Chapter 19
Captain Carl Levine of the Illinois National Guard was exhausted. He had been fighting with his company in South Chicago for more than three weeks, claiming block after block of the heavily armed Afro-American and Latino gangs who had started the revolution and wreaked havoc on half of the Chicago metropolitan area.
Being an African-American himself, he had led his men in the battle across the streets, seeing five of them die by machine guns or booby traps.
He was now resting on the half-burnt kitchen floor of the McDonald's located in South Ashland Avenue, where his company had set up camp. The rebels were just seven hundred yards away. He turned towards Lieutenant Wade Dunn, his second in command, a young white man from Naperville, Illinois.
"Wade, is the brigade command going to send exoskeletons again? We cannot get past this street with losses, too many snipers."
"I frankly hope they don't, Carl," Wade answered, "otherwise we have to go after them to cover their ass again."
Carl nodded his head in agreement. The first attempts at using the weapons in the urban battlefield had been a disaster. The command had hoped that the armored exoskeletons, armed with heavy machine guns and grenade launchers, would get rid of the lightly armed rebels without too much collateral damage.
"Yeah, those assholes at headquarters did not realize they had so many infrared antitank grenades," Carl recalled. "It was enough for the rebels to let them get past their first lines, and then shoot at the gas turbine exhaust to torch them all. The only option the poor guys in the exoskeleton had, was to fire on everything that moved, causing more damage than a Bradley tank."
"How the hell did those guys have so much ammunition?" Wade wondered.
"Come on, man, don't forget that starting two years ago, back in 2032, all the gangs were swimming in cash from the Telomerax illegal trade, and could afford to build small arsenals for their own turf wars. Then President Strickland did away with federal prohibition, and you know what happened. No more business, no more cash. Don’t you agree that we must find a way to use the weaponry to make ends meet?"
"Yeah," Wade continued, "end of prohibition basically meant transfer of revenue and profits from gangsters to big pharma companies. The funny thing is, the cost to get Telomerax did not go down too much, even though it looks like it is quite cheap to manufacture."
"Is it?" Carl asked, "Then how come the drug companies charge you nearly ten thousand dollars per year for the treatment? If I wanted to get it for my family, I would have to choose between this, sending my two daughters to college, or having better medical insurance, just in case anything happens."
"No, I assure you that it’s affordable. Look at this," Wade handed over to his tablet. It was playing a video shot from the campus of an Indian company. "The guy you see there is called Dinesh Kheradpir, he is the tycoon who made billions by manufacturing the drug in India."
Carl watched the video. It was a plea to the governments and the pharmaceutical industry to make Telomerax affordable for all, and remove the market barriers that prevented prices to adjust on a global basis. It ended with a set of hyperlinks where it was possible to download all the pill manufacturing process.
"Wow, that looks awesome. Can you really set up your own lab?" Carl asked, "I must admit I got some pills for me and my wife when the drug was still illegal. It was enough to stop aging for about one year, that's what my dealer told me. But if more people manufacture the pills, prices will drop."
"Hold on," Wade countered, "it's not as simple as that. Legalized does not mean free, it means regulated. All those who can setup a Telomerax lab have done it, and then bumped into a number of bureaucratic obstacles that make production expensive. You have to feed the FDA, the lobbyists, scores of government agencies, and pay taxes on it. If you want to make it affordable for all, you have sell an illegal version. Some decided to do so and..."
"...and the illegal trade reappeared, this time mixed with other nasty drugs that give dependency...so that those who could afford the higher prices went to the legal market...and the illegal one lost its richest customers."
"Exactly, I see you understand economics even if you are an engineer," Wade grinned. "The result, well, it's where we are right now; inner cities becoming poorer, riots and unbelievable levels of violence that we have to fix the hard way."
Carl handed the tablet over to Wade, and took off his helmet. It was time for the daily video call home to Brenda, his wife.
"Ah, about this Dinesh guy…is he the one who invented the drug?" he asked Wade before calling.
"No, he is not. If you watch the whole video series, there is one episode where Dinesh credits a Frenchman with the invention. If I recall his name correctly, it is Louis Packard, or something like that. He is a very discreet guy, you do not find anything reliable about him on the Internet. It looks like he lives somewhere in Europe."
Carl laughed, "I think the French guy is right to keep a low profile. If it were for me, I would prefer he had never invented this. I could have continued my engineering job at the truck factory, retire, and pass away when it was time."
"Come on, Carl, I do not agree with you there," Wade slowly shook his head, "you do realize we are getting immortality, don’t you?. It's just that we have to learn how to use it, like we learned using planes and nuclear energy."
"I hope you are right, Wade, I hope you are right," Carl repeated. "For the time being we have to clean up the area with the least possible damage."
Carl had barely finished speaking when he received a call from the regiment headquarters, five blocks away. He had to report for a special assignment, directly from Lieutenant Colonel Taylor Kaser, the unit commander. Carl confirmed and hung up. He did not like to withstand the dark humor of Taylor Kaser, a white veteran who never missed the opportunity of saying how much nastier and dangerous the Chicago blacks were than the fucking Arabs. Carl had recorded many of his officer's racist speeches, hoping to send him to Court Martial once the revolt was over. He calculated that the Army and the National Guard needed another two weeks to eventually clear the the last hold out of the gangs, a square mile located between West Garfield Boulevard, Marquette Road and I-90.
He stood up, handed command over to Wade, then hesitated.
"Wade, one last thing," Carl said slowly.
"Yes, Sir?"
"In case anything bad happens to me, just make sure my family gets my last words. I keep a diary on a memory micro-pill recorder, it's disguised here in the necklace I wear. Just make sure they receive it."
Lieutenant Wade hesitated, then saluted his commander.
"Sure, Carl. I am sure you will be back safely, though."