1- The Dark Warrior

The Dark Warrior

Two years earlier...

3:35 p.m. Los Angeles, California

It was the last few days of the automobile. He often looked out across the nearby urban streets as the traffic crawled and he often wondered if The Great Depression had been like this. There were shuffling crowds of hungry and jobless people on the street. Beggars begged other beggars for the little excess they had. The remaining rich kept isolated and hoarded their goods and became as rare in public as charity. And yet now, as then, life went on for the majority of the world while a desperate minority scavenged for edible scraps in trash bins and formed lines waiting for the states food distribution trucks.

It was so frustrating; nothing seemed to work anymore. The currency collapse had changed the entire nature of the economy. The term “the full faith and credit of The United States “became a punch line to a joke about as funny as flatulence at a funeral.  It was like the book “Atlas Shrugged “in real time on an endless loop that would not quit; the one thing that did reliably function, that endless loop.

He remembered an old movie with Michael Douglas called “ Falling Down “ where there was an estranged father that had just decided one day that he had had enough and he wanted his life back. That was really all he wanted; his old life back. The life where you went to work every day, collected your pay and lived a nice little life in zero lot lined master planned communities where most of the neighbors never spoke and knew nothing of the other’s lives

Nowadays, it was all about bandwidth. And the government had a one hundred percent monopoly on bandwidth. You needed bandwidth to download income credits, to have any form of entertainment, to vote, to pay bills, everything. If you used up all your bandwidth in a given month you were out of luck. Just like always, certain select people with an “in “got more bandwidth than others and a new black market came into being where bandwidth was illegally bought and sold. It was meant to be the perfect system where corruption could not exist, so they were told. Except, like that old song said, when you meet the new boss, it’s the same as the old boss. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer, just like always.

Now, he sat in his car on the clogged freeway. The new clean air fuel was better as no waste colored haze hung in the sky anymore, but it still left you feeling short of breath if you sat bathed in it for too long. His vehicle had not moved for five minutes. Sometimes, when it was like this, thugs climbed up onto the freeway from the slums below and robbed people stuck in their car, or worse. You did not want to be a single woman alone in a car when that happened. Guns were only in the hands of security personal now, mostly. They no longer responded to calls for help.

The radio offered no respite. The chatter was all about the Chinese calling in their loans and demanding their physical gold back from the Federal Reserve. He just stared straight forward, trying to let his mind drift onto more pleasant subjects.

The United States government was in an unenviable position; when the Chinese demanded their gold back and called due trillions in loans it was unable to deliver. Nobody seemed to know where the gold was and the paper money was only recognized inside the borders of the United States. The Chinese had no interest in the phony paper. The heads of the centrals banks vanished and “I don’t know “became a lame answer when the Chinese parked an aircraft carrier a few miles off the port of Long Beach in California. The government offered up a one hundred years lease on the shale oil rights in Utah and Colorado to settle the debts and things got scary when China demanded California instead. That was where things stood now and as the negotiations went forward, everybody did their best to carry on as if nothing had happened. Overnight it seemed, a hundred businesses opened in town offering Mandarin language courses. It seemed inevitable that giving California up was the only way to settle the debt without open war at least that was what the news media people said. The borders between states were manned by National Guard troops and nobody was allowed in or out.

When it was revealed that the U.S. could not meet its obligation the dollar crashed overnight and it was only through executive orders that there was still trading and exchange of assets inside the borders. There was no Amero, no more Euro and the nation’s ability to force other countries to trade in dollars was over as there was no more money to pay the troops and many of them had simply abandoned their stations and went home to neighborhoods with few jobs and less hope.

He thought about a theme for his podcast tonight. Trying to connect the dots between the financial collapse of society and the governments intervention in every aspect of business seemed simple enough when discussed over beers with friends, but crafting it into a message that would sink in and resonate with people and at the same time stay under the radar of the NSA and the state censors security forces was challenging. The writing on the wall was not hard to read, and when he uploaded his podcasts it went through six proxy servers and as far as he could tell, his podcasts appeared to generate from a small town in Belgium. He felt safe enough, for now, but speech was no longer free or entirely prudent in public. The freeway was hopelessly clogged. He looked at the nearly empty fuel gauge and shut the engine off and got out of the vehicle as other were beginning to do. There seemed to be some commotion up ahead but he couldn’t see anything, just people out of their cars and gesturing. He turned the radio on but there wasn’t any local news, just national propaganda (so he thought of it) and stuff about the outbreak of the fresh water disease in Florida that was 99% fatal if contracted.

Two helicopters appeared over the freeway, and they looked odd to him. Military in appearance, not black but menacing in appearance somehow. They buzzed the roadway maybe two hundred feet off the ground and this seemed to be really off in the way they made him feel. They had strange markings he had never seen and seemed to be a blend of the logos of Samsmart, the world’s largest retail chain, and Chicom the world’s largest shipping company.

People pointed to them and he felt a sense of dread, as if internally he recognized that things were accelerating and some turning point had been reached. He removed the keys from his ignition and placed them in his pocket. He climbed the fence on the side of the freeway and began to make his way home. People looked at him in that new way they did with eyes as lifeless as fish. Except for the guy in the car behind him. He was the only one to say anything.

               

He turned on the webcam after scanning the news again and rereading his emails. The camera was trained on his head but the light was such that nobody could see more than a shadow of his face. Anonymous broadcasts were both illegal and dangerous. He had about two thousand subscribers but no way of knowing how many were watching at any given time. In his and his friends opinions the only way to change to situation with the world and government was to counter the official propaganda with unofficial, positive propaganda.

He pressed the record button, a red light came on over his desk and he began this evenings broadcast wearing a headset attached to an old copper kettle that he wore as a hat, an idea he got from some guitarist back in the 1990’s. It was drilled for ventilation and lined with tin foil as a spoof on the old crackpot conspiracy radio shows like “ Coast to Coast “. He stored the headset when not in use on the head of a male mannequin that looked down on him from behind his shoulder. Occasionally he would turn to the dummy when he was fired up and ask it questions that he would answer himself in one of three voices he used to simulate in studio guests. It was shtick, but being entertaining was what he used as a vehicle to make his points and get his information out. Information seemed important; more than ever. The last hope for truth about what was going on was in citizen journalists like him, and that was why he was a wanted man.

“Good evening ladies and gentleman. It’s Friday night, I am Delano Calhoun and welcome to the show. “

Some of his long time listeners knew that Delano Calhoun meant “Dark Warrior “.  In this post gun culture, information was a form of bloodless urban warfare. He had come up with the pseudonym based on old pulp fiction swashbucklers, and first attracted his audience with a poetic streak based on his admiration of the poet Lord Byron, an author 99.9% of the population could not reference for a whole  year’s allotment of bandwidths. The classics still sold, so the internet character Delano Calhoun was able to develop a viral following and he enjoyed the soapbox he had by channeling classic characters like Orson Wells.

“Tonight I am going to try and put this financial debacle into the form of a parable.

“Imagine a farmer. He plants his crops and makes his harvest. He goes to market and he makes a profit. But say this farmer was greedy, and he ignored the age old advice about crop rotation and over working the soil? That is how you create a dustbowl; you deplete the soil so nothing grows like it should.

“The very best thing we have done as a culture is moved the power of food production out of the governments’ hands. We know how to grow and produce our own food and medicine and where there were parks there are now community gardens and because defunding their state food chain was the only way to really decentralize power. When they closed the parks we planted trees that produce. We don’t need them. We care for our soil.

“But that’s not what the politicians have done. They are like a greedy farmer who is more interested in what they could get out of the crop they had on the first harvest, than how to propagate the crop for later use, and because of that narrow minded, greedy and short term way of thinking the crop died.

“The crop I am talking about is the United States economy.

“Twenty years ago we started hearing the term ‘Out-sourcing’.
As one example; they thought it was such a good idea to see prosperity in Mexico that they gave tax breaks for the companies that closed Chevy plants in Michigan and opened them in Mexico. The politicians talked of the jobs of the future, high tech yadda yadda, and infra-structure blah-blah-blah but what the result of this foolishness is that now we have aunts competing with nieces for waitress and Samsmart jobs and five hundred men lined up for one janitors job at a school, when it is available. There aren’t any good jobs! You don’t need me to tell you this but people need an explanation as to why.

“Only a politician could create the term jobless recovery. It’s a disgrace. Ten years of so called bailouts; what do you have to show for it?

“The bankers convinced the elected officials that if they didn't get some tax payer support they would stop the flow of funds that build the tractors that harvest the food. If they didn't get some tax payer support, children were going to starve. The bankers eventually began to take too much, and the politicians were too convinced that only money made the world go around so they just gave them more and more because the bankers said it had to happen now or else.  Children are starving anyways while they eat their meat and cheese and sip their expensive wine. The government, all the while, of course was backstabbing all parties involved trying to nationalize the financial institutions as well, and at the same time become the biggest shareholder in most big businesses. Now nothing works anymore! Of course!

“But, the key to creating a positive future is to continue the de-centralization of powers. We can only blame the government, the economy or the global corporations so much and then at some point we have to accept the responsibility for the world we live in.”

He looked at the clock. He had used up almost his entire five minutes. Going over that made the videos impossible to upload.

“That’s all I got folks. Thanks for listening and until next time.

“I am ‘That man of loneliness and mystery, scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh.’ “

That the world was backwards now, politically speaking, was old news. Even the state news referred to the old neo-conservatives as doves and the neo-communists as the new hawks and he had a passion to try and counter the information wars that were leading the people to expect a new world wide government and he wished there were more time to talk.

We switched off his webcam, began to upload the video onto the proxy server and went to see if the water was working today so he could shower. He thought in an abstract way about his car abandoned and parked on the freeway and the best he could about it at the moment was laugh. It wasn’t a laugh at his own stupidity for leaving his car: it was his memory of the man parked behind him on the stalled freeway. He had leaned his head out the window and asked dejectedly, “really? “and now it seemed funny somehow. He supposed it would be smart to go see if the car was still there.

He locked up the little cigar box of an apartment and began to walk back to where his car was parked, patting his pocket to make sure the key was there on the way out.

In every town, no matter how bad the economy became there still seemed to be two types of establishments at the very minimum; bars and churches.  It was somewhat irresistible to stop by the former for which he occasionally asked forgiveness in the later even though he was half Navajo and had lived on a churchless reservation for his first twelve years, and after walking the few streets to the strip he entered Dave’s, the first bar he came to. The streets felt like canyons with almost all buildings being five stories tall. There were few cars and people were standing about, the air hot and still. The sky was devoid of planes and only occasionally they spotted drones so there was mostly the murmur of feet and voices

The bar was long and pockets of shadowed tables were empty along the walls. Eight men roughly in their early forties, like him, were scattered around the oval bar. He liked Dave’s. Dave was his oldest friend in the block and the only one that knew about Delano Calhoun. He sat at the farthest end of the bar and plugged his key into the receptacle on the bar.

Dave called him Delano only when he was being serious. When he was in a good mood, like he apparently was today he greeted him with his first and last name.

“Ricardo Sanchez, welcome to Dave’s. Rot gut, only fifteen BC’s “He was referring to bandwidth credits, the only official currency. The little led read out on the back of his key read 2524.

That was plenty of credits for a drink or two.

“Dave, “he said, glancing around at the other faces at the bar, feeling as if they were trying to listen. “ We gotta talk. “