Designated Targets

The express trolley carrying Dan Black out to the Zone took its own sweet time covering the distance to the city’s newest center of power. “Travel through eight decades in just one hour,” or so it said in all the brochures. And people did, by the thousands. Tourists and rubberneckers passed through, wanting to catch a glimpse of the future—even though at the moment it was mostly just half-dug foundations and unfinished factories. Volunteers and recruits poured into the barracks of the Auxilliary Forces, which were growing like topsy around the core of the original Multinational Force.

Representatives from the “old” armed forces came to learn what they could as fast as possible, and not always with good grace. Engineers and scientists traveled there from all over the free world. Students bussed in from across the country. Factory workers and their families streamed in to fill the plants and production facilities, which were starting to sprawl across the Valley floor, chewing up thousands of acres of orange groves and ranchland. They filled the constellation of fast-growing, prefab suburbs known collectively as Andersonville so quickly that they threatened to outpace the contractors who were building the vast tracts of cheap housing. Indeed, most were still living in tents, like itinerant workers during the Depression.

Still, they came whether or not there was a bed or a job waiting for them. Riding the overcrowded trolley back to the Zone with about a hundred new arrivals, Commander Black wondered how Kolhammer could possibly hope to manage the explosive growth of his strange new world.

It reminded him a little of the California he’d known in the thirties, when waves of nomads from the dust bowl states had fetched up on the western shore of the continent. Glancing up from his flexipad, he could see that about half the passengers fit his recollection of those days. Families clung tightly together around rotting cardboard suitcases held together with twine. They swayed back and forth as the tracks carried them eastward, forcing them to retrace some of the last steps they had taken on their long trek to the coast.

To Black, they didn’t look any less desperate than the thousands of Okies and chancers who’d poured into the state during the Depression, but for one small difference: hope burned a little brighter in their eyes than it had in his own when he’d lit out from Grantville. Even now, months after the world had adjusted to the fact of the Transition, the newswires still hummed with developments taking place in California, be they dry stories in the business pages about new manufacturing techniques, or yellow press hysteria about the “perversions” and “moral sickness” that were widely believed to be rampant within the confines of the San Fernando Valley. Some days it seemed to Black as if half the country wanted to drive the time travelers back into the sea from which they’d appeared, while the other half would sell everything they owned just to purchase a ticket west, and into the future.

Eddie Mohr and that Mexican kid Diaz were a good example of the latter. Black had no idea about why the chief petty officer had opted to transfer from the old navy to the AF, but he wasn’t alone. The applications list ran to tens of thousands of men and women, all wanting to get out of their original units and into new Auxilliary Force outfits that, for the most part, existed only on paper—or data stick, he corrected himself. Sometimes, Dan knew, they were simply drawn by the lure of flying rocket planes—which hadn’t yet been built—or sailing in missile boats—ditto.

Diaz, on the other hand, was like any number of hopefuls who had been seduced by a single promise. When they set foot on that relatively small patch of turf, which had been established by a narrow vote of Congress as the Special Administrative Zone (California), their skin color, gender, religion and—most controversially—what they did in their own bedrooms, ceased to be a factor in determining the path their lives would take. Once inside the Zone, they became subject to the laws of the United States of America, and the provisions of her Uniform Code of Military Justice, exactly as they existed on the morning of January 15, 2021, the day of the Transition.

It meant, for instance, that nobody could call Diaz a wetback or a greaser, at least not without incurring significant legal penalties. It also meant, however, that they couldn’t drive without a seat belt, smoke in public spaces, or “cross a public roadway while immersed in a virtual reality.” Not that much of that sort of thing went on just yet, anyway.

Black couldn’t help but smile a little smugly at the warm self-regard the uptimers had for themselves and their many personal liberties. To him, they looked like people who’d been freed from heavy iron shackles—only to bind themselves just as tightly in a million threads of silk.