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  chapter 4

  Manny told the taxi driver to take him to Main Street in Fern’s River, figuring he could navigate his way back into life in the United States best if he started with the area he was most familiar with. He was wrong. Knowing what Main Street looked like before made it even more difficult for Manny to process what it had become six years later. Most of the big box stores — Officetown, Toolz, Beds & Bathrooms, to name a few — that came to define this and other similar suburban towns throughout the country were boarded up. The only open businesses were a convenience store (FASTMART), a liquor store (LIQUORMART), and an electronics store (ELECTROMART). All of these storefronts were owned and operated by the Martins, well known in the beltway for their strong affiliation with the Corcoran administration and their influential mega PAC, Praising Freedom for Tomorrow’s Angel’s. The Martins were able to weather the most recent economic downturn by downsizing their stores and focusing on the few items that American people couldn’t live without – potato chips, alcohol, and large TVs.

  The loss of outlet diversity for consumer goods was not all that Manny noticed. When he left the US, basic infrastructure was cracking at the seams. Now the seams had burst open, and the country’s innards were spilling out in all directions. Stoplights were working more often than not when he left. Now, they were suspended metal relics, reminders of a time when traffic laws were obeyed. And the roads were so strewn with potholes that most cars had been replaced by trucks, many of which had tires that exceeded the height of an average-sized adult. The monster truck segment of the auto industry was, in fact, booming, purchased by those who could afford them.

  “When was the last time these roads were paved?” Manny asked the driver of the monster truck that was his airport taxi.

  “I got this ride four years ago. So before then, I guess.”

  After his landslide victory eight years prior, President Corcoran stayed true to his promise of strict “value engineering” throughout the government bureaucracy, and there was no increase in spending by any existing agency from the moment Corcoran took office. Many agencies, such as the Federal Highway Administration, were purged from the federal bureaucracy altogether after Corcoran’s allies in Congress successfully legislated its demise.

  As a result of these cuts, taxes declined across the board. Lower-and middle-class families saw their effective tax rate cut by 10 percent, and upper-class families and corporations, now recognized by the courts as “corporate people,” saw their tax rates cut by 16 percent.

  Corcoran’s early success translated into huge political gains for his party, which won control of the Senate and secured control of the House after his second year. The control of the legislative and executive branches gave Corcoran carte blanche to do what he wanted to further his agenda. While he remained committed to shrinking government on almost all fronts, he did push through Congress (and it did not take much pushing) the creation of one entirely new agency – the Department of Cultural Security (DCS). Spending for this new agency offset most of the cuts in spending Corcoran achieved, but approval for Corcoran was so high that few people seemed to notice. They also didn’t seem to notice the yawning deficits that this new agency created.

  “What about garbage pickup? That ever happen?” Manny asked the cab driver.

  “Well, we get EWDs about three times a year these days.” The taxi driver then explained to Manny how the Red Cross’s emergency waste disposal activities were carried out when the roads became impassable.

  Encouraged by tax breaks and other incentives by local and state governments, private waste disposal firms popped up throughout the country to fill the void of the now defunct sanitation departments. Almost all of them were out of business within a year.

  Fiscal conservatives blamed the failure of waste disposal privatization on Americans’ sense of entitlement to a street free from debris. “Garbage trucks don’t pick up garbage, people do,” was the new government slogan, created to get people to stop relying on government to solve their problems. After that approach failed, they then pushed for more deregulation, claiming the environmental laws were too onerous for all of the private waste disposal firms and that the requirements to pick up different types of trash and recycle it in different ways were crushing their profit margins. Two years later, most of those regulations were relaxed, but the private garbage disposal industry never fully recovered, and the few remaining firms only served gated communities, picking up the trash twice a day in those economically flourishing areas. These gated communities were a mix of lawyers, bankers, doctors, and the new wealthy: DCS employees.

  “How bad is unemployment now?” Manny asked.

  “I reckon it’s holding steady at around 25 percent.”

  The taxi driver informed Manny that Americans not lucky enough to live inside the gated sanctuaries still found themselves visiting those areas quite frequently. The most reliable form of employment for these Americans came from private sector jobs within these communities: private school teachers, nannies, security, and landscapers, to name a few.

  Public education still existed outside the gated communities, the taxi driver told Manny. “But I ain’t that poor,” he said. “Those places are more like criminal finishing schools than learning institutions.”

  The taxi driver’s consternation turned to unmitigated anger as he told Manny, “Almost thirty freekin’ percent of my income goes to paying for and busing my two adorable little runts to a private school at a gated community in Northern Virginia that allows ‘outsiders.’ Not much I can do about it now, this job beats the shower head plant that I used to work at.”

  “In the US?”

  “Yeah, got that job around 2028. During the manufacturing boom. Paid real well. Until it didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “Shut down. Most people preferred to smuggle in their shower heads. Half the price, twice the quality. Didn’t have to deal with the furtl crap.”

  Manny asked the driver to drop him off at FASTMART. The parking lot was mostly empty, save for a few monster trucks, and when the wind kicked up, Manny found himself under attack from two errant potato chip bags and an empty plastic bottle of protein-infused pomegranate vodka.

  Manny entered, passed the bacon flavored slushies, and stopped to look around. After picking up an eight cheese veggie burrito he went to the front counter.

  “Where are your newspapers?”

  “You looking for news on paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t sell ’em,” the store clerk said.

  “Not one?” Manny asked.

  “Not for about two years. Where you been?”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” Manny said, not wanting to draw attention to himself. He wasn’t a wanted man, but the circumstances of his departure meant that he was reluctant to inform anybody of his return. The media crucified him for months before he left, and paparazzi followed him day and night. Manny assumed that the media would not hesitate to resume stalking him if they found out he was back. As such, he trimmed his hair as short as he could on all sides. He also made a feeble attempt at a goatee, but even at 46 years of age, he couldn’t come close to connecting it on the sides.

  “Six bucks for a disposable tablet,” the clerk said.

  Manny took out a large roll of cash from his jeans pocket. He had stored a lot of his remaining wealth in cash in a variety of storage facilities around northern Virginia. On his way back to Fern’s River, he had his taxi driver stop at one of those facilities in Reston.

  After the clerk gave Manny his change for a fifty, Manny started going through the tablet. He noticed the furtl operating system. Holospace must not have succeeded in penetrating the US market after all, Manny thought to himself.

  Flipping through stories about celebrities and competitive eating, Manny came across a picture of Susie Mays. She was flanking President Corcoran at a public speaking engagement. He launched the video of the event on the tablet – it was at a gun rally in New Jersey. W
hen Manny ascertained from the video that Susie was the Secretary of Cultural Security at the DCS, he threw the tablet down and stared with his lips pursed at its shattered pieces glistening off the floor.

  “Yo, those things don’t grow on trees! Clean it up,” the clerk said.

  Manny sheepishly cleaned up the remains of the tablet with a broom provided by the clerk. Then he exited the convenience store.

  In the parking lot, a small boy, 12 years old, whose slight frame and boyish face suggested he was still a few years away from puberty, was being taunted by three teenagers in Nickelback T-shirts and wallet chains. Each member of the gang was fatter than the next. They looked to Manny like a gang of life-size peanut M & Ms. They all sported a “chinstrap,” a popular facial hair style for Nickelback fans of the day. They haphazardly tossed the boy’s phone to each other.

  The game of keep-away was making them tired as the small boy’s aggravation and anxiety grew. One chinstrapper decided to grab the boy just as he was lunging for his phone.

  The small boy looked on in horror as the egg-shaped boy in the “2029 World Nickelback Domination Tour” T-shirt began to tap on the screen of the boy’s phone with a devious grin on his face.

  “What are you doing!?” the boy yelled.

  “Shut your hole!” his captor growled in his ear.

  “Please don’t do anything to my phone,” the boy said.

  The plea fell on deaf ears. The chinstrapper with the phone continued to type furiously, laughing/wheezing the whole time.

  Manny walked closer to the activity. “Hey!” he yelled.

  “Whateva old man,” the chinstrapper with the phone replied, briefly looking up at Manny and then resuming typing.

  Manny moved toward the boy’s captor. Just then, the chinstrapper having his way with the boy’s phone stopped what he was doing and threw it at the boy. The boy was let go, and the entire chinstrap gang trotted off laughing and wheezing.

  The boy tried to fix his ill-fitting clothes and picked up his phone. He hit a few buttons. His expression changed to horror. “NOOOOOOOO,” he yelled.

  “What happened?” Manny asked.

  “They updated my status.”

  “What?”

  “They updated my status three times!! It says, ‘the US govurment sux a gigantick DONG!’, ‘I LUV MAO AND MARX!!!’ and ‘the free market blows.’”

  “They wrote all that?” Manny asked.

  “Yeah. I’m screwed.”

  “Can’t you just erase it?”

  “You can’t never erase anyth…” A black van came screeching into the parking lot. The van door was emblazoned with a “DCS” logo.

  An imposing DCS agent shot out of the van as the kid dropped his phone and ran. Manny stood by and watched the boy try and fail to evade the agile agent. Manny wondered just how they found the boy so quickly.

  A second agent got out of the van and retrieved the phone. He looked up at Manny. “Official Department of Cultural Security business. Nothing to see here,” the officer barked, staring at Manny as the kid was being Tased against the van right behind him.

  “I said nothing to see here!” the DCS agent said.

  In the days after his return Manny learned that President Corcoran came up with the DCS proposal in response to a number of prominent social conservatives that threatened to boycott his re-election campaign unless he proved he was serious about his religious values. Those values came under fire when it was revealed that his grandmother on his father’s side was half-Zoroastrian. Persian heritage of any kind was frowned upon following the Battle of Iran in 2020. It was seriously frowned upon following the second Battle of Iran in 2027.

  The creation of the DCS as a cabinet-level agency was a significant win for Corcoran. Conservatives — both social and fiscal — were now on board with his agenda. The social conservatives wanted a man they could trust to stem the “moral decay of America.” The fiscal conservatives wanted lower taxes. Corcoran’s ability to play both sides of this debate with the DCS merged two strands of conservatism that had been growing strained in recent years. Before Corcoran, there were some rumblings of a formal split in the party. After the creation of the DCS, those rumblings vanished.

  The bill was called the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Creating Adjustment Tools Required to Impede and Obliterate Cultural Terrorism act” – the USA CATRIOCT Act. It was 1,342 pages long. An early rumor claimed it was about giving more rights to American cats, so support for it surged, and members of Congress were inundated with calls of support. Democrats complained it was an act of political sleight-of-hand by the President to get them to vote on it during their recess the evening before Christmas 2028. But most of them voted for it anyway.

  Staffed with a who’s who of conservatives in America, the DCS quickly evolved into a political attack dog, sniffing out individuals who engaged in activities on the Internet that the DCS identified as contributors to America’s moral and cultural decay. First, the agency targeted child pornographers. Then it went after environmental terrorist organizations and other leftwing radical groups. Then they moved into more overtly political territory, shutting down Islamic websites the agency deemed “politically radical” or “suspicious.” The DCS had all the resources it needed – and few limitations on the scope of its activity. Those that ran afoul of the DCS were subjected to punishment via “DCS tribunal,” which shielded the judicial process from public scrutiny.

  After Congress approved the DCS Force (DCSF) the DCS was able to conduct investigations and make arrests without notifying the FBI or local police forces. Within a year of its creation, the staff and budget of the DCSF grew to five times the size of the FBI’s and about ten times the size of that of the aggregate public sector police force, which had been downsized substantially after a series of local and national spending cuts. The NSA officially shuttered its operations a year after the DCS’s creation. Corcoran explained its dissolution as “redundancy minimization.” In reality, the DCS didn’t want any other agencies invading their turf.

  DCSF vans and unmanned DCS drones throughout the country became commonplace even as petty thievery surged in non-gated neighborhoods. Law-abiding citizens were encouraged by the DCS to report “suspicious” status updates and other social media posts, which were dealt with in a precise and forceful manner befitting an agency with an almost bottomless well of money, resources, and political support.

  After passage of the CATRIOCT Act, possession of a Holospace machine became a felony that carried a penalty of a year of “cultural education support” (CUS). By support, the DCS was referring to, a strict regimen of “online decorum tutorials,” GPS tracking beacon injected into one’s thigh, and daily visits from DCS agents to ensure no secret devices were being used to coordinate “malfeasant, destructive, or subversive behavior.”

  Following Manny’s introduction to the DCS, the once familiar ache of his tightened shoulders re-emerged as he shuffled through the garbage-strewn streets of northern Virginia. One morning, he found himself outside the ELECTROMART staring at one of the screens in the display window. It was a public service announcement (PSA) “paid for by Praising Freedom for Tomorrow’s Angel’s,” the Martin mega PAC. It portrayed an all-American family of four lounging around in their great room on an oversized turquoise massage couch, enjoying the Internet on their furtl tablets, watches, and phones, all the while manic, epilepsy-inducing cartoons played above them on a 100-inch television screen that was suspended from a glass rod protruding from the ceiling. A narrator, possibly Morgan Freeman, delivered the line, “This is your family.” Then the room morphed into a manufacturing plant, and the image dissolved to grainy black and white. The same family was now working on a steamy, rusty assembly line as a Chinese man with predictable features – round head with a little mustache, cigarette dangling from his mouth – whipped and scolded the American family into submission. The narrator then said, “This is your family on Holospace.” Then the screen went black. An old-fashioned s
tamping tool flew into the frame and pounded the Chinese symbols _____ into the black void, accompanied by the sound of a creaking jail cell slamming shut. Underneath the symbols, in a slow fade, was the translation: “Any questions?”

  Before the introduction of Holospace machines, US politicians had grown accustomed to publicly demonizing China but privately accepting their role as providers of low-cost labor and cheap products. Once the Chinese entered the high-tech space, however, these same politicians on both sides of the aisle were more than happy to get behind the Corcoran administration’s vigorous efforts to curtail the Holospace’s access to the US market.

  But outside US borders, the Holospace’s success couldn’t be stopped. US allies in Western Europe were the last to transition to the HoloNet. But after the DCS (with furtl’s support) was caught recording the President of Spain’s secret sex parties using furtl’s remote videocamera control feature – which the President of Spain was sure he disabled – they all jumped ship. Import tariffs on Holospace machines in Europe were relaxed, and the resultant flood of business juiced China’s 2028 GDP growth by three percentage points.

  Political scientists from around the world blamed the US’s innovation stagnation on the “great firewall of America.” But Corcoran chose to spin this development as good for domestic job creation, and it was. Lots of manufacturers cropped up in order to fill the void born of the fact that the American shopper could no longer easily buy goods from overseas companies via the Internet. And thousands of formerly unemployed Americans were put to work. In the late 2020s the “Made in America” tag was once again flourishing, displayed on everything from sippy cups to refridgermators to the shower heads that Manny’s taxi driver mentioned. But the prices were typically twice as high as the same goods sold in other countries. Thus emerged a gray market of goods coming from now-thriving Mexico and Canada. This prompted more money to be spent on securing the Mexican and Canadian border. Securing, in this context, meant keeping Americans from sneaking into neighboring countries to the North and South to buy things that they couldn’t get in the United States. Like Holospace machines.