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= ORWELL IN ORBIT 2084 =

Dystopia USA

by John Argo

Page 14.

Chapter 6. Meme Juice, Part III: City of En (One Million Years Uptime)

Though the star field outside Mack's window seemed static, the train was in fact moving very fast, outside time and space in the Motherverse. Within that great, shiny brass circle that looked like the frame around a clock face, a city in space was now visible. Slowly, a vast array of lights came into view: The City of the Universe (COTU), also known as Time Town; or as the greatest number of all numbers (infinity) impossible to actually reach, N—The City of En, or COEN, in the complex bureaucratic pontifications of its many administrative branches. Its history and structure and meaning were very complex. But its dire situation was easy to understand, and brutally simple: the city was dying. Long ago, a time war had fractured the cosmopause, causing it to disintegrate in this sector.

Mack saw that the city's clouds of light had structures embedded. The lights emanated from those structures—buildings, blocks, entire cities, continents, he could not yet determine. The City of En consisted of innumerable blocks of these lights and structures, like a wall of carefully dressed stones put together without mortar. Each piece was discrete, but they interlocked as an entirety. The city stretched in all directions as far as he could see, as the train drifted into the city. The structures resolved into city blocks, most of them elongated cubes about a thousand feet squared at the end sides, and three times as long on the longer faces. It was as if you took all the neon-drenched cities of Mack's future, all the New Yorks and Tokyos and Londons and Parises and more, and stacked them on top of each other. You could traverse in all perpendicular directions among the cubic city blocks.

In the open spaces among the blocks, traffic flowed—space borne buses, trucks, cars, even one-person hooded motorcycles, for lack of better terms, though all seemed to have some form of that nacelle or jet engine. Many of the vehicles were quite stylish.

Mack gasped. "How big is this city?"

Hoseth said: "It's immeasurable, literally. This was once earth as you know it. Or knew it. The original Temporale port grew and grew until earth became just one part of an agglomeration of objects orbiting the sun. Now the sun itself is buried deep down in the Junkall, and the complex forms a kind of huge wheel orbiting the sun. We moved the three other terrane planets into safe orbits and they are now covered with glowing cities and green forests."

"Is there air out there?" Mack asked.

"Some parts are breathable. Most aren't. You still need a vacuum suit in many areas, and all these vehicles you see are essentially traveling in open space. Many of the city blocks are enclosed in a transparent sort of horn-glass, borne of the Temporale Membrane. In the centers of the city, most of the blocks are linked by breathable horn-glass tunnels."

"Overwhelming," Mack said. Lights from passing vehicles flowed over their faces in a gentle tissue of colors. The flowing colors were almost a song, a hymn, a solemn celebration of such glory. "And you say this place is in trouble?"

Hoseth pointed far out in the distance, where auroras of light shimmered in a grayish mist. "Look carefully, and you'll see parts of the city disintegrating. That's the cosmopause over there. Locals refer to it as the Dissolve. Each solar year, it gets a bit thinner. We're at the edge of space-time, flying apart with the universe. We wouldn't be there at all, if it weren't for a great time war ages ago."

"What's beyond there?" Mack asked, though he knew. The memes were still unpacking on his cortices.

"Nothing," Hoseth said. "Extinction. Death."

She said: "The factions of an extinct empire used inconceivable bombs on each other. Time bombs."

Hoseth said: "In the centuries after your time, our race progressed to space travel and discovered a node of the Temporale near the moon. Ships traveled through it, around it, past it, for generations, before someone realized there was an invisible portal into the motherverse and the Temporale. Our race developed into one of the great star faring people of the Temporale. Nobody knows or owns all of it. We've encountered alien races in far-flung places. We developed a vast trading empire that still exists."

She added: "We reached our limit thousands of years ago. Our job now is a defensive position, to hold what we have, to keep outsiders back. That's half our job. The other half is to tinker with the past. Yes, it can be done. The changes must not be big ones, or they cause a branch universe to pop out, and that does them good, but nothing for us. It's the tiny, very carefully engineered little changes that give us the most hope. If we do them wrong, the future changes, and the cosmopause shrinks a bit relative to the city, and more blocks break off and vanish into godots. If we do the right thing, then we gain an hour, a year, a decade if we're lucky."

"What you would call tweaks," Hoseth said.

Mack asked: "Do you ever get back what you lost?"

She shook her head ruefully. "No, I'm afraid not. Once a city block is gone, it's gone for good. But if we manage to do a good tweak, then of course the past changes and therefore the future, and a whole different bunch of blocks may be there. We don't always know it, either. It's very complex to monitor small changes in the city that are due to our tinkering."

Hoseth cut in: "We are actually at war with each other, quite seriously. That brings me to the final point. There are three major policies at work, although there are many factions that sometimes work together or against each other in complicated ways."

"Usually it's a balance,' she said. "At other times, our people murder each other like in the Cold War not long before your time. The constitutional empire, which is run by several directors and two consuls, with a figurehead emperor, wants us to do nothing. They feel there is too much danger in tinkering. Just move people out when another block is about to sizzle away into godots."

Hoseth said: 'Remember I said we rescued you from TRANSENT?"

Mack nodded. He remembered the woman's voice on the public address system—welcome to our ship and all that happy airline sort of stuff.

"TRANSENT is more radical than our organization. Transportation Entity runs roads and railroads, particularly in the Temporale, which means throughout the city also. We run the Postal Entity. We're POSENT. Our philosophy is to make minimal tinkers. Because we have cargo rights on all moving stock, we are everywhere that TRANSENT goes. Often, our agents work together. Sometimes…"

Mack interrupted: "What do you mean, agents?"

He said: "You have your different government agencies, I'm sure, and they have their own police and intelligence units.'

She scoffed. "If they don't, they should." There was a lot in her veiled look that she wasn't saying.

Hoseth said darkly: "Well, you can use your imagination, Mr. Mackinson…"

"Oh, I see," Mack said. "You're in our time, manipulating."

"Tinkering," she corrected. "Tiny little tweaks, only."

"Right," Hoseth said. "Say that our CloudMaster reasoning machines in the imperial information centers have done a calculation. Let's say they figure that a certain civil servant back in a critical age, say 1943, will accidentally run over a child going to school, and this child happens to be the little son of a major atomic scientist. The atomic scientist receives a call, and rushes to the hospital where his child critically ill. He stays there for days on end, missing some critical brainstorming sessions with Dr. Oppenheimer and General Groves, let's say, and thus a discovery he could have announced that day will be delayed for weeks. TRANSENT would send someone back to shoot the man in the car. POSENT would send someone back to yank the child back onto the sidewalk as the car goes by. The imperial bureaucracy, or Taxing Entity, also known as TAXENT, would do nothing and hope for the best. TAXENT also has an intelligence arm called EXENT, Executive Entity, which they might send into the field to interfere with both TRANSENT and POSENT agents. The TRANSENT person might kill both the driver and the POSENT agent, and on and on it goes…so you see it's a very dangerous and complex game with many possible combinations."

"On top of it, we have external enemies—some are aliens, some are more or less humanoid, humansh, humanish, what have you—there are countless national entities outside our own that have a stake in this, too. Some want us gone so they can grab our enormous trade empire. Others depend on our wealth and protection, though most would stab us in the back if it were the more appealing option."

"Confusing, even with all these memes in my system," Mack said.

"I know," Hoseth said grimly. "And now, Mr. Mackinson, with no time to waste, we must add to your information store."

"What was TRANSENT going to do with me?'

Hoseth deliberated. "I can't say, Mr. Mackinson. I can tell you it would be something far more drastic than we plan."

She rose and took a capsule from a plastic-like baggie in her pocket. She handed the capsule to Mack, who sat back and eyeballed the thing dubiously. She jerked her wrist insistently. "Take it, Mr. Mackinson. Remember our subliminal conversation a little while ago. Whizzago." She snapped her fingers, turning on the hypnosis they had just secretly engineered in him.

"Whizzago," he repeated dully. He was under hypnotic control, and he couldn't fight them. The activator was this nonsense word, which sort of vaguely rhymed with San Diego. It was the trigger to remind him of something, a fear, a loss, a terror, buried so deeply in his soul that he couldn't remember it, but knew he would give his life. He accepted the capsule, and swallowed it with the last of his coffee.

Hoseth started to explain the mission. "You will not remember this meeting, Mr. Mackinson. You will temporarily forget even the things you learned about cosmology, the Temporale, and Time Town. That capsule will suppress your knowledge long enough to get done what you need to do. You'll also have a temporary identity that will shield you from government scans."

"Let's get to it then," said Lady Betize. Golden blocks moved slowly past as they spoke. The library car had a cozy gloom to it, while stained glass color panes moved over the features of those in the room. Traffic flowed by in an ever thickening stream, revealing the energy and wealth of a city that was at the same time in danger of crumbling into nothing.

"You're going back to the late 21st Century, Mr. Mackinson, in the Year 2084. You will need to be cautious. Watch your step, and look for agents from the future if there are any. Some would be there to harm you, others to help you…"

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