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Brady Mahone had been away for a few days, having completed his Christmas deliveries. His FusionCar™ or the Hearse, as he nicknamed it, was as new as the day he bought it from the Greens nearly sixteen years ago. Gotta admit it - they knows how to make their vehicles reliable. He pulled into the Mahone Ranch. He noticed the old Sattva Systems™ billboards which his old friend Lucian had made needed a lick of paint. As he got out of the Hearse, he checked his Distor™, its vivid green digital display informed him that he was now the proud owner of over eight-hundred and fifty thousand Green Credits. Next year I’m going to be a Greenback Millionaire and then I can buy me one of those Mini-FusionPlanes™. The new century belongs to Brady Mahone Enterprises.
He went over to Archie Mahone’s grave and paused for a moment to think about the happier times he recalled from being with his Pops. He then marched over to the Lopez Ranch to see how the work was going in the East McFarland branch of his now sprawling business empire. His old friend Lucian got up out of his chair to greet him, ‘Hiya, old buddy.’
‘Hey Lucky, didja have a good Christmas?’
‘Sure did. Just a shame you couldn’t join us.’
Mary-Lou came over and gave Brady a hug, while Amie looked over at him from her armchair, and then she blushed and didn’t say anything. Brady looked at her and winked. She’s one of the youngest people left in the Trad world. She’s seventeen and cooped up here forever on the Lopez Ranch with only Lucky and her Moms for company. No wonder Amie keeps giving me those moon eyes. He turned his attention back to Lucian, as Mary-Lou poured him a steaming black coffee without needing to ask Brady if he wanted one or not. He knew they were eager for him to tell his latest tales from his time in the outside world. Lucian would want to know if he had met anybody, they both knew from his travels - the list of known associates was dwindling over the years. Mary-Lou wanted to understand how people were coping in the Trad areas and was looking for every conceivable reason to count their blessings of living in reasonable comfort, peace and security, whereas Amie seemed to be enamoured by the glamorous - to her eyes - stories of the teenagers in the Green Communities. She overcame her shyness enough to quiz Brady on which Files they were using their Green Credits on. When Amie left the room to go to the barn-cum-workshop, Mary-Lou told Brady that she would be watching all those TV shows and movies, and dream about discussing them with children of her own age.
Brady had noticed all of them growing older, even if he seemed immune to the onset of old age. He still felt fighting fit - which was just as well as he had got into plenty of scrapes over the years. Lucian had recently entered into his fifties, which was now relatively old for a Trad nowadays, and he looked closer to sixty. Brady found himself dwelling on this more and more, especially as many of his initial contacts were beginning to die off. His remaining surrogate family at the Mahone and Lopez Ranches benefitted from a power supply and plenty of fresh food - courtesy of Brady’s earnings. However, they still seemed to age quicker than the old days. Brady’s theories as he travelled for long hours and days in the Hearse ranged from the effects of stress on them, having spent most of their adult lives isolated from the rest of the world - the sum total of human interactions between them were the three members of the Lopez family and himself.
The Trad areas depended on how society evolved, they seemed to have a different identity in every place he visited. In East McFarland, they worked hard to keep some kind of normality, they maintained a sense of law and order, no doubt inspired by Judge Jefferson’s strong leadership. That reminds me I’ll leave them another update from the San Jose areas. The Professor loves my bulletins.
He still tried to avoid Castaic, if he could, when he travelled south, as the Cesare Mafia were utterly ruthless with anybody who crossed them, and they seem to have had a system where if you didn’t join them then you were eliminated. Then the Cupertino district adapted by fortifying the old MASSIVE™ complex and lived like blissful hippies and fully embracing their new feudalism ideals. This was the place he did most of his dealings for the old Blank Black Files.
Even Brady had found himself taken in by the tales of the secrets held in the hidden vaults. As with all the tall stories of an El Dorado of secrets, nobody ever knew precisely where these mysterious vaults were. But trust the Cupertino Crew to spin a tale which would make them more special than any other of the Trad Areas. Still, if the stories were true, then this would be a veritable museum of old tech as the CEO of MASSIVE™ in the 2040s had begun a mission to collect all the formats of the ages in her mad desire to be The One to convene with aliens that visited from outer space, one day soon.
Tia Cassandra reasoned that she would have the History of Mankind available in every possible format which an Alien Technology might be able to read. Tia Cassandra was ousted as CEO just three days before the Internet Crash of 2050 and supposedly went off to a remote retreat on the edges of the Mojave Desert. She told the world that she wasn’t fired, but she was in fact, embarking on a top-secret project that would save mankind - whether they deserved to be saved or not. Most onlookers shrugged, ‘She would say that - wouldn’t she?’
I wish I’d have had the chance to take Pops to Cupertino, he would have been in conspiracy theory heaven.
His Pops had told him of every alien technology conspiracy theory ever mooted, so he was an expert when it came to dealing with the Cupertino Hippies. Cupertino cunts, more like. What fascinated him more were the stories of the bitter rivalry Tia Cassandra had with Sattva Systems™. They were effusive in their stories of how she, more than anybody else, stymied all the big ideas from John Kane, at first, and subsequently, the guru-like stylings of the poser Xavier Kane - the Cupertino Hippies, as a matter of principle refused to ever utter his pseudonym of Bodhi Sattva - that was just uncool.
Some loved Brady and took him in as one of their own, while others thought he was a collaborator with the Greens. Brady didn’t look like them. They were long-haired, flowers in the hair types, whereas Brady was a hulking six-foot-six musclebound hulk of a man, and his jet-black hair was kept tidy and short, courtesy of the regular trims which Mary-Lou gave him. However, he used his stories of the favouritism Bodhi Sattva had endowed onto his Mother, Libby Skye, and her cronies in Malibu to prove that he wasn’t as golden as the Sattva brand suggested he would be, and when he told the story of John Kane being the money man behind a paedophile ring, they didn’t know whether it was true or not. Frankly, they didn’t care, it was a brilliant story and gave them bitter comfort that the Kane family was as corrupt as the rest of the business world back in the day, and not the perfect family who got into bed with the madder side of the Green debate. Even though the GreenRevs would have a lot in common with the new breed of Cupertino Hippies, they hated them like bitter sibling rivals.
No matter how different from each other all these Trad areas were, the one thing they had in common was that they all aged quickly, and the elderly were dying much younger than they would have done in the old days. I wonder if it has something to do with that sterilising goo they sprayed on everyone, not long after they took over?
Brady was confident that he would still live to a ripe old age. He felt good. Even after spending time in some hellish places on his extensive travels, he never seemed to fall ill. It concerned him that it might not be long before his surrogate family succumbed to old age, and he didn’t want to contemplate his lonely life without them.
He thought of Professor Yuan Chu. He looked at his watch, and it was nearly 6pm. I haven’t seen him for a while, and he’ll be passing the bus stop soon. I think I’ll give him an update in person, for a change. I’m sure he won’t mind.
He walked over to the bus stop which the East McFarland Trads now called the Brady Stop. Nobody was there when Brady got there. He pulled out his latest communique, in recent times he was informing them more about places which had been lost to the Greens when the population had either died out or moved on. His latest entry stated: Los Banos XXX.
I’ll head up there in the next few days to see if there were any scraps I can pick up. The basements and cellars of the abandoned homes have produced some rich rewards in the last few years. It’s a closing down sale of epic proportions - the whole town must go.
He was smiling at his latest plans when the man, who was the nearest thing to a mentor in the life of Brady Mahone arrived at the abandoned bus stop. Brady lied, ‘Hey Professor, you’re looking good.’ Brady struggled to keep his air of cheerfulness, as the Professor was the oldest man he knew, and positively ancient by Trad standards, Brady wondered if he was nearly ninety years old. Brady instinctively knew he was not long for this world.
‘Hello, Brady. I wished I looked as good as you.’ He laughed and said, ‘Do you mind if I sit down. I’m feeling a bit weary, but the walk is beneficial to me.’ He pulled the paper from behind the Perspex film, which used to provide protection from the elements of the old bus timetable. ‘So, another town has been abandoned to the Greens. I used to have relatives in Los Banos.’ He placed his walking stick between his leg and the wall of the shelter.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you. What do they do with the abandoned areas? Do they move in?’
‘No. The Green Workers go into their Operation Clean-Up mode, they spray everything that doesn’t move on the ground, and then the HeavyFusionPlanes™ move in and spray the buildings.’
‘Even the old churches and historic buildings?’
‘Especially those. The Greens have got a real hang-up about nostalgia for the old days. It’s a real sin of theirs, y’know, all that Lead us not into temptation crap.’
The Professor nodded, ‘And yet they let you wander into their homes and sell them all those images from the distant past.’
‘I’m not knocking it. I gotta make a living, and if I spotted a loophole in their big plan then Go Me, that’s what I think.’
‘Do they draw any lines of what is fair game with historical artefacts?’
Brady shrugged, ‘I haven’t noticed any. It’s all future-forward with these guys - no looking back. I suppose you gotta admire it, really.’
The Professor said solemnly, ‘It will be of some comfort to me that I won’t be around for much longer to witness it.’ He changed the subject as it was not his intention to make Brady feel bad. ‘I’m glad I had the chance to see you, as I wanted to thank you, personally, for all you have done for us over the years.’
‘Me? No need to thank me. It’s been good business. In any case, you’ve always treated me right. I’ve always appreciated that about you. You never looked down your nose on old Brady Mahone.’ Brady laughed.
‘You are one of the main reasons our community has held together over all these difficult years, and I suspect, many other communities in and around the old California State.’
‘Now hold on Professor, I think you are giving me entirely too much credit here.’
‘I’ll try and explain. Our small community cannot move beyond the Green Perimeters. You told us not to abandon any land to prevent the Greens from acquiring it. This meant we could farm the green spaces still left to us. This kept us fed and with healthier food than we otherwise would have had.’
Brady wasn’t used to taking praise, especially, when he felt he hadn’t deserved it. ‘I have said that, but I didn’t see into the future, it was just what I’d seen on my travels, is all.’
The professor looked at Brady with his rheumy-brown eyes. ‘Ah, let’s discuss the effect of your travels. You’ll never know the immensity of the value we put on your news from the outside world. When you bring us even the most basic information, it connects us to the outside world. You let us know that we are not alone. It gives us a reason to stick together and to struggle on. It keeps us civilised.’
‘You’re welcome. Just doing my job.’
‘Brady, please receive my utmost thanks. I need to know you have received it in the spirit in which I give it. Even if you haven’t saved us, in your own unique way, you have made our burden bearable.’ A single tear escaped from Professor Yuan Chu’s eyes, and Brady looked away. He put his hand back on Brady’s shoulder and said, ‘Will you accept my gratitude?’
Brady gulped involuntarily, but said, ‘Yes.’
Professor Chu said, ‘Now that you are aware of the importance of your visits, I would be grateful if you could promise to keep giving our people this information after I’ve gone.’
Brady wasn’t going to give a platitude to the inevitable death of this old man, no matter how much he respected him. ‘I will. For what it’s worth - I give you my word.’
‘Your word is more than sufficient.’ He smiled, ‘Now, I must return.’ He laughed, ‘I have been summoned by Judge Jefferson to help organise the New Century celebration.’ He got up slowly, grabbed his walking stick and hobbled away.
His time ain’t long. I’ll do something nice for the next time I see him. I’m sure gonna miss him when he’s gone.