guest article

GUEST ARTICLE
My regular article earlier today
*
The Border


by D. Ritchey

Chapter 6

Betts came back up on the car and saw the man slumped over. He waited. Carefully he came up and checked the man’s pulse. He was dead. Betts dragged the corpse into the brush, where he stripped it naked. Then he pulled it deeper into the ditch, where he covered it with heavy rocks. He inspected the contents of the man’s wallet. His name was George Robertson. His ministry ID was cracked and stained, like no one had read it in years. He wondered if the chip in it was good—and what about the chip in the vehicle?

He searched the car thoroughly. The keys were in the ignition. He found a bag of fast food trash, a pack of cigarettes, porn magazines, a half pint of imitation scotch whiskey. As Betts went through he felt guilt for what he had just done. But the man had given up, and Betts was still fighting.

He tuned the government two-way radio, turned the volume down to whisper, listened. The chatter was about everything but inspector Robinson. Betts scanned up and down the freaks. Chatter and chatter. One thing overpopulation did for you: it increased your anonymity. He froze when he heard “code thirteen two-two”—stolen government vehicle—but a moment later he learned it was a public schools vehicle. He returned to the Health Ministry freak and listened while he examined the car.

He found the chip in the trunk, mounted on the side. Every government vehicle had an RFID which allowed it to pass through sensor gates. There were different classifications; Betts didn’t know how far this chip would take him. He looked carefully around; the Spoils were still deserted. He looked at the chip again, wondering how this little piece of nothing, manufactured by the billions, kept billions of people enslaved. He resisted the impulse to smash it.

Betts kept the man’s shirt and trousers, ID and wallet. He started the car and drove over to his fishing spot, where he hid his gear in the brush. He started down the main road, an old bed of compacted oyster shells and gravel, to the gate. He saw the sign warning against trespassing and threw out the trash. The fence was broken down and the sensor, though flashing (indicating it was under power) didn’t signal him to pass. Or stop. Betts drove on through and came to the main road.

He checked the time; the rush hour was on. Here the danger started; if a cop saw him emerge from the Spoils road Betts would probably be finished. But this was on the .fringe of the city and few cars were passing. He pulled out and headed north, back to Philly. He had not driven a car in years and the experience was strange. The machine shook and vibrated; it was a piece of shit, a model called the Nirvana, made by the tens of millions by slaves in Calcutta.

Along the way he thought about the backtrails through the woods he had taken to the Spoils, and how he was passing all that way so easily with this machine. The contrast between the primitive effort of travel, and this means, disoriented him. Without realizing it was happening he was straying off the road; the grounding and rumbling of gravel alerted him. While he was watching for cameras and patrol cars he found himself glancing into the woods, the paths along the creeks as he passed over them. To have a machine was to enter another dimension of existence. Here he was, up out of the mire, away from the animals and insects—and under more scrutiny. He realized that the machine could work against him, and he must use it quickly and in the best way.

The rush hour traffic favored him. With 15 million people confined to 225 square miles that was New Philadelphia, traffic was always horrendous. Rush hour was combat. From above it would appear as a billion ants scurrying in all dimensions, overwhelming every path and portal. The stream thickened. He kept thinking about the opposition he was facing. The “elite” division of DPS was Executive Rescue, which protected high officials and the wealthy. If he managed to penetrate to the Free Zone, Executive Rescue would hunt him. On the other hand, if he got deep, fast, without hurting anyone, his case would go cold. Then Executive Rescue would turn his case over to the territorial police.

Betts used to know troopers in Executive Rescue. They had their own codes; indeed theirs came closest to a chivalric ideology—yet the elites didn’t know how much Executive Rescue troopers disdained them. The elite was degenerate, and continued because System media never published their violations of the laws and codes the general public would go to prison for. Executive Rescue prided itself on being clean and strong, loyal and dutiful. Betts knew that the elites and wealthy were doomed—eventually—because their Praetorian Guard would someday turn on them. He hoped to see it.

Betts entered the downtown. His scar was itching, crawling like it was opening. Unconsciously he felt it with his fingers; maybe he was imagining the chip deep in his thorax signalling. Or maybe it was. Yes, of course it was; he had entered a heavily scanned zone. But who was paying attention? And was his signal standing out from a trillion other signals? Of course not.

He found himself crawling along in a lane of vehicles. It went on forever, over the rise, and disappeared as well in his rear view mirror. Endless people. Rush hour was the peak of the assault on dignity; no person with a sense of dignity could experience rush hour without wishing for population reduction and the destruction of the System.

The puppetmasters who ran the System knew exactly what they were doing. By denying natural pacifiers to the population—by keeping cannabis sativa and its derivates illegal—it fed the pharmaceutical industry and kept a tighter control on public moods and intellect. The System understood the consciousness-expanding potential of cannabis, and amanita muscaria mushrooms and other natural relaxants. The System strove to prevent imaginative thought; it would bring the System down. An agitated population does not think clearly; it lurches and reacts like a shoal of reef fish. The masses were kept high on sugars and amphetamines which infested everything: drinks, food, drugs, toothpaste, soap, shave cream, “vitamins,” drinking water. Thus rain barrels were illegal, and so was eating wild food.

Rush hour also showed the structure of the classes. The wealthy drove powerful cars loaded with electronics. The middle class was very small; they drove older vehicles generally plain. The masses walked or rode buses and bicycles. The streets of New Philadelphia resembled an Asian city of the 20th century, mobbed with cheap scooters and bicycles, helter skelter, embroiled in smog and cacaphony of horns and curses. He would have to fight to make it home. It was disgusting. The border was still a long way off.