"Stupid bastard! Serves him right for getting his ass arrested!" Prime was saying – yelling – as Elder Tull approached the bar. He was speaking to – at Eydie. She was sitting on a stool at the bar, curled up in an oversized hoodie sweatshirt. Elder slipped one of his plates in front of her, hoping for some sign of life. Eydie sat motionless, staring down at the floor.
"Shut the fuck up, Prime..." Sweet Beat replied, standing over Eydie, attempting to comfort her. Sweet was dressed in a pair of Mickey Mouse hot pants and a heavy duffel coat. Kevin was keeping a respectful distance at the end of the bar, a glass of Prime's grain hooch in his hand. The whole of the old gang was there: Elder Tull, the Prime Administrator, Eydie, Sweet Beat and Kevin. Everyone, except Steve.
"Eat, Eydie, you've got to eat," Elder said. He took his own advice and bit a large chunk off a slice of buttered bread.
"You can cry in your beer, Eydie, or you can get on with life," Prime continued. "If Steve's a Stem... well, then he's one of them. It's not worth mourning one of them." Prime finished off his glass and reached back for a bottle.
"Prime, why do you have to be such a fucking prick?" Beat said, rubbing Eydie's back soothingly.
"Facts are facts," Prime added, pouring himself a healthy measure of clear liquid.
"Come on, Prime, it was Steve..." Kevin spoke up.
"I know. I've never had a better friend," Prime mused. "But he's a Stem now. Do I have to tell you all what that means? Fuck him, I say, fuck him."
Suddenly, it hit Elder like lightning. The memory of what he had seen the evening before: Steve in the Puff Club with the Stems. Elder opened his mouth, but hesitated. What little tact Elder still had hidden beneath his scruffy, soiled exterior held his tongue. He instead filled his mouth with a large spoonful of lima beans.
Perhaps if Elder had spoken up then, he might have saved a few lives.
But instead, Elder chewed. Chewed and chewed. He never remembered liking lima beans, but these were delicious...
"You know what, Prime?" Beat thrust an accusatory finger over the bar. "Fuck you–"
She would have continued heaping insults on Prime had Eydie not suddenly and unexpectedly moved. It wasn't much, just the motion of her head and a hand reaching out for the buttered bread on the plate in front of her. But it was the first sign of life anyone had seen from her all day.
#
Each and every Puke had his reasons for resisting implantation, and the motivations of Elder's friends were no less varied.
Prime was the most easily comprehensible case: a combination of classically liberal values mixed with a good measure of Area 51/Kennedy Assassination paranoia. To Prime, the whole thing was a vast conspiracy. But answers to "by who?" and "why?" he never really pinned down.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Prime would stand in counterpoint to whatever great social revolution arrived in America. Even back in college, where he'd run the computer lab that had bestowed on him his particular name, he'd been against most everything: environmentalism, war, peace, social justice, welfare, affirmative action – he was against it all. Give Prime a cause, and you could count on him to oppose it. Any cause, that is, that didn't fit with his libertarian, Ayn Randian, objectivist world view – which meant pretty much everything.
When the WLI was invented, it was like the coming of the Apocalypse for Prime. The signs had been all around him, and now the four horsemen had arrived. His natural inclination to mistrust all grand plans for human betterment went into hyper drive. It took a strong will and a great deal of alcohol to stop Prime from going full militant and blowing himself up on a bus...
But his views touched everyone around him in various ways that they might not have been able to verbalize. In a way, Prime gave a voice to everyone's unspoken concerns about the rapidity and totality of the stem's adoption amongst their peers.
He might have been a bat-shit crazy, paranoid, conspiracy theorizing gun nut, but that didn't make him wrong.
If Prime was the idealist, then Eydie had always been the pragmatist. She was almost the polar opposite of Prime politically. In college, she'd given up a promising career in Bioinformatics after her lab had been segregated along Stem/Puke lines. She'd realized she was witnessing a new stratification of American society and instantly knew she'd never be able to count herself on the side of the preferred class.
In the intervening years, the validity of her observations were proven correct time after time. At first, it was simple social segregation: Stem lab space and Puke lab space where Stems wouldn't be distracted by the smells and sounds of the Pukes. But soon it became political policy: hiring and occupancy laws targeting Pukes, restricting their occupations and areas of residence, rationalized under the guise of health concerns and sanitation. Pukes, after all, had significantly poorer health and higher medical costs than Stems, and required outmoded and ill-maintained sewer facilities to properly manage their waste.
That society's final solution to the Puke Problem was already underway, moving silently above Eydie's head, breaching the upper floors of the building above Madame Damnable's, would have come as little surprise to Eydie. Like Prime, she'd foreseen such an end from the very beginning, though perhaps for very different reasons. History had taught Eydie that the story never ended well for the lower strata of any segregated society. Not well at all.
For Sweet Beat, being a Puke was more personal. She'd been raised an army brat, flitting around the globe with her Major General father. Her mother had checked out early in her life, and Sweet Beat had practically been raised by the Marine Corps. At eighteen, she'd signed on the dotted line just in time for the troubles in South America. She'd seen more than a belly full of combat, and returned to the States a brevet Captain.
She'd returned, however, to an America that was rapidly changing, taking the Marine Corps with it. In a high-level, Stem-backed shuffle, her father had been squeezed out, dishonorably discharged on some trumped up charge. He'd taken his own life only three weeks after Beat had returned stateside.
She didn't even have to desert – the new, Stem-powered Marine Corps had no place for her.
In the abandoned, cobwebbed filled upper floors of Madame Damnable's, dark, gas mask-cowled figures took a knee and listened intently to ear buds for a 'go' signal. Weapon loadouts were checked, and gas canisters removed from webbing pouches. Below them, the unmistakable sounds of a celebration rose up through the floor.
For Kevin, at least in the beginning, his opposition to the stem had been religious. Steeped in his Southern Baptist heritage, he'd deferred early on to the teachings of his church. America's conservative, moral majority had initially opposed the WLI before making a sudden about-face almost five years into the stem's wholesale adoption. They soon became its most aggressive boosters.
Concerns about the political backgrounds of many of the early stem proponents gave many of America's fundamentalists valid pause. The Universal Party had formally been known as the TWRF: the Trotskyist World Revolutionary Front. Its conversion to universal, pro-stem advocacy had required a name change, but little ideological modification. But as the stem's power to free Man from his mortal concerns became apparent, the fundamentalist wing of the nation started to warm to its adoption.
Stems, after all, could never succumb to the morally degenerative effects of alcohol, as much of the stem's circuitry was given over to restricting inebriation. And Stems were healthier, stronger, and generally considered of a better character – everything that religious America was attempting to mold the nation into. Clear minds and clean characters.
But the change came too late for Kevin. By the time his church flipped to a pro-stem stance, he was already married to Beat. To maintain his marriage, as God demanded, he had to break with the teachings of his church. And break with his church he did, totally and completely. If ever a man had had faith, then Kevin had lost his.
By the time Beat and Kevin's marriage disintegrated, it was too late for Kevin to return to the other sid
e. By then, his views were fixed in stone: God hated the WLI, Kevin was sure, and religion had led man astray. Mankind had no choice but to spiral down a path that ended with its destruction. The stem meant the end of the world.
"Go weapons hot," the scratchy voice said over the megahertz. In the gloom, armored figures moved lightly to their feet, shouldering automatic rifles. Their footfalls made no sound, but the floorboards beneath them creaked.
Below, Elder Tull glanced up, a mouth full of au gratin potatoes, watching a thin haze of long, undisturbed dust break free from the boards in the ceiling and float down to his face. Perhaps, if anyone else had noticed the movement, what was about to happen would have come as less of a surprise. But for Elder Tull, the synapses were making no connections. He coughed with a mouth full of potatoes and struggled to stifle a sneeze. He shook the dust from his face and returned his attention to the insults Beat and Prime were tossing across the bar. The movement in the ceiling was quickly forgotten.
Elder Tull... well, Elder Tull was just too loony-bird crazy to get stemmed. He'd always been of an excitable nature; a delicate genius, voted by his high school class the most likely to become the next dot com millionaire – the next Drew Arrow. By the time food had become scarce, Elder had already given up on the day-to-day work of taking care of himself. If Steve and Eydie hadn't taken him in, he'd have quickly died of starvation, or been arrested for vagrancy and stemmed in jail.
Normal, everyday life had always been a challenge for Elder. Particle physics, writing in assembly language, a three-body problem, these were easy... but everyday life...
#
"So, Bannock? No shit?" Elder spoke up, changing the subject. Eydie brought the slice of bread to her mouth and began to eat quietly. Everyone realized they were standing still, watching her every movement. They had to shake themselves free of the hypnotic sight.
"Bannock? Shit, yeah! Real as I am standing here in front of you. You're eating the proof."
"But it's just some place called Bannock, right?" Kevin spoke up. "I mean, not the promise land prophesied by that half-crazy Brotherhood..."
"No, fuck it, dude!" Prime chuckled. "The Bannock. Arrowsoft logos on all the equipment and everything. The real deal. Really real. I was there."
"Yeah, sure, Prime..." Beat dismissed.
"I was–" Prime harrumphed. "Look, I've been pushing out farther and farther, right? Up into the mountains. The easy pickings have been picked clean, you know? The stuff near civilization, so I've been heading out into the sticks. Finding communities that haven't been touched by the stem – hardly even heard of it.
"Anyway, two – three trips is all any of them have ever been good for. Come back one day and everyone's up and lit out. Supplies got short, they made enough from trading with folks like me, and they move on, looking for greener pastures. So I have to push farther and farther up into the hills each time to find the next hillbilly town that hasn't heard from civilization yet. So this trip, I'm in the Wagoneer all the way up in the middle of nowhere, off Highway 2, and I run into these old timers, and they start talking about this commune up the road that might be worth a look-see. They say it's a big operation, they see trucks and stuff rolling by all the time. I'm thinking, hell, it's some Stem summer camp and I'm going to roll right through the middle of it. But I go check it out.
"Up a ways, the road turns to dirt, then mud, then it ain't much more than a foot trail. I'm thinking I've taken a wrong turn, and I'm looking for a place to turn the Wagoneer around. Then I bust through this line of trees, and right there I see the queerest sight. Trail climbs up in front of me, up through a steep-walled canyon, and at its summit, there's this massive boulder. And I mean massive! Like five stories high, and perfectly round like somebody's carved it out of the rock. Fucking thing is just sitting there at the top of the hill, all Indiana Jones and shit, like it'll roll down at any second and squash you flat. Lots of tire tracks here, leading up the sandy slope through the canyon, and I realize I'm on the right track.
"So up I go, shiftin' the Wagoneer into four-wheel drive, up and around that motherfucking big boulder. Then I'm over the hump and heading down into this valley... well shit, it's the fucking Garden of Eden, I'm tellin' you! First thing I see is five hundred – a thousand acres planted with wheat, waving in the sun like some old breakfast cereal commercial. Road cutting right through the middle of the crops. I'm bumping along it, not believin' a thing I'm seeing. Grapes growing up on the north valley wall, hop vines and corn fields... a small river, damned, flooding a section of the valley for rice. When I'm through the wheat, the whole dead-end of the valley is put down for grass, and cows are grazing. Fucking cows! Beef on the hoof!
"And right at the end, right where the valley walls come together locking this whole magic kingdom away from the world, is a tiny little hamlet. Ten, fifteen prefabricated houses, maybe, the whole deal circling a church with a bell tower. A fucking bell tower!"
"You're so full of shit, Prime," Beat was listening with arms crossed, her head tilted to the side.
"I know! Sounds like an LSD trip, am I right? But this fucking place is real. 'Course, the natives weren't so happy to see me. I get welcomed by a dozen M16's pointed at my head. But once they realized I was cool and not some fucking Stem weasel, they warmed up.
"Turns out everyone there is either with the Brotherhood of Bannock or a direct employee of Arrowsoft. They're setting the whole place up, no expense spared, to be totally self-contained. Once Drew Arrow himself arrives, they're going to roll that big fucking boulder down and shut off the valley for good, trapping the good-hearted Pukes inside, and the evil Stem world with all its horrors out.
"They sent me back with some of their bounty." Prime gestured at the Potluck. "Told me to spread the word. The day is quickly approaching when Bannock will vanish off the face of the earth. Time for all good souls to repent, if you know what I'm sayin'..."
#
A hand wearing a Kevlar glove tested the handle of the door that topped the flight of stairs which led down into the depths of Madame Damnable's. Finding it unlocked, the hand pulled the door open slowly, letting the florescent lights from below shine off the mirrored glass lenses of a dozen silent gas masks. The hand found the CS Gas grenade it had previously shifted to its partner glove, and tugged the ring free from the safety lever.
Steve's motivations had always been the most pure and the most cynical. While no libertarian freak like Prime, Steve had always been troubled by the veracity with which the Stems so quickly dismissed the safety concerns of the Pukes. The Law of Unintended Consequences was what Steve always quoted. If a background in biology and a solid understanding of evolution had taught Steve anything, it was that you couldn't just change a major biological element like human nutrition without causing ripples through all the other elements of human physiology and psyche. No one, no matter how smart would be able to predict the long term social, economic and physical effect of the stem. Steve preached caution. He wasn't anti-stem per se, but he was certainly highly skeptical.
At least in the beginning.
The loathing and hatred of the Stems came later, as it did to them all. There was only so much punishment an animal could take before it lashed out in anger. Steve reached that point – that point and well beyond.
The safety lever of the grenade came free as the canister bounced down the hardwood stairs. It was quickly followed by two friends and an avalanche of combat boots hurrying behind them.
The first grenade popped like a firework, belching forth a thick stream of white gas. It almost went unnoticed in the packed room of partying Pukes, feasting happily on Prime's Potluck. The first Puke to breathe in the gas had no time to react as a rifle butt cracked down across the side of his head.
The Potluck had officially come to an end.
Chapter 10
The raids came to be known as The Night of Loaves and Fishes.
It was the largest police action to take place in United States history, wi
th almost every federal, state and local law enforcement agency acting in concert. Like a giant net cast over the towns and cities of the nation, the Government moved in a single night to detain, process and transport to encampments the whole of the country's Puke population.
There was no resistance, no forewarning that might have provided its intended targets an opportunity to flee. Out of the ether, the largest gathering of non-military personnel ever recorded appeared, executed their task, and vanished from whence it came. The level of precision required to keep such a state secret was the most stunning example of Stem unity that the world had ever seen from any society.
Before dawn had risen the next day, almost every Puke in America had disappeared.
The first Elder, Prime, Eydie, Beat or Kevin knew of the Night of Loaves and Fishes came with the explosion of the tear gas grenade at the foot of Madame Damnable's stairs. They had no time to question what was happening as a flood of SWAT barreled down the stairs behind their grenades. The police bellowed through their gas masks and pointed guns at the mass of people standing shoulder to shoulder in the compact basement bar. The crowd panicked as people struggled to get away from the tear gas. People screamed as policemen sent Pukes crashing to the floor, dropped by rifle butts.
If the bar had been less jammed, perhaps the police would have been able to control the situation. But Prime's Potluck had been such a success and the turnout in Madame Damnable's was so large... the crowd spasmed like an injured animal, flinching away from the wound. People lost their footing and the crowd rolled on top of itself. Crushing.
At the rear, behind the bar, was Prime. His martini glass of grain alcohol fell from his hand as he reached under his oversized Hawaiian shirt and came up with a large silver revolver. He was dancing on his feet, trying to decide exactly which way to jump, as the mass of those trapped on the barroom floor crushed up against the bar, screaming in pain. With his free hand he reached over the bar and yanked Eydie out of her seat, pulling her across the bar almost completely by her dreads.