Chapter 27

Clarence Bartel Junior pressed the button that would take him up to his father’s penthouse office and the metallic lift doors slid closed noiselessly in front of him. His reflection, to his satisfaction, portrayed a confident young man. Dressed in a fully zipped stylish gray bomber jacket, black jeans, and expensive looking white athletic shoes, Clarence Junior looked like a sports celebrity on his way to sign an expensive contract. At 6 feet and 7 inches tall, he towered above anyone he stood next to, and his coarse black hair flowed gracefully, braided, onto his shoulders. His smooth face was stern, but smile lines indicated a propensity to break the solemn mask.

As the elevator gained speed, he felt the confidence waning, replaced instead by a growing anxiety that was now settling into an unignorable pit right below his chest. His father, Clarence Senior, had ordered him to attend the protest at the detention center 2 days ago to instigate things if it looked like events might fizzle out, but the circulation of the news bulletin about the prisoners, and the subsequent swelling of the protest, came as a surprise to everyone. Everyone except for Clarence Junior, that was.

He’d decided to leak the reports after his father was too cowardly to do it himself. They’d screamed at each other about it, and as always, Clarence Senior got his way, in the moment, at least. This was too important. The momentum this could create was too palpable to ignore. The final words he’d spoken to his father before embarking for Cirrus Prime, Promises, no trouble, father, sat heavily on his shoulders now. Clarence Junior was not ashamed of what he’d done, not embarrassed, but sad that he was about to be in conflict with his father. Isn’t this what fathers and sons do, though? He tried to joke with himself, but the nerves building around his impending meeting with Clarence Senior made the concept of humor seem disgusting and immature. Knock it off, dude, get your mind right.

This was, of course, a stereotypical power struggle between father and son; a tale older than time and an honored trope of the public-stream films he’d watched at the view-bar on 48 with his father while growing up. Most sons, though, didn’t have the fate of the planet resting on the outcome of that power struggle.

His father seemed to appreciate the importance of this point in history, but was unsure of how to seize the moment. All Clarence Senior wanted to do was talk about the importance of action, but in Clarence Junior’s mind, the timeline and the cause and effect was clear. The coalition had saved humanity by elevating the surviving masses to the skies in their mysterious floating cities, but what had they done in the last century to actually improve things for humanity? The planet was still boiling; the surface was unlivable. The income inequality that plagued the old world had momentarily eased with the climate crisis and the sudden imposition of new social and economic systems in the world’s new order of floating cities, but now an unofficial system of classes had emerged and the people realized, with growing frustration, that it was simply a new mask for the same old system.

Clarence Junior had been the one to realize that their efforts at a true class awareness would only manifest if the laboring classes were exposed to the harshest injustices of the Coalition. So, he had leaked the details of the murdered prison crew and watched, with glee, as their anticipated protest numbers grew to three times their predicted volume. The people needed to see it all at once - a single protest about poor labor conditions was good, but they’d been doing this for years now with no progress. The people needed a true one-two punch to the gut: something temporal and something abstract. The reaction was exactly what he’d wanted - a growing consciousness among the people that the Jurisdiction had reacted to in the worst way possible.

The lift played a soothing melodic chorale as it neared the penthouse where Clarence Senior kept his office. Stand your ground, be true, Junior told himself as the doors trickled open and he stepped out into the lobby of his father’s office. The white marble floors and antique pottery placed strategically in each window, of which there were many, always made Junior feel like he was going to a museum instead of to see his father. He strode forward and placed his hands in front of him, resting them on his father’s secretary, Gloria’s, desk. He interlocked his fingers as he’d seen his father do many times when talking to support staff.

“Afternoon, Glo. I think Senior’s waiting for me,” he said in greeting. Gloria raised a silent index finger to him and listened to something on her headset before responding. Junior noticed that his father’s door was closed - that usually meant a call or meeting was in progress; or he was brooding. Junior slumped, imperceptible to most, but he felt his shoulders sag every so slightly with the recognition that Clarence Senior must already have entered his angry father phase after learning about Junior’s initiative with the leak. Stand your ground, man! He reminded himself and straightened himself to regain the micrometer he’d lost in stature.

“Yeah, he is, CJ, but he’s on a call right now. Give him a few minutes, I’ll let you know when he’s ready. Go look at the new Cheroctaw Piece - he had it imported last week, over there in the corner.” She gestured absently to the corner of the room with the new indigenous vase as she returned her attention to her headset and desk terminal, and Junior was certain that she didn’t even know, or care, if he went to look at his father’s latest piece of art. Those pieces always bugged Junior, anyway. Something felt wrong about displaying Native American art like that, especially given his father’s reputation as a freedom fighter. The whole thing just felt a little hypocritical.

Junior walked over to the bar cart by Gloria’s desk and fixed himself a drink; a Gin and Tonic. An old school drink, but it’s what his father always had around this time of day, so he’d made himself enjoy both the drink and the tradition. One of the small concessions he could make for his father so that their differences, which Junior felt made them significantly different men, were more reconcilable. Or at least that’s how Junior saw it. Drink in hand, he glanced across the room towards the new vase; it looked the exact same as the other 15 vases that lined the edges of the room: black, shiny, and adorned with pictures of animals that no-one had actually farmed, hunted, or even seen in over a century. Fuck it, Junior thought, and turned and walked into his father’s office. He heard Gloria voice her protest as he opened the door, but her objections were distant noise now as his heart began to beat faster and the adrenaline of a conversation with his father inoculated his blood.

Hearing the door open, Clarence Senior turned rapidly, in one quick motion, in his chair to identify who had violated his chamber of solitude. When he noticed that it was his son, he wrinkled his face into a disapproving expression and gestured with his hand for Junior to wait outside. Junior didn’t notice, though, he’d walked straight into the office and placed himself on one of the couches on the opposite side of the room, nursing his drink and looking down on glittering streaks of the transports in the skylanes below. Never quite taking his attention from his meeting, Senior dropped his hand slowly and sighed as he recognized that his son would, once again, be ignoring one his requests. Junior’s father’s office smelled like tobacco smoke and everything seemed covered in a slimy sheen of the exhaust his father spent puffing most of every 16 hour workday he conducted.

Junior stretched his legs out onto the antique ottoman in front of him and waited for his father to finish his meeting. Clarence Senior gave one last look of disappointment and sighed heavily in his chair before returning his full attention to his call. Junior could make out the end of what someone was saying loudly into his father’s terminal. “…underestimated the consequences of a leak like that, yeah?”

“Yes, and I completely understand. Trust me, this was not authorized, but we will deal with the fallout, can you trust me to do that, please?” Clarence Senior said back into the terminal, a slight edge in his voice. His voice lacked the confidence that Junior was used to hearing from his father. Instead, it was the voice of someone doing damage control. Junior didn’t know for sure, but he expected that the person on the terminal was blaming the leaked report on Clarence Senior. No doubt several factions had lost good people in the skirmishes that popped up across Cirrus, but that was the price of doing business - especially in the Revolutionary Industry.

Junior had missed the response, but tuned back in just in time to hear the conclusion. “…will have to do. Let me know your plans so we can help. We ain’t angry, Clarence, but damn, some warning would have been nice. Could have made this a right bit more fancy, yeah?”

“I don’t disagree, but things are what they are now. I’ll be in touch, Green,” Clarence Senior said, tapping a button on his desk to end the call. He turned his attention to his son now, and scoffed at the young man’s nonchalance - sipping Gin and Juice, looking out the window like a kid who’d done his homework and was waiting for daddy to finish up at work to take him home. Junior, hearing his father’s exhale of disappointment turned, removed his feet from the ottoman, and placed his drink quietly on to the glass table next to the couch.

Junior opened his mouth to speak first. “Dad, what you ne-”, but Clarence Senior cut him off.

“No, what I need to understand is how you’re sitting there, smug as a rug, watching the afternoon pass by without a care in the world.” Clarence Senior rose from his desk and crossed around it and leaned against the corner to continue addressing his son, crossing his arms as he settled against the desk. “Do you understand the gravity of the events that you have set in motion, Clarence?”

Clarence stiffened and he felt his face growing hot. This was what his father did in these moments - come out swinging and goading Junior into a screaming match so that anything Junior had to say, as legitimate as it might be, seemed unreasonable because he was shouting. Junior took a breath and centered himself, reminding his anxiety and his anger that he was the righteous one, this time. His father was blinded by his time in the trenches and needed a reminder of how to truly be revolutionary.

“Dad, what did you think those protests were going to accomplish? We’ve been doing that shit for years now. All the coalition does is fix things for a few months, and then BAM,” Junior shouted the last word and bent down to strike the ottoman hard enough to emit a whack. Clarence Senior flinched as the sudden noise and Junior smiled, shook his head, and looked down at the hand print he’d left in the fabric of the ottoman as he continued speaking. “Then, a few months after that, hundreds of more people die in a bullshit preventable catastrophe.” His opening volley was strong, but his father’s stubbornness would certainly not be turned with a single exchange. He prepared for Clarence Senior’s rebuttal.

“We’ve had this discussion, Junior,” Clarence Senior started. “You know that we’re building a new world brick by brick. It will take centuries. Not decades. Not years. Centuries, Junior. We’re talking about generations of successive -” Junior was finished listening, this was the same line he always heard. It was his turn to interrupt his father now.

“That’s the fuckin’ problem, man,” Junior threw his hands up in frustration and turned to walk over to the window and look out on the city. He continued speaking as he faced the window. “I got friends, dad, that are locked away, never know when I’m gonna see them again. And you wanna lecture me about centuries of progressive change? Nah, we have a moment here.” Junior gestured down to the city and then turned to his father with an arm still outstretched toward the cityscape outside the window. “What I did, I got way more folks aware of what’s happening out there. WAY more people dig what we’re doing now because I made our event that much bigger. Why can’t you see that?” Junior dropped his hand from the window and then mimicked his father, leaning back into the window with his arms crossed.

Junior had been loud, foul, and insensitive in his tone. He watched his father’s calm face, waiting for the rage to erupt and the real shouting to begin. Instead, his father uncrossed his arms, dropping them to folded hands at his lap, and looked up at the ceiling, releasing a long hissing exhale that he blew up from his bottom lip, like he was trying to correct a stray hair with his breath. Junior found this funny because his father was bald, but chose to silence this nervous grasp at levity, just as he had in the elevator. This is no time for jokes, laugh at the old man later. Clarence Senior slowly turned and returned to his desk chair and tapped a few buttons on his desk terminal.

“Come, Junior, sit with me for a minute and let me show you something. I realize now that I was remiss to keep some things from you. Things that we’ve known but have kept incredibly close because to share our knowledge would bring our destruction.” Junior raised an eyebrow at his father, taken aback by this new tactic in their discourse. Anger, screaming, once even an attempted physical altercation, Junior could all handle. But what was this groveling, apologetic, wise old sage move?

“What? Dad, no, show me a video to make your point later. I need you to understand why I did what I did. Please, let’s hash this out,” Junior said. As he examined his father’s face, he saw no malice, no games, no combat-through-discourse; his father was scared and needed him to now know what was worth being terrified of. Junior grabbed his glass from the end table and joined his father at the desk terminal. His father spoke as he approached the desk.

“Nothing to hash out, son. What you did, sending that report to everyone, which I admit was reckless, and I hope you will soon understand why, is no longer the concern. There is a precedent that the coalition likes to follow in situations like this, and our informants are concerned that drastic measures may soon be taken on Cirrus Prime in order to suppress the disorder that we catalyzed, but that you amplified.”

Clarence Senior opened a desk drawer and, with an old-world key that he produced from a pocket in his blazer, unlocked a hidden compartment in the back of the drawer. From the compartment his father now pulled a small plastic chip, it almost looked like a plastic thumb; it even had a white nail on the tip.

“This,” Clarence Senior said as he held the chip up for his son to see, “is what the old world called a flash drive. It has a determinate amount of memory, but can be recycled as many times as you need. It’s how they used to physically traffic data from one place to another without uploading to a cloud server.” As he explained, Clarence Senior grabbed what Junior had come to think of as the drive’s thumb-nail and pushed up, exposing a pluggable port at the end of the drive. “This bit here,” he said, gesturing to the now exposed metal plug-in, “will fit with a special adaptor in my terminal and I can access some files that I’ve chosen to keep off of the cloud servers.”

The drive had, apparently, done what his father needed it to, so Junior guessed it was impressive enough, but he found the device strange and inefficient. Why didn’t the old-worlders just encrypt their data if they didn’t want anyone to access it, he wondered, but that was a question for another time. Instead, he asked “What’s on the drive?”

“I honestly don’t think you’re ready for this,” his father said, pausing briefly and staring at the drive in deep contemplation for a few seconds. Finally, he continued, “it’s something that I hoped to never have to show you, but it appears that we are nearing a point that we should be aware of all that the coalition might do to preserve its influence. Son, these images are not pleasant. You need to see them, I just wanted to warn you.”

Clarence Senior finished uploading the drive into his terminal and pressed play on the first video file he wanted to share. Junior leaned forward as he tried to make sense of the images that were in front of him. As the video reached its climax, he gasped, his drink sat long forgotten on the desk next to the two men. Senior watched on with the hardened, tight lipped face of a man who is never surprised, but always disappointed in the depravities of the human race. The rest of the video, Junior watched in a catatonic kind of shocked horror. The video finished and Junior found his brain incapable of accepting that what he’d seen was real.

“Dad, what the fuck is this?”

Senior replaced the first video with another that he intended to show, but paused before pressing play. He turned his head, stopping it halfway between Junior and the terminal, and looked at Junior from the corner of his eyes .

“This is what they do when we fuck up, son.”

This second video was a different perspective of the same cataclysm documented in the previous video. Junior brought his hands to the sides of his face, like that Scream painting his father had been obsessed with a few years back. Junior refused to believe what he’d just watched, but he couldn’t stop replaying the images in his mind. He still wasn’t sure he believed that it was real; computers could do amazing things now and surely this was just a very sophisticated simulation. No, man, those were real people you saw in those streets.

The satellite centered perspective hadn’t been clear at first, but as the image panned out to demonstrate the full scale of what it was recording, his heart broke. There’d been no sound in the video, but he could hear the chaos that those poor people had endured in their last moments. The video began with an incredibly close perspective of the top skyline of a city, but Junior immediately felt like something was wrong; it looked like a mass of transports were fleeing the city from the top levels of every building in sight. As the recording panned out, Junior discovered that his intuition about trouble in this city was correct. He’d gripped the sides of the desk and leaned forward to make out the finer details in the image. Smoke was billowing from the middle of most of the towers, and in the couple of sweeping pans of the promenades between levels, there were people rioting. A dingy looking transport tried to flee a lower level, but was swallowed by smoke that was billowing up from below screen. The recording zoomed out to show the complete scale of the city, and Junior suddenly felt much smaller and less secure about his place in the world.

He was watching a city die.