HAPPENSTANCE

May 2058

It was an overcast day with no wind, neither hot nor cold. There had been many of them lately—much to the chagrin of the Free Energy Agency, whose forecasts of power supply and demand relied heavily on sunshine and wind on one side and demand control on the other.

With battery recharging banned for all but public transport and government vehicles, the roads were eerily quiet. More people than usual were relying on e-bikes, but the pedaling required to recharge them was taking its toll on the elderly and infirm, with a sharp increase in reported cardiac infarctions. The message from the Free Energy Agency was that the country needed to reduce its energy usage by forty percent if the goals of Article Five were to be achieved, and calls for power resources to be supplemented with natural gas and clean coal were just further proof—as if any were needed—that vested-interest lobbies were still hard at work trying to sabotage the zero-carbon aims of the government.

Article Five was very clear: “Reduce man-made carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses to zero, and convert all energy consumption to the use of renewable resources.” How much clearer, the FEA demanded, did the message have to be? Yet although bulletins were delivered daily to everyone’s Konektors, there was a growing feeling that the FEA message was worn out—and so were the people. For both, the power of belief was simply exhausted.

Two people relatively unaffected by the impact of the electricity outages and rationing were Jordan and Alexa. Both being beneficiaries of hydrogen fuel cells, they experienced no interruption to their work.

Bill Jones, Jr., the DDC’s landlord and a fellow Deranger, had long ago recognized that leaving energy supply in the hands of government agencies could potentially wipe out both his marijuana operation and his ParkFed indoor plant-based meat operation. Thus, he’d installed proton-exchange membrane fuel cells in all his buildings, including the data centers and laboratories of the many tech incubators that were his tenants. So, for Jordan, the virtue-speak of the FEA was nothing more than another opportunity for a new Artie Sharp segment … assuming, that is, that he and Antonio could find a fresh and entertaining take on a subject Artie had successfully lampooned many times already.

Alexa, of course, worked for an essential arm of government whose buildings had long been future-proofed with fuel stacks and whose autonomous vehicles ran on hydrogen, not electricity. If the thought ever occurred to her that reliable power should be freely available to everyone, she never expressed it. Technology was not her thing, and a habit of voicing skepticism would not have helped advance her career. There were clear signs emerging, however, that suggested a sea change was taking place in Alexa, and she was steering into rough waters. Some days after a visit from Shane Whitman, she messaged Jordan and asked if he’d join her for a drive in the country.

“I’ve got two entrance tickets to Neutrality Park and a full tank of hydrogen. If you’d care to enjoy a day out of the city, I thought I could tell you what I’ve learned at the Social Equity Ministry while we drive. What do you say?”

He said okay.

In the year since they’d met at Lexie’s celebration for Manaia, they’d worked out an unspoken protocol. She would initiate contact. He would neither encourage nor discourage it. From the outset, they had limited their conversations solely to mathematics and her work. She never asked him in depth what he did with his days, and he never inquired about her personal life. Even allowing for Alexa seeking his counsel for her work, it was their fondly remembered relationship as star student and admired teacher that still defined their connection. So long as that remained the case, they were on safe ground. But inevitably, with increasing contact, personal boundaries are tested … and this outing would prove to be the beginning of that test.

She picked him up outside his apartment building and set the destination as Neutrality Park, with a journey time of ninety minutes at a predicted average speed of eighty miles per hour.

“How long since you’ve been out to the coast?” she asked, pouring him a cup of coffee as the car set off towards the edge of the city.

“It must be nearly eighteen years,” he mused. “I came out for one last look just after they announced they were taking over all the land from here to the coast for the solar and wind farms. There were people running around in front of the bulldozers, trying to save the desert tortoises, sticking them in cages in the backs of pickup trucks. I don’t know how many survived. Everything got flattened. No one was happy. I’ve seen the photos, but I’ve never felt any desire to go back.”

The cloud cover above them was altostratus, a mid-level grey blanket that diffused the light, stretching beyond the horizon. The city and its outskirts had the pallor of an uncommon metal, and the green plantations that girdled the urban limits, placing an ecological chastity belt upon any attempts at expansion, stood like motionless sentinels as they passed through. All conversation within the car ceased as they entered the eerie landscape of old PV solar panels lying heavy upon the arid earth as far as the eye could see. It would take them almost an hour to reach the wind farm, and a further half hour to Neutrality Park.

Alexa had brought muffins as well as coffee, and she seemed pleased when Jordan ate them with relish. The provisions showed that she had planned this trip with some care; it was neither casual nor spontaneous.

When he’d finished and wiped the crumbs off his lap, Alexa took a digital tablet from her bag and slid a hidden table out of her armrest. As the screen fired up, he watched as she waited for a file to be found, frowning in concentration—a habit which, now that she was thirty-nine years old, had left her with a permanent crease between her eyebrows. She wore her hair long and tucked it behind an ear, leaving the other side to fall over her cheek, where she alternately twirled it around her forefinger or absentmindedly sucked on it between her lips.

Jordan briefly closed his eyes, unable to bear looking at the glass desert outside, and equally wary of the intimacy created by Alexa’s proximity.

“You said you’d be interested in what I found at the Social Equity Ministry,” she reminded him. “So I thought I’d give you a summary.”

He opened his eyes and sat up, stilling her with a finger to his lips while taking out his Konektor. The autonomy of so-called autonomous vehicles relied on near instantaneous data transmission over 12G wireless networks. That data included everything happening inside the vehicle as well as around it. Jordan found the sound scrambler within his Alt-Identity app and switched it to 2m Voice. He held it up so she could see.

“Yes, I’ve been looking forward to it,” he replied once she’d nodded her understanding.

“It’s not what I expected,” she cautioned. “In fact, I find it quite hard to accept.”

“Because…?”

She reflexively moved the cursor and tapped the keyboard, as if to assure herself that the file in front of her wasn’t going to suddenly vanish. “As a snapshot of society, it’s … well, it’s very disturbing, to say the least.”

“Because…?” he prompted again.

“Okay.” Her frown deepened. “You know that my first task is to reassign the coding for Societal Points so that the Transitional Benefits budget can be balanced.”

“Yes … and so that white males specifically can no longer hide in the minutiae of self-identified minorities.”

“Oh, that part was easy. Once I applied Bertrand Russell’s One-One, as you suggested, the stats changed to fall exactly in line with our expectations. No, it’s what I’d call the ‘essential economic status’ of groups that came as a shock. That’s not a term we use much nowadays, of course. Economics is like mathematics in that way.”

“It’s persona non grata!”

“Exactly! But when I started looking into social identity groupings, I found that those groupings were anything but equal when it came to the assessment of their societal standing and economic levels—and that certain policies had deliberately been put in place to make it so. It depends on who’s favored at the time, and that doesn’t happen by accident; it’s aggressively promoted by progressive ideologues in positions of influence. The question is, do you think the Agenda Implementation Tribunal knows that dividing the population into highly differentiated classes has gotten out of control—and now they’re using me to untangle it?”

“Possibly,” Jordan replied. “They seemed to be taken with your idea that they could now claim to have eliminated distinctions between groups while achieving the goal of financial equality for all. I thought that was a stroke of genius on your part. So, are you suggesting that’s exactly what they wanted all along?” If she’d really come to that conclusion, then her pride could have been sorely bruised.

Alexa spun her tablet around so that it was facing Jordan. She leaned forward and touched his hand. Why? Their signal was blocked; nobody could hear their conversation. He narrowed his eyes and looked at the screen, then withdrew his hand and fished in his pocket for his reading glasses. Alexa sat back and looked out the window, not seeing. Her tablet went into sleep mode.

“At the height of the Overthrow eighteen years ago,” she said quietly, “my father disappeared. There was so much fear and confusion at the time that no one knew where to turn for help or information. The first news I received of him was brought to me in an envelope by one of his friends. The friend told me that Daddy had been brought before the dreaded Security Oversight Committee, accused of sedition and distributing Hate Speech.”

“Hate Speech…?”

“That was the charge. His friend said that he’d been declared a Non-Person, and when I went to the FIB to try and locate him, they denied having any record of him. Of course, there were rumors about the camps the FIB set up around that time in the FEMA emergency centers, but as hard as I tried over the next two years, I couldn’t get anyone to tell me where he was.”

Jordan hesitated, then leaned across and touched the hand from which he had just withdrawn. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea. What about your mother? Did she hear from him?”

“She died during the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, when I was only two.”

Jordan took his hand away awkwardly. “I didn’t know,” he murmured. “So, what made your father a target?”

Alexa turned away from the window and looked into his eyes. “He was an economist. Donald Melville Smythe. You might have run across him.”

“Yes, of course. A free-market economist, as I recall, favored by the media for his pithy one-liners. How could anything he had to say be classified as Hate Speech, for God’s sake?”

“You’re forgetting the Articles,” Alexa reminded him. “Article Two: ‘Protect all persons from harm in circumstances where insensitive Hate Speech is used, deliberately or otherwise, without the consent of the persons offended.’ ”

Jordan sat back and let out his breath. This was sounding all too familiar. “So it wouldn’t really matter what he had to say, if they chose to be offended by it,” he acknowledged. “That’s the one Article in Agenda 2060 that undermines the entire document. It’s a charter for bullies, misanthropes, and malcontents—even social engineering totalitarians.”

“Careful, Professor. You just offended half the population.”

He smiled without humor. Of course, Artie’s discovery had partially prepared him for this revelation about Alexa’s father, but he hadn’t known the actual charges or the outcome. “Ain’t that the truth,” he muttered. “But you mentioned an envelope. What was in it?”

 “As if by happenstance—now there’s a word he’d have liked—it contained an exact prediction of what I would find two decades later in the classified records of the Social Equity Ministry … a frighteningly accurate prediction of where the architects of Agenda 2060 would lead us.”

“Do you still have it?”

She tapped the space bar on her tablet, bringing the screen back to life. “It’s there in front of you. Read it.”