare how proud she was of me. Few students were being offered law as one of their three approved career options anymore.
But I wasn’t thinking about things like law school or the grounded movement on the morning of July
29; I was panicking that it was the day of Kinnari’s sixteenth birthday party and I had yet to buy her a present. Rosine had already reminded me twice that week but I’d kept putting it off.
O
n the twenty-ninth I’d run out of procrastination time and after breakfast I jumped into my trans and instructed it to take me to Moss, the shopping district on the far side of Billings. Kinnari and Rosine loved the rundown old shopping quarter and our house was crammed with antiques they’d discovered there. When you were strolling Moss streets you’d notice that the brick buildings looked like ones from a history book, as though you’d stepped back into the twentieth century.
Normally
, the affluent residential neighbourhoods and the D.C. district (where they’d relocated the White House, Lincoln Memorial, and other significant Washington monuments after Billings became the new capital city) were the areas crawling with SecRo patrols because they were the places influential people deemed worthiest of protection. But when Billings Criminal Control was desperate to find a fugitive they’d inevitably send the SecRos to sweep Moss.
I don’t know who
they were looking for that morning in July, but the streets were thick with Ros; I was scanned by several of them before drifting into an art shop. The dusty store was crowded with paintings—pastorals, portraits, surrealist offerings, and works that my untrained eye interpreted as brand new. Thin strips of yellowing walls peeked through the spaces between the paintings and I suddenly felt very thirsty and very young.
Two women about my mothers’ age were chatting to each other behind the counter at the far end of the room
, each of them wearing clothing made of antique fabrics that you had to wash yourself rather than the self-cleaning materials that were popular in 2063. Both women looked up as I stepped in their direction. “It’s a shame they have to spoil an all-clear day tromping around Moss like that,” the woman in the wool blazer said to me.
An all-clear day meant the
forecast showed next to a zero chance of storms and that it wouldn’t be dangerously hot either. There were few all-clear days in Billings and my mothers had chosen the date of Kinnari’s party with the good weather in mind. Her actual birthday was still a week away.
The other woman clucked at the one who’d complained about the
SecRos, as though in disapproval of her colleague’s frankness. “What brings you this way?” the clucking woman asked me, her face sour.
I didn’t
know what to tell the woman. Kinnari had everything she needed. So did I. But I had to get
something
for her birthday. It was tradition. “I’m looking for a gift for my sister,” I said. “She’s turning sixteen.”
“Well, what is she like?”
the first woman asked cheerfully.
Open-minded and a good judge of character
, for a start. She’d sensed things in her boyfriend, Latham Kallas, that I’d never have guessed were there. He wasn’t a carbon copy of his power-hungry father and he wasn’t just a troublemaker. He was someone who didn’t want to travel the route that had been laid out for him, someone who wanted to go his own way. As for Kinnari, she probably would’ve been a poet if she’d been born in another time. Or an occultist. Someone who stared into a crystal ball and pretended to see other worlds there. She had what Bening liked to call ‘an active imagination.’
“She likes
old-time movies,” I replied. “And mythical things, like unicorns and dragons.”
“Aha!”
The woman beckoned me forwards. “In that case, I have the perfect thing for your sister.”
I followed
the woman in the wool blazer over to a corner of the shop populated with Buddha statues, shaking my head in protest.
Her thin lips formed
a knowing smile. “Not the Buddhas, the painting.” She pointed up at a ninety-degree angle, and my eyes snapped towards the image of a unicorn, majestic and out of place. It seemed to bow to the observer while a crowd of people in ragged clothing and grimy faces gathered around it, their expressions somehow forlorn and awed at the same time. Normally you see unicorns surrounded by woodland in paintings, but this one was in the midst of a dilapidated urban centre that made the white of its coat look that much more dazzling in comparison. Many U.N.A. cities were in a similar state of rot before the government built the social welfare camps. In the 2030s and early 2040s, U.N.A. crime and death by starvation rates were through the roof.
I didn’t know what it meant to have included the unicorn in a scene like that. Hope? Or
its opposite—was the painting declaring that hope was only a myth?
“I don’t think so,” I told the woman.
“Maybe something artistic but less depressing.”
I watched the woman stifle a smirk.
Behind the counter her colleague was still frowning like she wished I’d never walked through the door. I frowned back to let her know I wasn’t exactly impressed with her either. She must’ve read me wrong from the beginning. Taken me for a politician’s or wealthy industrialist’s kid. Billings was full of them. Young people who were stubbornly sure they’d inherit the earth, never mind that the Pakistan-India War meant crops were failing like never before and countless women were losing their unborn babies to damaged DNA. Nobody knew how long the human race could go on like this. One thing for sure, another nuclear exchange would smother us, even a limited one like the Pakistan-India conflict. There was too much radiation in the air, too many holes in the ozone layer.
“
A cloisonné bracelet came in a few days ago,” the frowning woman said, her eyes on me but her words directed at her co-worker. “If I recall correctly it might have had a unicorn on it. Why don’t you show it to him and see if he likes that any better?”
“
Please
.” Despite my irritation I said it with extra kindness to prove I wasn’t the sort of person she suspected I was.
The woman who’d been assisting me disappeared behind a heavy purple curtain and emerged, second
s later, with the bracelet in her hand. “It’s a vintage 1970s cloisonné enamel
bracelet,” she said, passing it to me.
As promised, there was a unicorn on the front. Unlike the one in the painting, this
animal was vibrantly coloured—swirling with pink, red, purple, and blue. The floral design and twisted rope detailing in the background were something I could imagine Kinnari appreciating too. The bracelet felt nearly magical in my hand.
“It closes with the metal clasp there,” the clerk said
, lifting the bracelet from my palm and flipping it over to demonstrate. “It’s really quite a unique piece.”
Most old jewel
lery and other collectables were what people called ‘salvaged.’ Millions of citizens had to leave their homes behind when the government ordered the evacuation of the coasts and arid lands. Others could no longer afford their properties when their jobs were taken by Ros. People desperate or fearless enough to enter evacuated or abandoned areas made a living by collecting and reselling things others had left behind.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask where the bracelet had
come from, but what difference did its origins make? The bracelet’s previous owner would probably never be reunited with it.
“I’ll take it,” I said, waiting for one of
the women to scan me for payment.
When I ambled outside with the bracelet I could see the
SecRos in the distance. They must have finished investigating this block and gone on to the next. The trans sensed my proximity and opened for me at the exact moment my ears picked up a clattering noise to my left. It could’ve been anything, but the SecRos’ presence had set me on edge. I turned to see a man with dishevelled hair, dark stubble, and clothing that hung askew on his thin frame barrelling up the nearest alley with a stack of ornate dinner plates in his arms. My hunch was that he was homeless. I’d seen enough people that looked like him being returned to the camps to recognize the type and I waved him away, instinctively wanting to warn him about the SecRos.
The man squinted at me as though he didn’t understand and I veered back towards the
trans to avoid raising any unnecessary suspicion from the Ros. But it was too late. A lone SecRo zeroed in on me and the man in a flash, its monotone voice demanding that the man stop. “What’s this about?” I shouted after it, the SecRo hurtling by me and towards the man who was nervously dropping his fancy plates, one by one by one. All but two of them crashed to the ground in smithereens.
“Thank you for your concern,” the
SecRo said to me, its attention never leaving the unkempt man. “The situation is under control.”
“What
is
the situation?” I asked, jogging towards the man. The SecRos were programmed to respond to human queries when doing so didn’t actively interfere with their duties, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself and pushed them a little too far. A programmed piece of machinery shouldn’t have any power over people.
“This citizen is breaking the law,” the
SecRo declared as a second Ro charged up behind it. “This citizen is AWOL from a social welfare camp.” Meaning technically homeless, as I’d suspected. And it was illegal to be homeless in the U.N.A. The government said it caused unnecessary discord and that there was no reason anyone should be homeless when they had a government willing to provide for them.