January 31, 2010
Drone Wars: A Jury of Unborn Children
As per usual his wife woke up before he did. He could smell the percolating coffee when he stepped out of the shower. Handsomely attired in one of his nicest pinstriped suites he sat down at the kitchen table to the glass of orange juice and bowl of cereal she had waiting for him.
Together they watched the morning show, Good Day United States of Money, like they always did during breakfast, silently noting the stories of suicide bombings, drone attacks, and the government response -- always firm but fair. Despite the dire news accounts of skyrocketing crime, a country in near-total disarray after economic collapse, and ever more brazen attacks by Rebel dissidents, they lived a nearly picture perfect middle-class suburban life.
On the way out the door his wife told him how handsome she thought he looked in his new double-breasted suit and tastefully conservative necktie. In a ritual they had repeated a million times before she kissed him at the door and, as he strapped himself into his sporty Blue Oval electric Regina, she waved one last time and wished him a good day at the office.
Traffic was worse than usual. He tried not to think of it as a bad omen for the day ahead, but he couldn't help himself. By nature he was a fatalist. He was constantly on the alert for little signs -- "tells" they called them in poker. A string of green lights, for instance, meant his luck was good. By the same token, any hold-up, or other annoyance, was seen as a sure harbinger of bad things to come. A flipped over vehicle that blocked the right lane of the freeway, and caused traffic to slow to a trickle just before his exit sinched it. "Today," he decided dryly, "is going to be a rough day."
And, sure enough, as he pulled into work, there was another man standing on his corner.
"What's the big idea?" he demanded of the other fellow and put down his briefcase in a huff. "I've been working this side of the street for years." He was practically livid, but his tone softened somewhat when he realized the interloper was just a kid. After closer inspection he saw the young man's suit was poorly fitted and lacked any distinction. He had survived hostile takeover attempts before, attempts by competing pharmaceutical companies to force an unwanted merger or leveraged buy-out, but this wasn't anything like that. The boy stood stock-still, clearly frightened. After further assessment he asked the young man if he was lost. "You got to move along, son," he explained it to the kid, "this here corner is mine. Go on," he waved, "scoot."
After drugs were legalized legitimate businessmen took the place of dealers. It was inevitable it would happen. Faced with the certitude of bankruptcy states were desperate for any taxable income they could lay claim to. He was among the first legitimate drug salesmen, and from the start there was a lot of pressure to bring a certain amount of respectability to the trade.
His peers all had their specialty. His was methamphetamines. Directly across the street the man in the snappy bow-tie sold weed. On the two other adjacent corners stood an opiate salesman and a rather twitchy character he found somewhat objectionable.
There was something about the fellow's attire he disliked. Sure enough the man wore a well-tailored suit like the rest of them. By any reasonable assessment the other salesman's appearance was utterly professional and beyond reproach. Nevertheless, he found the man's color choices garish and untoward. "What the hell," he resignedly thought to himself, "do I know about how to run a psychedelics business," and steadied himself for his own growing line of customers.
There was no way to make one's way down any of the major streets in downtown Kansas City without fighting off the drug merchants. They were on every corner of every street. Whichever way one turned any number of these otherwise respectable well-heeled citizens closed in fast with a pitch for their "cure-whatever-ails-you" product. The same was true for every metropolitan area in the country. Gray-suited salespersons in thin-brimmed fedoras and briefcases accosted every sidewalk passerby in every major city touting the virtues of their various pharmaceutical wares.
And he was definitely no exception. "Now there's a sad case," he could spot a perspective customer a mile away. With a forced smile he filled the last crystal-meth prescription before his lunch-break.
Among the pharmaceutical sales-people there was a distinct pecking order. For whatever reason the opiate and methamphetamine merchant were shunned by the rest of the sales-force. The others made it abundantly clear they didn't want to have anything to do with them. No surprise then that they spent much of their lunch-hours badmouthing their fellow businesspersons. After a while, however, their conversation inevitably turned to more serious topics like politics.
"There must be something more important in life," he sighed, "than selling drugs to a bunch of addicts. Mustn't there?"
"A forty-four in brainpan," the heroin salesman flatly said over drinks at the bar. They were talking about the doctor at the local abortion clinic. "That's my prescription for the bastard, anyway."
Both looked up at the 3DTV above the bar. It was a pornographic re-enactment of the news. A renowned professor of archeology was getting head in his trailer at an unspecified dig-site. "Work the shaft, squeeze the balls," he kept yelling. Animal groans followed as the leading academic built to his climax. His favorite student closed her eyes and tilted her face up to receive the load. In the heat of passion he had boasted a facial she would never forget, but at the moment of truth all she felt was a single hot spatter on her skin. Unimpressed she opened one eye to see if he was really done.
As she flicked the single pearly droplet off her chin with her pinky the intercom crackled to life. "We broke through to the other side of the barrier rock," the foreman of the drill-crew yelled. "Come quick. It's unbelievable. You've got to see this."
Three miles down, at the base of the pit, the foreman held out a ratty Teddy Bear for the archeology professor to inspect. "We found it just under the black rock-line Doc, what do you make of it?"
"What else did you find?" the professor asked.
"A mess of plastic garbage and junk just like you might find in your average landfill on the planet's surface."
"Impossible," the professor exclaimed in total disbelief. "We are talking about hundreds of millions of years ago: Before Lucy-kind man, before even dinosaurs." He was clearly puzzled. No one had ever penetrated the black shale layer before him. For years he had argued for the great discovery that lay below the layer of impenetrable rock, and now all he had to show for it was a tattered Teddy Bear and a bunch of modern-day trash. Unless... The more he thought about it the more it made sense.
News anchor Michael Michaels ripped off his fake professorial beard and unceremoniously cut off the archeology student and drill-crew orgy that followed their breakthrough discovery with a news bulletin. "New evidence has surfaced," the anchorman bellowed into the microphone, "that a civilization much like our own existed millions of years ago. In fact, it was almost exactly like our own. Scientists believe it achieved a parallel level of development to our civilization then inexplicably and mysteriously caused its own extinction. Are we doomed to relive its fate? Is, as a prominent physicist has theorized based on this new and astounding evidence, our civilization caught in some kind of time warp where we are destined to relive our own demise over and over again? Answers to these and many other questions at six..."
The methamphetamine salesman knew full well the heroin salesman was right. There was more to life than pushing drugs. And he knew exactly what he had to do...
Michael Michaels sat up straight in his anchor's chair as if to give the next story more credence. "In version XX of Drone Wars," he reported, "The Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, ruled that the jury-pool should in some cases be expanded to include all interested parties." He shuffled some papers on the narrow shelf of the news set countertop. "...And," he picked right up again, "in the first test case, the Kansas City methamphetamine salesman accused of the cold-blooded murder of a local abortion clinic doctor was, after only thirty minutes of deliberation, easily acquitted of the crime by a jury of unborn children."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
