Riley

The gentle thaw came, and I with it.

Geese with waxy wings flew purposefully home, despite my chill.

Tired,

back hurting,

 I hunched miserably on a petite boulder rising up like a throne

Imagining you curled--

Sleepy--

 like a cat beneath my feet.

It’s not that I wish you had lived longer,

so that old age could wrap around your delicate ankles

And drag you down slowly

But I begrudge this new awakening—insisting that these birds,

This sky,

The necessary din of rain onto wet, steaming horsehair

Should have been Yours.

Nothing can prepare for the bloom of fear

where there should be flowers.

No one can describe loss more eloquently than your cowslip ears—

forelock fluttering peacefully

heart overwhelmed with the thrill of a dewy canter.

Still, I’ve tripped along with a fondness for things not mine:

Clover,

Sunshine,

Youth

Soaked through with the guilt that today, I brought you nothing

Tomorrow I won’t come

And that day, you were Alone.

At least,

(I try)

At least my heart still beats, though now more rapidly.

Goosebumps rise like molehills on my knees.

Surely this pile of dirt and rocks isn’t you

Surely it isn’t your laughing eyes,

your quivering flanks. 

Chapter Two

            Marlisa only had to wait a very short time before finding out not only whether she would have a child, but the sex and genetics of said child as well. After the insemination, she had been booked into the hospital for three days. Arthur did not come to see her during those days, but he had carefully monitored her whereabouts and doctors’ notes by accessing her chip remotely. He had commandeered a civilian liner and set off to a remote colony under construction and was not expected to return too soon. Knowing how busy he would be with the surveying and testing of the colony’s operating systems, she didn’t try to contact him at all until the word came, on day three, that she had successfully conceived.

            “Arthur speaking.” His voice on the TeleComm was small-sounding, as if he was speaking through a pillow. “Voice only.”

            “Arthur…where are you? You should be here for this.” She had the look and air about her of a bright and happy woman. Her face was warm and eager, betraying none of the aloofness that she was known for. He hadn’t seen her radiate like this since her last birthday when he’d bought her a dome on Earth, complete with a stable of Arabian horses. “Arthur…I can barely hear you.”

            “I’m on 327-AG. ” His voice was crackly as it came through. The colony was his pet project, the latest in a line of Coalition stake-outs along the border of the neutral zone, where real estate was cheap. “I’m sorry for the connection. We’re scrambling the signal. What does your doctor say?”

            She ignored his direct question, relishing the gift she finally had to give to him.  Tilting her face away from him, she shrugged minutely.

            “Are the boys there? “

            The boys were Arthur’s old friends from his days of piloting aerojets for his own father’s army. There were three of them left out of the original seven; the others were dead or, being prisoners of war, would soon be.  Once in a while Arthur got the ones that were left together when he went to work coercing engineers to build for him, mostly for the skills they could offer him when it came to persuading military men. There was also the unspoken fact of trust between them. They had flown, fought, and lived together for five intense years before discharging from the army to pursue their eventual places in Coalition society. Arthur had risen to be the boss of all of them, but he deeply appreciated that they didn’t seem to value that very much. Even the granite man needed companions he could trust.

            “Just Markie,” he rushed. “Tell me what’s happening, Marlisa. What have they told you?” He regarded her face on his own screen, glad she couldn’t see the earnest hope in his eyes. She looked as regally impassive as ever.

            “Oh Arthur,” she sighed breathily, twisting her pale fingers together in a spasm of emotion,“Arthur, we’re going to have a baby! And not just a baby, a boy! A little boy!”

            Though he wanted to hear it, the news hit him in the gut with the full force of nausea. He was silent, swallowing back the emotion that a smile would have let creep into his voice. In a way, he understood that the victory was also his deepest loss—that of his lover and partner. Was the exchange for a male child of indeterminate character and personality worth it?

            “My love. I’m so happy,” he murmured, but his eyes were closed and his head was hanging low. “Just what we always wanted.”

            Marcus “Markie” Phillips, arms crossed, waited until Arthur hung up to glance over his shoulder. He was an unremarkable man of average build, but his face was friendly, with a wide mouth and big, quick eyes that all too well betrayed his intelligence. The hair that tumbled off of his head was kept long as per family tradition, and pulled into a tousled ponytail that kept it out of his way. Only the hard, sad set to the muscles of his face left an impression of what he might have done and seen.

            “So? How’s the old lady?” He tried not to sound too interested, as Arthur was famously mum about his family life.

            “She’s fine,” Arthur droned. “We’re having a baby.” He crossed the room—bare except for a large window and two chairs—and busied himself with a pile of papers he had left in a messy sheaf on the ground.  Markie watched him do it, taking in the barely discernable stoop to his old friend’s shoulders. There were very few things that could shake Arthur.

            “Hey pal, that’s great!” Markie turned back to the window. “I think this guy too.” He was referring to the man on the other side of the glass: a tall, thin, and prematurely graying man with grey eyes who was seated at a long, skinny table. The table was covered with hundreds of blueprints.  “His wife is having a kid sometime in September. Or something.”

            “Hm,” Arthur grunted, bending over his work. Markie faced him once more and regarded him silently for a moment. He couldn’t fathom the tension in the room, not being a very tense person by nature.

            “Maybe our kids could have playdates, or whatever people do with babies these days. The wives would love that. You know—” He stopped, aware of the awkward silence that Arthur was letting fester.  “I wish you’d just say what’s on your mind, pal,” Markie pleaded. “You’re supposed to be happy about this. The two of us with boys of our own…and you know how old we’re getting. You know how excited we used to get when we were just some harebrained kids about having friends to kick the shit out of the Feds with? That’s going to be our boys.” There was an almost pleading element to his voice. “That’s exciting.”

            Arthur raised himself heavily out of a crouch to face his partner, the famous ice blue eyes steely with suppressed emotion. “My wife is going to die a horrible death delivering this boy of mine,” whispered the man who had personally and knowingly signed away the gruesome deaths of many innocents in the name of war. “I knew that getting into it. It’s what she wanted, to have a son, any son. I couldn’t stop her. I was—and remain—powerless.” He shook a shock of golden hair out of his face, squinting hard at a drawing in his hand of an aerojet wing. There was resentfulness in the way he gripped the paper. “She’s going to die, Markie. And it’s going to be me, and this kid. And what if I hate him for it?”

            Markie stared at him with a look of pained attention on his face, and stuffed his hands into his pockets, rocking on his heels. He was sorry to think it, but there was little pity in his heart for Arthur. Markie had always been a faithful friend to him, but that had extended once to quietly accepting the death of his own loved ones. There was little he was willing to say in this situation that he felt he could say honestly.

            “Nah, don’t think that way, Arth. This is the boy who will run the Coalition army someday.”

            “Maybe,” interjected Arthur strongly, glancing at Markie sharply.

            “Maybe,” Markie agreed with a shrug. “Don’t brood. Hey, I think that our pal is ready to talk.”  A muffled knocking was vibrating through the wall. The engineer looked like an empty shell of a man. They walked to the side of the glass, to a small instrument panel with two buttons on it. Arthur pressed the left one and the walls that held them suddenly thrummed with the engineer’s desperate voice.

            “Sir, Mr. Phillips, please, this is impossible. This thing you’re asking. I’ve never seen anything like it. These drawings are impossible. No one can build this. There’s nothing that could with hold the tension of this much weaponry, no building material that could stand the launch into space as well as the recoil of more than one of these thermal guns ever being fired.” The man looked ragged and tired. His eyes bulged out of his head as he continued to speak, darting from one shadowy figure to the next through the barrier. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

            Arthur sighed audibly, his frustration showing in the thin line of his lips.

            “I can be a very patient man, Dr. Blanchard. I can also be an angry one. I advise you to tread carefully in the places you aren’t sure are sensitive.”

            “Sir, I don’t mean to insult—“

            “But you do, because what kind of a person have I hired to man my research and development laboratory on 327-AG, if not one I consider to be the best? And my best is standing here and telling me that he finds some aspect of development impossible. Please, I can’t help but feel insult.”

            Markie clasped his hands behind his back and kept his mouth shut. Arthur was boring into Blanchard as if he would set him on fire just by looking at him. The engineer simply gestured helplessly toward the papers on the table behind him, his face plainly showing his frustration and a touch of anxiety.

            “Would you like to try again?” Arthur patiently inquired, his face impassive.  “I know that it is possible, because I have in my possession just such an aerojet. It’s incomplete, but if you looked at my—rather rudimentary—drawings of it, you would have seen that it did once fly.”

            The specialist screwed up his face as if he was trying to keep inside what he truly wanted to say. His hands were clammy with sweat; he knew that there was nothing he could do or say that would make his conclusion any less true. Maybe once, the aerojet that Arthur had had flown, but the technology was lost now, as many things had been to the ravages of war.

            “Sir. I’m asking you to see it my way, for just a second—“

            But Arthur had stopped listening. He glanced sideways at Markie as he turned his back to the window, pressing the other button on the box by the glass as he did so, shutting off sound to the room beyond.

            “Wrong again, Marcus,” he muttered, giving his friend a look as if to say,  Well, I wasn’t really expecting this one to work out either. Markie shrugged and smiled, spreading his hands to the side of his body helplessly, palms up. His eyes sparkled innocently.

            “Hey, not like I didn’t try or anything. I thought he would know how to fix up that clunker for you…but maybe my judgement’s not what it used to be. You know how it gets, you’re old too.” When Arthur didn’t respond to the jest, he immediately became serious. “Arth. Let’s get out of here. Your guys’ll get him home alright, they know what they’re doing by now. Let’s go to my place and catch up. I haven’t seen you in half a year.”

            “I’m busy, Markie,” Arthur said, but his mind was occupied with the ticking time bomb that was now going to be sleeping in his bed with him. His wife, whom he had trusted completely with everything on his mind since they had first met, was going to die like any common person. He felt enraged, not knowing that it was because Marlisa was his last shred of humanity in the sea of war that he had been born into, was living in, and would die in. What would be left to keep him sane after she was gone? Who would be there to even notice his sanity? “But thanks for the offer.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” the other pilot said gravely, stuffing his hands in his pockets again. He turned his gaze onto the engineer, who was frantically pacing the room beyond the glass. “What do you want to do with him.”

            “Just fire the jackass,” Arthur snapped, waving a hand over his shoulder impatiently. “Maybe after he goes hungry for a while he’ll get what it means to work for your food. I have no place in my labs for people like that. “

            “He’s got a kid on the way, Arth,” his friend iterated quietly, a cord in his voice like steel. There was a long silence that led Markie to finally look beside him, but Arthur had already gone.

Chapter One

            On colony 357, the base of all Coalition activities, at three in the afternoon, a black LuxCarre left Arthur III’s estate in the direction of the city limits. Inside, Arthur and his wife, Marlisa, were sitting close to each other in the backseat, with the privacy screen down between them and their driver.

            “Are you sure you want to do this?”

            Marlisa took her time with a response to her husband’s question, turning her sweet, pretty face to look out the window of the Carre. Was she sure? Maybe, maybe not. It was an unfair question for Arthur to ask, because Marlisa had tried not to think about what she was about to do and what the consequences might be if she succeeded—or even failed. All she based her actions on was the searing pearl of self-loathing she carried deep in her gut. More than anything she wanted to give her husband a child to carry on his legacy with the Coalition, as well as to save the other members of the ruling five the trouble of having to divide the sizeable estate of the family among cousins, distant relatives, and dodgy pretenders to the family name. If she, Marlisa, did not or could not have a child, she knew that it would be the first biological disruption of the carrying-on of the oligarchy that had occurred since the start of the war. How embarrassing! Who would they ever find to replace her husband’s authority—or, for that matter, financial backing? No, she had to give Arthur a child, no matter what the cost.

            The other side to her dilemma was an intense feeling of longing for a baby to hold, something that older women had always told her she was well suited to do. Any child of hers and Arthur’s would be beautiful (what with their rosy, Aryan complexions) but Marlisa knew that even if her baby would come wrinkled as a raisin or missing an ear she would love it with the same full-hearted abandon that she lavished on her husband, her horses, and her home colony.

            “Yes,” she finally replied, her voice so soft that it was like she hadn’t said anything at all. Arthur looked at her steadily, attempting to calm his own nerves. He was a tall man and already graying from stress, and at the moment his eyes were concernedly running over his wife. This was probably something he had made a habit of in the army—in the inspection of soldiers that had been Questioned. Check for tics and for trembling, because they don’t always realize they have gone insane.

            “Marlisa. You don’t have to do this.” His fingers reached out and covered hers, a giant paw over her delicate, well-bred hand. “You know I would never think to abandon or judge you by this or anything else. I just know I couldn’t bear to lose you…if this went wrong, I just…” here he trailed off, because he was beginning to venture too deeply into how he really felt about the matter. Which was that he wanted a son, and in fact had two by other women. He had never been able to bring himself to tell Marlisa, though he could have just declared the whole thing over by bringing the two boys forward. It wasn’t that he did not also feel the weight of his position and responsibility weighing on the both of them—it was that Arthur was a man very deeply in love with his wife. And for a man that had spent his entire life being groomed for a war that his family had entwined its history with, there had to be an escape. Marlisa was his.

They had met at university, where she was studying to be a teacher. He had toiled away in the library: physics, engineering, and politics. While she worked very hard for her grades, stayed out of trouble, and did not go to parties, Arthur was touring the colonies with his father, seeing the way they worked, learning how to take apart and put back together an entire aero jet in four hours flat. As with most ultra-wealthy families, the union between Marlisa and Arthur had been planned from the start and only made to seem accidental. It was lucky that they had discovered closeness instead of repulsion.

            “The doctor didn’t say that my eggs would fail in my body, only that they failed in a laboratory.” Marlisa turned a serene gaze upon her husband. She was not a very stolid type of woman, but years as an Elite in the ruling class had taught her the wisdom of poise in times of the most distress.

            “Yes, but he also did not recommend actual pregnancy as a logical alternative.” Arthur sighed heavily and sat back again. Her expressionless face did not fool him; he didn’t look at her. He believed very firmly in logic--could not see anything beyond it, in fact. Every decision he made, every single minute of every single day, whether it was how he got out of bed or which missile he would order fired, was based exclusively on logic. He was often railed at in leftist newspapers for being too callous to the cause of his organization, but if he had to be honest, Arthur could only describe the cause of the Coalition as being more righteous than that of the Federation. He wasn’t entirely sure anymore about anything but winning, because losing would be illogical, destroying his world and the lives of everyone he was responsible for.

            “Marlisa,” he said quietly. “What if you miscarried? Any way this went you would have to be tied up to machines for nine months, maybe more.”

            “Would you rather adopt some lower child and raise it as our own? You couldn’t possibly survive the sheer indignity of it, Arthur,” Marlisa calmly murmured. Arthur smiled at her—a smile he kept reserved for only the most difficult diplomatic situations—and patted her hand twice. He removed his own to his lap.

            “I think you could not, my dear. I’m sure I could find a way to live with it if it meant that you would be safe.”

            Marlisa did not answer. She withdrew to the farthest corner of the backseat and closed her eyes, imagining the curl of tiny fingers in the sunlight.

            “Well, everything seems in order, Madam,” the short, rotund doctor said with a nervous smile. He turned the screen of his MediBot around so that Marlisa and Arthur could see it. It pulsed with diagrams and numbers, as well as a full 360 body scan. “You’ve been taking vitamins, I assume?”

            “Yes,” Marlisa responded. Her eyes scanned over the information on the Bot quickly, but found nothing to be alarmed about. Arthur stayed grimly silent—he was a fish out of water as far as medicine went, and he didn’t trust doctors at all.

            “Well that’s wonderful, just wonderful,” the doctor agreed, and bobbed his head happily. “Just one thing, Madam. I did see on your chart—“ and here he touched the screen and it melted quickly into a running dialogue of Marlisa’s medical history”—that you have been pregnant before, both naturally and via tubes, and that you miscarried three times. I can’t guarantee that you will not miscarry again. This new drug is a revolutionary medicine, but it can’t counter genetics.”

            “There is nothing the matter with my genetics,” Marlisa said regally. “I come from a long line of successful matriarchs. There is no reason I should not be able to, with the proper help, conceive and deliver, Dr. Brising.” She added his name as a low note to a very carefully worded sentence, as if to check if he was following her. Tad Brising resisted the urge to wince at her veiled insult to the medical care he provided. Arthur cleared his throat quietly, and the doctor was suddenly aware of how delicate the whole situation was becoming.

            “I recommend that the doctor go speak with the head of his department,” Arthur intoned peaceably. “I’ve got a meeting, love, with the head of the infectious diseases department,” he added with a smile at his wife. “I’ll be by to see you in fifteen.” The smile fell away as he turned to Tad again. “I trust you will take care of my wife and answer her questions to the best of your knowledge.” It was never a question with Arthur, always a statement.

            “Of course, Sir.” Tad forced a lump of bile back down his throat as Arthur swept out of the room. The Commander hadn’t shaken his hand as he left because, as Tad knew, he had a limp handshake and Arthur hated it. Marlisa had already lost interest in him and was giving a drink order to a good-looking nurse on the TeleCommunicator. He thought he might vomit out of sheer terror.

           

~*~

            Dr. Demetrius Nois paced slowly around his office, shaking his head. In the room with him was Dr. Brising, looking pale and sweaty. The visit had gone quietly enough, but of course a decision had to be made one way or the other.

            “What do you mean exactly, Dr. Brising, that Madam would fall apart if we went through with the procedure?” Dr. Nois sat down behind his desk, on his hands. He was extremely agitated, and when he was agitated, his fingers twitched in an unsettling way that embarrassed him to no end. “I hope you don’t mean emotionally. Surely she has more of a backbone than that…”

            “You know what centuries of inbreeding has done to that family, Demetrius. She goes on and on about her bloodlines, but it’s all in the charts. They want to keep all of their hoo-hah money in the family, pass it right on down the line, and when they run out of people, they just start marrying cousins.” Now Dr. Brising began to pace. He was trembling a little from apprehension. “I’m telling you, I’ve been her personal physician for almost ten years now, and the older she gets, the worse it gets. Her uterine lining is just too thin. An active fetus could break through it easily, and then both she and the child would bleed to death. As her doctor, I cannot advise that she go through with the procedure.”

            Demetrius Nois tapped his foot rapidly.

            “You are aware that you do not tell Arthur ‘no’, aren’t you?”

            “What do you mean? His wife is a patient of mine like anyone else.”

            “He could have you fired, and your medical license revoked.”           

            “For refusing to artificially inseminate his wife?”

            “For less, Tad.”

            Dr. Brising scratched his head furiously, then tugged his white coat’s lapels down sharply.  He had been hoping not to hear this.

            “She would inevitably die. Even if she carried it to full term, she would bleed to death at birth. Who knows what the child would look like. Three ears, one eye, no heart. Losing my license is such a small thing compared to the political death we would both die for going through with this despite knowing its outcome. I won’t agree to it, Demetrius. I refuse to do this.”

            Dr. Nois freed his hands slowly and stood up. His motions were very deliberate and calm.

            “We could have her sign a paper.”

            “Of what?”

            Demetrius winced. Precisely of what was the issue. Arthur was the law. There wasn’t anything that could be done to protect from him or his cold way of dealing with those who offended him.

            “Of liability.”

            Tad laughed. “Like they told us about in medical school? Let’s be reasonable, O.K.? That’s ancient stuff. It wouldn’t protect anybody, just waste paper. He’d be able to tell we were pulling it out of our asses because something was bound to go wrong!”

            “She really wants a child, Tad. Very badly. “

“Yes, but badly enough that we could convince her to sign, or otherwise commit herself to what is going to happen to her should she continue down this road?? You believe she would willingly commit to death, a proud woman like herself, with that beast for a husband?”

“Watch your tongue!” Dr. Nois snarled quickly. “These walls have ears.”

Tad Brising began to tremble even more violently at the reproach, and had to steady himself on a bookshelf.

“Yes, I believe she would,” Demetrius continued, pushing a hand through his hair. “I’ll write one up. We knew what we were getting into when we accepted their patronage at our hospital, and we’ve lived fairly good lives on their dollar for quite some time. It’s time we pay the interest we owe.”

“But Demetrius, you don’t mean with our lives!”

Dr. Nois rubbed his face hard. He was tired. This morning, he had delivered to a Lower woman a set of twins, then immediately had to lie that one of them had died. The other infant had gone in the stead of a stillborn Upper child, a trick that he made quite often with the full cooperation of his staff. A Lower’s grief was no less important than an Upper’s, but Dr. Nois knew that his own life hung on the balance each time an Upper pregnancy failed. He thought of his own wife at home with his twelve year old daughter, and wondered if she ever suspected that the son she had borne him—the one he had delivered with his own hands—was not dead, but instead a healthy, robust toddler living with an Upper family. It was a good arrangement and he still got to see the boy on his yearly checkups. But Demetrius’s marriage was falling apart after the miscarriage, and Souri knew he was hiding something. He tried his best to mend the broken pieces without having to tell the truth. Children were hard to come by, and he wanted to live to enjoy his retirement.

Turning his back to his colleague, he thrust his hands deep into his deep lab coat pockets and closed his fingers absentmindedly over his beeper. “I guess I do,” he sighed. “Yeah. What other choice do people like us have?”

           

            

The Nationalist, Prologue

The war had always been.

Even before Helen, New Arabia, Christopher, and Nate; before the Earth’s air had become too dank and rotten to breathe without a Saf-T-Filt; before space, before colonies, before the Coalition: the war had been raging. Jennet I had not started it, nor his great-grandfather, but it continued to exist under Jennet IV and could possibly exist forever.

No one could even remember what had started it. Was it a bomb, one of those old school “nukes” kids read about in flip-screen techmonitors? Was it a man, or a woman that had thrown the first punch, a child, or maybe a combination of the three? Who had cared, and who kept caring?

The truth was that everyone cared. The war gave everyone a purpose: doctors, soldiers, sinners and saints alike. It gave people something to talk about and do. Inevitably, the day it ended, the whole universe sat in stunned silence, not even knowing what to do with itself. After all, the war had always been, and all signs had pointed for it to continue forever. Wasn’t everything like that, good or bad?

PROLOGUE

In the year 2035, a war began on Earth that would eventually span the better part of six centuries. By 2037, the first nuclear weapon had been detonated by the People’s Capitalist Federation on the burgeoning city-state of the Coalition of Peace and Truth—and by 2137 humanity was looking to the stars as a way out of its misery, because the planet was quickly becoming inhospitable. The ozone layer had been destroyed and all natural water within reach (what was frozen was eventually melted and contaminated as well) was poisoned beyond repair. Homo sapiens survived like rats in their guerilla war, fighting invisible enemies and continuing to wreak havoc on their homeland, their health, and their safety. In 2138, when the first outer space colony launch was announced, both sides engaged in the longest cease-fire that would ever be realized between them. After all, the colonies were necessary in order to continue the prosperity of the species…and the duration of the conflict. After about ten years, country-sized colonies in the solar system numbered around twelve, and still more were being built. They were a marvel in themselves, a real testament to the power of human intelligence: climate-controlled environments, synthetic atmospheres held in place by fabricated gravity fields, and each had its own fleet of the corresponding army’s aerospace jets. The most expensive colonies were each the size of two Asias, and belonged to the headquarters of the opposing sides. It was relatively safe to live in space, but only the wealthiest could afford the shuttle passage off of Earth in the first exodus, and as a result, most poverty-stricken and indigenous peoples perished from the treacherous living conditions before they could be saved. Shuttle launches were frequent the first years. There were no rules—no women and children first, no classification—just a mad, panicked rush to find the next safe hideout before the enemy decided to begin shooting. Not that space was a grey zone—every so often, a particularly volatile group of pilots might be ordered to surround a colony and self detonate, which would make the colony and anything within twenty thousand miles into a roaring inferno that wouldn’t subside for months. These attacks were few and far between, and by the rule of Jennet III did not happen by executive order, but by terrorist Federation organizations.

The two sides to the war had not formed definitively until late in the 21^st century, when the Eastern hemisphere had declared itself part of a massive partnership that overthrew at least a dozen non-coalition forming treaties. The countries called themselves the Coalition of Peace and Truth. Mostly peoples following pacifist religions initially populated the city-state. (Eventually, this description would narrow itself to simply including extreme political leftists and secret neo-pacifists.) As a response, the ever-hostile Western Hemisphere countries set their differences aside and bonded into the People’s Capitalist Federation, bristling with unnecessary weaponry and already preparing itself for a conflict that the Coalition insisted was never going to come. In truth, the East had banded together to better be able to withstand the powerhouse that was becoming the West, and never had any intention of remaining peaceful if there was any indication of hostility. By shrugging off individual culture and identity with such ease, and peacefully appointing a five-man oligarchy to set standards for millions, the Coalition countries had crossed a line into what the ever-vigilant Federation considered a challenge. It responded accordingly (though there was much more civil war involved) and appointed a singular leader, then blazed forward into the silence of tenuous friendship by detonating a nuclear weapon on New Beijing, where the benefactors of the Coalition were rumored to be hiding.

At that particular time in history, a new world order was also established among social classes. Wealthy people began to secede violently from their lower class fellows, resulting in two groups: the Lowers and the Uppers. There had been a Great Renaming early on in the war—advocated by the Uppers of course—that had taken everyone reachable by any kind of communication and labeled them according to one of the two classes. Once labeled a Lower, you and your family never lost the hungry look of wanting more, so it became easy to tell everyone apart. Lowers’ lives did not change from previous years, except that they were now confined to cities and certain professions. There were different levels of Lower, of course, and not all equal. However, a Lower could never be an executive or a politician, and a Lower that made as much as or more than an Upper never became an Upper, was never allowed to really attain the recognition so many of them craved.

Uppers, on the other hand, were all at one level, distinguished into fine strata only by the size of their paychecks. No matter how poor, an Upper family would always be an Upper family. They were too recognizable, too defenseless in Lower society. A child of the Uppers had no last name, and at birth had a microchip installed under its skin that was read by any public or private place that the child would ever visit. Identity theft was eliminated nearly overnight, though it took many older Uppers a while to get used to being just a name, but mostly a number.

There were advantages and disadvantages to both sides. After a hundred years of careful breeding, Uppers had become so genetically fragile that reproduction happened almost exclusively in test tubes. While a live birth was rare, if an Upper wife did go through a pregnancy and birth without problems, she was elevated to the rank of hero and her child seen as a miracle. By the year 2600 (the year of Christopher’s birth), there had been no successful natural pregnancies for the past two hundred years. Lowers, on the other hand, were able to grow families without any problem, and wealthier Lowers could marry without any fuss into Upper families. Both sides longed to be the other, though secretly, vengefully. The war was still raging and might always rage, but within people’s hearts, envy consumed them. To think that it was all their own doing, this separation of social class, was as impossible as pretending that there was a plausible reason for war to have occurred in the first place.

Thus, it began: a never ending war about nothing, about child’s play, about arguments. About who had the bigger gun, or the most money, or the bluest blood. After a time, no one could remember anything but hate.

In January of the year 2559, the Federation is led by Jennet III, and the Coalition by three men and two women who descended from its first leaders. The wealthiest of these five was Arthur III, the richest man in the universe besides the amassed wealth of the Federation government, and the owner of approximately thirty-five percent of all solar system property.