Monique being taken away, smiling at grief. marieclaire.com
We arrived back at the house and found Mary inside, alone. She was elated to see us, bursting with joy as she ran to Scout and clasped her. We proceeded to the living room to hear the news. She informed us that she was all better and chip free. She turned to Rebecca and told her that her parents were also safe at home and eagerly awaiting her return. But then she looked down sadly and said:
“We fear Monique is lost. She was separated from me right after we were reprogrammed and taken by bus somewhere. They let me go back to my shop, where Naomi came the next day and brought me here. We talked to Claire on the computer, but she said that she’d already destroyed all records of people’s whereabouts and unless Monique contacted us, there was little hope of finding her in time for an easy recovery. Her cell phone was taken from her and people were being shuffled around everywhere on different assignments. She never called back. I think she’s gone.”
I took Rollo upstairs and turned on the computer to contact Claire. Once again her face lit up the screen, and she joyfully welcomed us home. Rollo talked first, and she made him promise to speak with her every day.
Then she told me we were slowly winning the war, that the government was in shambles and fragmented, thanks to her ability to scramble and change all communications. The population not under the influence of the new chip, nearly half the people, after being fully informed about the evils of it and seeing for themselves the damage it wreaked upon their friends, had risen up in revolt, taking control of the television stations, public utilities and civic buildings which had been staffed by the new automatons. The politicians who were a party to this indoctrination slunk from their posts into hiding and public shame. The people who replaced them had Claire and her associate computer ghosts lending them every sort of aid. So their endeavors succeeded, while those of the enemy were tangled up in endless loops of miscommunication and misdirection. Money was transferred and computer systems restored only to the right people. Managers were found to reestablish normality, along with clean business leaders and ranking people in the houses of government. They were able to sideline and silence the military chiefs who now had an army of almost useless, smiling robots.
The citizenry that had been dosed were equally pitiable, easily confused by contradictory orders and clueless as to who to listen to. They were programmed to obey but never told for what purpose, so they were like boot camp recruits who snap to attention at the click of two heels, but any two heels, clueless grunts. Perhaps over time, these chips could have shaped them into a fighting force, with training. But this droid army was nipped in the bud. Even the police and the scanners, and all the young recruiting groups who had eaten the chip, all of them were far too green, made heady, almost dizzy to serve well, but through lack of experience, totally incompetent.
The Claire controlled media went wild over this bloodless revolution, this victory of a free-thinking people over mind control. From North America it spread around the world like a tidal wave. There were riots everywhere, even a backlash against any chips at all. Millions wanted all of a sudden to be wafer free, and Zaptech stepped up to the plate. All those centers that had been set up to prep people for the new wafer were busy once more, this time stopping the damage. But they couldn’t reverse the damage already done. Those who had been under the influence for more than a month were treated like public wards. Hospitals reopened everywhere, where they were taken and given the care they needed as invalids. This restored the medical profession and employed millions. And it made millions happy, both on the receiving and the giving end.
It’s a sizable part of our giving nature and heart, accrued over the last hundred thousand years, that makes us want to aid and comfort others in a more unfortunate state than ourselves. This nurse-like empathy was silently lost in the first wave of chip induction when everybody received perfect health. But it came back with a vengeance, overnight, when there were sick people again.
So the poor citizens who’d been dosed were now lovingly guided to hospitals and helped by countless therapists to slowly recover their identity. Our economies were quickly booming with this new wave of employment and the world was at peace. It was like the aftermath of a world war, where countless lives are injured or lost, but the rest of the people spend all their energies rebuilding all that was damaged. Everyone is busy and happy.
This is the way it was in California in the late fall of that year, 2029. Scout and Rebecca were back to school, as were all children. Scout and Mary were now living with me again. Mary had no heart in reopening her pastry shop now that Monique was gone.
But Monique was finally found, in a small town in the Napa Valley, in December. Claire announced it to all of us from her screen one evening. So Monique was returned and spent three weeks in a convalescent ward in Oakland, where Mary tended to her every day, along with Scout and Rebecca on their time off school. I visited her, she was like a four-year-old child, like many of the victims, in identity and comprehension, but able to regain some aspects of herself over time with love and teaching. Within a month she was back in our house and slowly improving. She took to Rollo. They were almost kindred spirits, her mental age the same as his, and they would romp through the rooms and arrange his toys and roll and cuddle in his bed and read stories together, under the covers with a flashlight. Most of the time he was reading to her.
What a delightful thing it must be to be able to re-live one’s youth, to enjoy a double-dip of the best era of one’s life, the hours of pure innocence and joy. You’re unaffected by the complexities of adulthood and relationships, the happy years when bonds are limited to two, mother and father, except for the few cloudy moments when a sibling or a classmate bursts in. Meals are brought to you and all of life’s necessities provided. Sleep and waking are equally delightful. You hug your pillow at bedtime and your mama upon waking up with equal warmth. Existence is carefree at that point. It’s nirvana.
Life returned to a peaceful complacency in Roland house, all except for the troubling condition of Monique. We talked each day with Claire and listened to her reports of progress, of restoring the world to stability, to a humane order. At nights, when the children and Monique were asleep, Mary and I would watch the news with pleasure, as we saw the work of our computer ghosts substantiated. Borders were coming down. People were working together to patch the lives of the dehumanized souls and tend to their recuperation.
Simple tasks were found for those who were ‘diminished’, farming chores, factory work, cooking and janitorial duties. Occupation made them happy. Many were soon out of the convalescent wards and contributing to the greater good of society. After shutting down the labs that could produce chips, one of Claire’s, and her associates goals was to come to terms with technology. That meant slowing it down to a saner pace. And after the disastrous world trauma which everyone had just experienced, a more cautious approach to science and innovation was the tune of the day. In fact, for many people, it was a going backwards.
It was like in the late sixties with the Hippy movement again. With the government fractured, broken like a sheet of glass into a thousand pieces, communities moved toward a simpler, nature-based relationship with life, self-supporting, agrarian sustainability. Cities emptied into the countryside. Large agricultural complexes changed back into the thousands of smaller plots and farms they use to be two hundred years ago, hand tilled and hand seeded, and the diverse crops and animals they nurtured fed each family that watered them. Others retreated even further into the woods, to log cabins. But with solar panels and water pumps and computers all in play, they built a beautiful symbiosis of lifestyles, connected and yet detached, and self-sufficient.
Under Claire’s regency, all science, not purely evil and destructive to humans, was preserved. Our world wide web, our scientific and space research were fostered and improved. On the medical front no research was needed because one type of chip was kept in production, one that cured you in a day and then deleted itself.
But tight muzzles were put on two vistas, mind research and AI. Bigger supercomputers were no longer a go. Everything was decentralized, localized and scaled down to handle that local. All other chip production was not only outlawed, but the possibility of it was erased from data banks. The plants that produced the nanochips shut down, all except for one, closely monitored, that supplied Mr. Tanaki’s facility, where the unhackable wafers were still manufactured at a rate of some fifty thousand a month under Jaime’s supervision, and distributed around the globe to Claire’s chosen managers, for the benefit of mankind.
