Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

And boy, do I ever miss them. No more billboards, no more chain stores, no big-box Chinese depots and no neon fried-food shacks. It’s become another world, as in “another world is possible,” and we’re stuck in there. It’s very possible, very real, and it’s very smelly. There are constant power blackouts.

Every once in a while, some armed platoon of “resilient nation-builder” militia types would come by on their rusty bicycles. Sometimes they brought shot-up victims on stretchers. The Liberated Socialist Masses were plucking their homemade banjos on their rickety porches. Lots of liberty, equality, fraternity, solidarity, compost dirt, unshaved legs, and dense crowding.

Otherwise, the crickets chirp.

Those were, like, the lucky people who were outside our prison. Those cooperative people are the networked future.

So, my cellmate Claire was this forty-something career lobbyist who used to be my boss inside the Beltway. Claire was full of horror stories about the cruelty of the socialist regime. Because, in the old days before we got ourselves arrested, alarmist tales of this kind were Claire’s day-job. Claire peddled political spin to the LameStream Media to make sure that corporations stayed in command, so that situations like our present world stayed impossible.

Obviously Claire was not that great at this strategy. Me, I was more of the geek technician in our effort. My job was to methodically spam and troll the sharing-networks. I would hack around with them, undermine them, and make their daily lives difficult. Threaten IP lawsuits. Spread some Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Game their reputation systems. Gold-farm their alternative economies. Engage in DDOS attacks. Harass the activist ringleaders with blistering personal insults. The usual.

Claire and I had lots of co-workers all up and down K-Street. Both seaboards, too, and all over Texas. Lavishly supported by rich-guy think-tanks, we were the covert operatives in support of an ailing system. We did that work because it paid great.

Personally, I loved to buy stuff: I admired a consumer society. I sincerely liked to carry out a clean, crisp, commercial transaction: the kind where you simply pay some money for goods and services. I liked driving my SUV to the mall, whipping out my alligator wallet, and buying myself some hard liquor, a steak dinner, and maybe a stripper. All that awful stuff at the Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, when you never knew “Who the hell was buying that?” That guy was me.

Claire and I hated the sharing networks, because we were paid to hate them. We hated all social networks, like Facebook, because they destroyed the media that we owned. We certainly hated free software, because it was like some ever-growing anti-commercial fungus. We hated search engines and network aggregators, people like Google—not because Google was evil, but because they weren’t. We really hated “file-sharers”—the swarming pirates who were chewing up the wealth of our commercial sponsors.

We hated all networks on principle: we even hated power networks. Wind and solar only sorta worked, and were very expensive. We despised green power networks because climate change was a myth. Until the climate actually changed. Then the honchos who paid us started drinking themselves to death.

If you want to see a truly changed world, then a brown sky really makes a great start. Back in the day, we could tell the public, “Hey, the sky up there is still blue, who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” And we tried that, but we ran out of time for it. After that tipping-point, our bottom-line economy was not “reality” at all. That was the myth.

My former life in mythland had suited me just great. Then I had no air conditioning. My world was wet, dirty, smelly, moldy, swarming with fleas, chiggers, bedbugs, and mosquitoes. Also, I was in prison. When myths implode, that’s what happens to good people.

So, Claire and I discussed our revenge, whenever we were out of earshot and oversight of the solar-powered prison webcams. Claire and I spent a lot of time on revenge fantasies, because that kept our morale up.

“Look, Bobby,” she told me, as she scratched graffiti in the wall with a ten penny nail, “this rehab isn’t a proper ‘prison’ at all! This is a bullshit psychological operation intended to brainwash us. Leftists in power always do that! If they give you a fair trial, you can at least get a sentence and do time. If they claim you are crazy, they can sit on your neck forever!”

“Maybe we really are crazy now,” I said. “Having the sky change color can do that to people.”

“There’s only one way out of this Kumbaya nuthouse,” she said. “We gotta learn to talk the way they want to hear! So that’s our game plan from now on. We act very contrite, we do their bongo dance, whatever. Then they let us out of this gulag. After that, we can take some steps.”

Claire was big on emigrating from the USA. Claire somehow imagined that there was some country in the world that didn’t have weather. The inconvenient laws of physics had never much appealed to Claire. We’d donated the laws of physics to our opponents by pretending that air wasn’t air. Now the long run of that tactic was splattered all around us. We had nothing left but worthless paper money and some Red State churches half-full of Creationists.

We had gone bust. We had suffered a vast, Confederate-style defeat. The economy was Gone with the Wind, and everybody was gonna stay poor, angry, and dirt-stupid for the next century.

So: when we weren’t planting beans in the former backyard, or digging mold out of the attic insulation, we had to do rehab therapy. This was our prisoner consciousness-building encounter scheme. The regime made us play social games. We weren’t allowed computer games in prison: just dice, graph paper, and some charcoal sticks that we made ourselves.

So, we played this elaborate paper game called “Dungeons and Decency.” Three times a week. The lady warden was our Dungeon Master.

This prison game was diabolical. It was very entertaining, and compulsively playable. This game had been designed by left-wing interaction designers, the kind of creeps who built not-for-profit empires like Wikipedia. Except they’d designed it for losers like us.

Everybody in rehab had to role-play. We had to build ourselves another identity, because this new pretend-identity was supposed to help us escape the stifling spiritual limits of our previous, unliberated, greedy individualist identities.

In this game, I played an evil dwarf. With an axe. Which would have been okay, because that identity was pretty much me all along. Except that the game’s reward system had been jiggered to reward elaborate acts of social collaboration. Of course we wanted to do raids and looting and cool fantasy fighting, but that wasn’t on. We were very firmly judged on the way we played this rehab game. It was never about grabbing the gold. It was all about forming trust coalitions so as to collectively readjust our fantasy infrastructure.

This effort went on endlessly. We played for ages. We kept demanding to be let out, they kept claiming we didn’t get it yet. The prison food got a little better. The weather continued pretty bad. We started getting charity packages. Once some folk singers came by, and played us some old Johnny Cash songs. Otherwise, the gaming was pretty much it.

A whole lot was resting on this interactive Dungeons game. If you did great, they gave you some meat and maybe a parole hearing. If you blew it off, you were required to donate blood into the socialized health-care system. Believe you me, when they tap you more than a couple of times, on a diet of homegrown cabbage? You start feeling mighty peaked.

Yeah, it got worse. Because we had to cooperate with other teams of fantasy game players in other prisons. These other convicts rated our game performance, while we were required to rate them. We got to see the highlights of their interaction on webcams—(we prisoners were always on webcams).