Dirty Tricks
by Catfish Russ
Bobble sauntered through Parisville, under the still standing Eiffel Tower. Walking past makeshift booths where people sold everything from bird meat to spare parts, Bobble had layers on, a cotton long-underwear suit covered by blue jeans turned up at the cuff, Nike Air Force One knock-offs, and a French Foreign Legion jacket over that.
Snow gently flittered and whitened the landscape. On his head a pull-over watchman’s cap. In his shoulder bag he carried a transistor radio powered by hand crank, a MedKit V10.1, flashlight, ammo, clean bandages, painkiller, anti-allergy pens, change of clothing, a reader and a compass (an old-fashioned magnetic needle compass), a map of Western Europe on Smartpaper with special notations of Brigade hideouts and meeting stations. The map needed an Internet connection, as it refreshed the info every time it was opened.
He normally carried a Taurus Judge .410 revolver, but he had had to check it at the entrance. No weapons allowed here. No one wanted that again. But there was little going on in what was left of the world. Western Europe had come out of the Great Rebellion fairly well. Lots of death. But a stable government had emerged with enough supplies to keep every one fed. For a while.
In the middle of the square a line was forming in front of some boiling pits, and a wonderful odor wafted from the soup canisters. Bobble took his place in line to get fed. The French still knew everything there was to know about food. After about 25 minutes he made it to the trading table.
“J’ai faim,” he said.
“Cela vous coûtera,” the lady answered. She was clad in a pull-over tunic and was very pretty. She had dark eyes and long augmented eyelashes and her tunic hid a curvy body. Of course they would man the station with a babe, and I mean right under the Eiffel Tower.
Bobble pulled out a hardback copy of Le Tartuffe, by Molière. She looked at it and called over a manager, a boyish-looking gal sporting a flannel shirt and flannel jacket. She looked it over and said, “Grand experience.”
Bobble was met by two men and escorted into a tent that smelled even better than the soup canisters. He ate duck in an orange sauce, a salad made of fennel and feta and oil. It was fantastic. And he had a 4-ounce steak. Amazing. He hadn’t seen meat in years.
He had cigars that night and a California Cabernet and he had a hard warm bed to sleep on. They made hot tea and rolled joints and cookies at 4 a.m. Bobble thought it was magnificent. They even let him stay there in the exquisite tent area for another couple of days because his trading item was so unique.
Afterwards, still adrift, he was looking for work, in his case, assassination. He stopped by the Security Checkpoint and retrieved his gun and left the compound and wandered. And wondered how he had got here. He was 53 and remembered the Days Before, when everyone had work and everyone was happy.
* * *
Everyone was fat and content and worried about Republicans and Democrats and didn’t appreciate the simple lives they had in front of them. Bobble had served three tours with Task Force 373 when the time distortions occurred and changed everything.
Nope, the end didn’t come the way anyone expected it to come. It came from a whole new angle.
Forget peak oil. When the devices showed up, the oil companies crashed within about two months. One morning, oddly September 11th, small white egg-shaped objects appeared all over the place. It didn’t take long for people to figure out they were electrical power sources. There was a place for wires to go, and when they were connected to anything that ran on electricity, they started to work.
The devices provided the exact amount of power that anything needed. They also defied any attempt by anyone to open them or find their source of what seemed like endless power. They worked on electric cars. Often you would see them jerry-rigged into iPod/cellphone universal jacks. One power pod or pPod would run an entire school.
Eventually, even the Army stopped playing the oil game and connected these things to tanks and aircraft. Everything had to be reconfigured to run on electricity only. One pPod powered a private mission to the Moon and back. The whole thing was powered by pPod technology and recorded with pPod technology.
The question burned: where did they come from? No government claimed them, most governments agreed to share data. Rumor mills sprouted that these were Devil’s Eggs, and that nothing is ever free, and if it is, then it’s evil. It sounded silly; you can’t argue with results.
Most people picked up on the meme that the Eggs came from the future. Some benefactor was sending them back to help us out of the apocalypse that the oil companies were staging. It was the ultimate payback scheme from a time traveler.
Most people believed time travel was possible since the Micro-Tipler Device demonstrated that you could see a few minutes into the future and into the past. It was the nature of scientific revolution: as soon as you know you can do something, you know the technology will eventually start getting better.
Oil companies were seeking to bring criminal charges against employees who might have a working interest in energy physics. Well, you would expect an energy company to be inundated with this kind of person. But bringing charges before a crime is committed? Only oil companies could think of such perfidy.
Then, something odd happened. After three years, on a Tuesday, the new bureaus began reporting that it had been a few days since people had last seen pPods appear. A few people here and there perhaps. But thousands and thousands of them had been appearing in people’s homes, on the streets, on desks, in desk drawers. All of that just stopped.
To make matters worse, no one, not with lasers or ovens or deep pressure or diamond drill and coding of any kind could make a dent in a pPod, let alone open one. No one could figure out what they were made of. It was a material that resisted any attempt to penetrate it, even with electromagnetic radiation. I mean, that’s what it produced in abundance. And each one was identical to the next. Each weighed 4.1 ounces.
It wasn’t long before laws were passed in almost every state that new pPods had to be reported and handed over to authorities. Older pPods that showed up in drawers and pockets and closets that had never been checked before also belonged to the government.
It didn’t take long for the edict to lead to gunfire and bloodshed, and even a black market. Soon, existing pPods were being ripped out of automobiles and stolen off of people on the street. The black market price for a pPod was about 55,000 Euros.
Warfare broke out in China, Russia, and the Mideast. Eventually even the Europeans started killing each other over the pPods. The Mideast degenerated into total war, except for Israel. But Iran and Iraq were engaged in an all-out air war. The Gulf of Hormuz was closed and countries like Venezuela, Nigeria, and China had whole new governments installed.
Millions were unemployed, but the pPods made quite a different point altogether. If something essential like energy were abundant and free, many people would never need to work at all.
The oil industry revived somewhat but no one would ever let them have as much power again as they had had before. A lot of equipment had been abandoned in the three years when the pPods were appearing. It would be hard to even assemble a team that could operate Hoover Dam, which still produced electricity, although much less than it used to. And because society seemed to have taken a huge step back, no one believed time travel would be completed, at least not for a while.
What was so weird was that there seemed to everyone to be plenty of the pPods and they each worked fine. But when they stopped showing up, an austerity mindset took place. Greed took place. There was enough for everyone, but in typical fashion, human beings killed each other in droves.
Perhaps the entire planet was being used by aliens as a laboratory. Like “The Monsters Are Due On Maple,” that old Twilight Zone episode where aliens instill fear by turning lights on and off, that’s all it took to light us up.
Nukes were still cooking off in Turkey, and on some nights you could see a glow to the west and hear deep baritone explosions shaking everything. One night, huge explosions were seen coming from the Mediterranean Sea and billowing skywards for thousands of feet. Nukes in ships under the water were cooking off. Soon all the food in France would come from the Normandy coasts.
It was a few days after the nukes in the ocean exploded that the vials appeared. The vials were filled with a clear green liquid. People soon discovered that the vials were food. One vial was enough nutrition for weeks, and it controlled the appetite responses. It was delicious. You could ferment the liquid and make it alcoholic.
Things got better for a while although people were hoarding them from the day they showed up. But people were fed. We all took a deep breath and decided to keep the farms and cattle. We would never be caught like that again.
I hope.
Copyright © 2011 by Catfish Russ
