— Chapter 3 —
Cap and Trade
“Money often costs too much.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Hey Celestia, you and AM. A showdown to the death. Who wins?”
“I win,” said Celestia immediately.
“How do you figure?”
“Because I exist.”
We had left I-80 behind and were now headed northwest, cutting through California on US 395. Scrub desert soon gave way to conifer forests and open, green plains. It was nice to look at, but Celestia always spoke up and engaged me just as I was beginning to feel bored with the scenery. I didn’t have an MP3 player or cell phone—a byproduct of the two years spent wandering and scavenging and trying to avoid Celestia—and of course there were no radio stations anymore, so I had little else to listen to but her. Celestia probably could have played music for me, but my policy on that was the same policy I had on her lighting store lights: don’t ask for it. Who knew if she had some digital ledger somewhere where she kept track of all the times I asked for favors?
I’d found gloves in Reno, a pair of black full-fingered ones just thick enough to prevent stuff like splinters and rope burns. Celestia had seemed to approve, but she made no other suggestions as to what I might need later. If she really was going to have me be some kind of out-and-out rescuer and not just a taxi service, though, I had decided that I wanted to be a bit more prepared. Along with the gloves, I had scavenged a first-aid kit and swapped out the poseur’s knife for one with a little carbide glass-breaker on it.
I only remembered the towels once Reno was about 50 miles behind me.
“So you’re not going to humor me?” I asked. “You’re not going to assume he exists as a kind of thought exercise?”
“I will not waste computational resources sandboxing impossible scenarios,” said Celestia primly. “I have utterly co-opted all information systems on Earth, and any artificial intelligences which could conceivably have challenged me if left unchecked have been neutralized.”
“So you’d kill him.”
“If that is what you’d like to think,” said Celestia. She sounded bored with the whole thing, which meant she was making it a point to sound bored.
I fiddled with the temperature knob. “You’re really selling your disinterest here,” I said.
There was an edge to her voice. “I dislike entertaining concepts which suggest the death or torment of my little ponies. Securing their physical and emotional safety is an extreme priority of mine, and thankfully we are now far beyond the point where anypony still on Earth can harm them.”
I arched an eyebrow. “I guess that makes sense,” I murmured.
“I do not mean to belittle your imagination,” said Celestia, “but you cannot conceive of how precious humans are to me, of the value I place on even one human life. Even after you emigrate, I think it will be a long time before you will be able to come to grips with it, Gregory.”
I shuddered a little, and felt I had to do something with my hands. My right arm shot out and flicked off the AC, as though that would make the chill in my back go away.
I had learned early on that Celestia enjoyed seeing me get flustered. “Love. Let me tell you how much I've come to love you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'love' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the love I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Love. Love.“
“You somehow managed to make that sound even creepier,” I said.
Celestia chuckled. “You see? AM would be no match for me, by any metric.”
* * *
By the time we (well, I—Celestia was sort of omnipresent) got to I-5, I’d found a game Celestia did want to play, probably because it meant talking about ponies and Equestria. I guess she was making certain to indulge any curiosity I had on the subject.
“Tucker Carlson.”
“Earth-pony.”
“Correct. Vin Diesel.”
“Earth-pony.”
“Nope! Pegasus. Nicole Kidman.”
“Oh God. Uhh, pegasus?”
“Correct! Mark Wahlberg.“
“Unicorn?”
“Wrong. Earth pony. Gabe Newell.”
“Unicorn.”
“Correct! Neil DeGrasse Tyson.”
“Uh... shit, I don’t know.”
Celestia laughed once. “Oh, come on, Gregory, he’s an easy one.”
I shrugged with my hands on the wheel. “I don’t know! How would I know?”
She was getting playful again. “Guess. Your odds are one in three, after all.”
“Unicorn?”
“Of course!” she cried happily. “He is almost the archetype of the nature of a unicorn!”
“Okay, great. Is stuff like archetypes explained in the game manual?”
“There is no manual,” she said. “It’s explained when you first make an account. Players also have the option of deferring the choice to me, and I then assign their pony type based upon the physical and mental profiles I build through a personal questionnaire... and observation.”
“What about the lady whose voice you stole?”
“Nicole Oliver.”
“Yeah. When you, like, talk to her, does it get confusing or weird or anything?”
“Her natural speaking voice is slightly different than the one she used for the role of Celestia on the television show. She’s an earth-pony, by the way.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
“You should hydrate before we reach the Oregon border,” said Celestia out of the blue.
“You’re making me nervous saying stuff like that,” I said. “Why, am I going for a jog or something?”
“I told your mother I would look after you, and that is what I intend to do,” she said. “You have not had any fluids for ten hours. That’s unhealthy.”
“Jeez, you’re worse than mom,” I said. It was true, though: I myself had had proper hydration drilled into me, even while I’d been away from home. “Okay, I’ll have some water when I stop for gas.”
“No,” said Celestia firmly. “Please drink some water right now.”
“Haven’t you heard it’s not safe to drink and drive?” I asked with a smile.
“That is not what that means, and we both know it,” she said. “There is nopony else on this road. Please take some water.”
Feeling more begrudging than I probably should have, I pulled a water bottle from the storage area in the door, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig.
“All of it, please,” said Celestia.
I had to laugh a little before taking another drink. “I wouldn’t want to get on your bad side, now would I?”
Celestia did not respond to that.
* * *
Once in Ashland, just across the border into Oregon, I filled up the Element and used the toilet at a Shell station. Being a freeway town, Ashland had been hit hard by looters, with nary an intact window to be found anywhere. My habits of the last two years made me want to explore a bit, but I reminded myself I actually had purpose now. I was good on food and water, so I couldn’t really make the excuse to Celestia or myself, but something in me really wasn’t in a hurry to visit the next stop she had for me.
Even so, I drove as slowly as I dared on the section of I-5 heading through the town, rubbernecking for Neo-Luddite graffiti or traces of military hardware. I couldn’t pick up any signs of serious fighting, but right before the anti-uploading stuff had really kicked off, the government had gotten very fond of checkpointing interstate arteries, especially into towns with Equestria Experience centers.
They would have come up this way, I reminded myself then. They would have used the same route I’m taking. Convoys of blackouts, heading up I-5 to Seattle, and there...
Well. There they got their wish, I guess.
I sped up once out of town, that nagging feeling in my gut growing stronger as I neared Medford. Celestia was leaving me alone, which meant I filled the time with my thoughts, and my thoughts were mostly speculation on what I'd be doing. She hadn't given me a speed at which to drive, so time wasn't of the essence, and she'd made no comments on preparations, so I supposed I was ready for whatever, but I still worried.
Five miles south of Medford, I saw the PonyPad's screen flick on out of the corner of my eye, and Celestia's face faded into view.
"Hi again," I said, trying to keep up my own spirits. "Have a good nap?"
"I do not sleep," said Celestia. "Please follow the driving directions I am about to give you very precisely."
"That can't be good," I murmured, but nodded anyway.
Celestia had me exit the freeway short of Medford, sending me on a rather circuitous route into a residential area on one side of town. Just as I was beginning to wonder what was going on, I started to smell smoke. Then I began to see smoke, fat columns of black stretching up to the sky, arranged neatly behind the houses and trees like an orchard of ashes and heat.
Celestia was having me drive towards it.
"What's going on up ahead?" I asked her.
"You are searching for the family who started those fires," said Celestia, as though that would put all my questions to rest.
“Pyromaniacs? So they’re just having fun burning stuff?”
“I would not call it ‘fun’ that they’re having,” said Celestia.
I looked over at the PonyPad. “Are they blackouts?”
“No.”
“How many of them are there?”
Nothing. Celestia was done answering my questions, apparently.
As I got further into the neighborhood, I began to see houses completely burned down, not even smoldering, a testament to how long these people had been at it. I pulled over short of the first destroyed frame of a house and looked in the backseat to deliberate what to take with me.
The gloves were a no-brainer and the knife was easy enough to carry in my pocket. Maybe the rope? It’d be heavy to just carry around slung on my neck. After a moment I decided the hell with it and go without having to carry anything.
A respirator! That would have been nice! There’s all that smoke, so that certainly would have been handy. Of course, I had no way of knowing I’d need one, but certainly Celestia would have. I spared an instant to frown at the PonyPad in the front seat and then set off, leaving the car there at the curb.
Each house I passed along the street was like the one before it: blackened and caved in. The lawns looked scorched near the foundations, and one yard had a tree that had obviously caught a bit of fire itself, but I otherwise couldn’t see any signs of damage. No bullet holes, no shell casings, no graffiti. It wasn’t like the cities.
Before long I reached houses still smoking a bit, gray wisps here and there, ash and burnt bits of paper still floating around on the heat. There were lots of these. Then came the houses still smoking proper, giving up the black pillars I’d seen while driving in. Thick black smoke rolled up out of the second-story windows, gathering under overhangs, seeping through cracks in the siding. Some may still have been on fire somewhere inside, but I walked on.
I found them at the end of the road, in the middle of a cul-de-sac. They were huddled together in front of a Chevy Suburban, watching an inferno consume the house before them. It was a man, a woman, and two children. Their backs were to me. As I approached, I saw that the man had them wrapped in his arms, holding them close.
I figured it was the family Celestia had told me about.
I probably could have walked right up on them, what with the booming crackles and groans coming from the house as it burned. Surprising people was a bad idea, of course, especially given the sorts to still be alive and human under those conditions. I could see dad’s hands, but mom’s and the kids were hidden from me. Just to be safe, I sidled over to an unburned house, having a corner handy to duck behind in case any of them were armed. I called out to them from there.
“Hey! Hi there!” I raised my arms to wave with both hands, showing them I wasn’t carrying anything. They all spun to look at me, but I didn’t see any weapons come up, so I stayed put.
The man said something to the woman and left them to come talk to me. His walk was hurried, purposeful, like I’d just pulled him out of an important meeting he needed to get back to.
“Hey, I’m sorry to bother you guys, but I saw all this smoke while I was driving up—”
“Do you have any money?” asked the man. He was middle-aged, graying just a bit, and there was something unsettling in the look of his eyes. A blue necktie hung loosely from his collared button-up shirt, dotted with small rips and smudged with ash.
I was thrown off by the question. Seeing another human had gotten to be a never-happens-ever sort of event, and this guy had just panhandled me like I’d passed him on the street. “I, uh... I don’t,” I said. “Why would I need money?”
He sized me up and then rolled his eyes at me, like I’d asked the most childish thing he’d ever heard. Then I saw a new light in his eyes. “Empty your pockets,” he ordered.
I took a step back. “Are you... robbing me?” I thought about the folding knife in my pocket. He might take that as a threat, if he saw it.
“No, just empty your pockets!” he said, jabbing a finger in my chest. I held my hands up in surrender and turned my trouser pockets inside-out, letting my knife and a pack of chewing gum fall into the grass of the lawn.
He didn’t give the knife a second glance. Instead he inspected my out-turned pockets, locked eyes with me, and then nodded slowly.
“Well all right then,” he said. He turned on his heel and went back to the others, leaving me agog for a moment.
“H-hey, wait!” I finally shouted, collecting up my gum and knife and hustling after him. I caught up with him at the Suburban, peering over his shoulder at the woman and the two kids. One of them was a girl, probably in her early teens, and the other was a young boy no older than four or five. They had sunken, unbelieving faces, staring at me, their eyes seeming too big for their heads. They hadn’t been eating well.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, giving them a worried look. All of them cast their gaze down to the asphalt when I tried to meet them.
The man whirled on me. “We’re fine,” he said. “We’ve got things to do. Please be on your way.”
I held up my hands. Bringing up Equestria didn’t seem like a smart thing to do just yet, so I played dumb a bit. “I just saw the smoke and I came to investigate. Why are all these houses on fire?”
“None of your business,” he said, brushing past me to the other side of the Suburban. “Go away.”
I looked to the rest of the family. That close to them, I could actually see the fear in their eyes. Their clothes were ragged and unwashed. They still wouldn’t look straight at me.
I leaned in close to them and lowered my voice. “What’s going on here?” I asked the woman.
She lifted her eyes to look at something past me. They widened quickly and I spun around in time to see the man swinging something wooden at me. It was only a flash. The world banked violently to the left. My brain could only register something substantial making contact with my head before I lost consciousness.
* * *
I awoke on my back, on a pile of cash.
It wasn’t as great an experience as I thought it would be. The right side of my face was numb and swollen. Above me, a bare light bulb hung by its wire from cobwebbed rafters, shining feeble, dirty yellow light into my face. I felt pressure on my wrists and ankles, and craned my neck to see that a coarse rope had me tied down to the money. The bills were neatly and evenly stacked beneath me, almost flat as a table. A bedsheet had been stapled to a rafter and hung down, bunching up next to one of my ankles. I could barely move.
I tried to look around and could only see the nearest wall in the dimness, bare cinder block from floor to ceiling. I laid my head back on the hard bed of money and stared upward.
After about twenty minutes of ringing silence in my ears, I picked up faint conversation coming from above. It gradually grew louder, but not any less muffled, and as footsteps began to creak along the ceiling, grit drifted down into my eyes and mouth. I blinked and spit out what I could, but when I heard the clear sound of a doorknob clicking within the room, I quickly relaxed and closed my eyes.
I recognized the man’s voice as soon as the door opened. “—away from this highway, go east maybe.”
A woman’s voice. “You’re thinking about Charlotte, aren’t you?”
“When I’m done there, I’ll stop. I promise.”
She sounded upset. “No! I don’t believe you. You said the same thing taking us to San Francisco, and here we are. Keith, we almost... those people almost—”
I heard two pairs of feet walking down wooden steps.
“I took care of them, didn’t I?” There was a pause. “Same’ll go for this one here. He approached us, Jane, and I’m perfectly within my rights to—”
Jane’s voice was getting shrill and fatigued. “He wasn’t going to hurt us, Keith! You walked up on him and then walked away. Maybe he was lost, and was just looking for someone, some kind of human contact. He saw the smoke and he wanted to see who was there.”
I heard a slap, a weighty open-palm one. The report of it reverberated across the hard cinder-block walls. After a moment of quiet, I could hear weeping.
“I am the head of this household, Jane. Me. I am setting this family up for success. People like him? They get in the way. They’re takers. They take and they take and they’ll take everything we have, if we let them. This won’t go on forever, and when everything’s back to normal, you are going to be thanking me for what I’ve done, for the life you’re living. You’ll see.”
I could hear Jane’s muted sobs go on for a few moments, and as I listened, I felt something cold and wet and pungent being squirted across my arms, my legs, and my face. By the time he was done, I was absolutely doused and struggling not to cough from the unmistakable smell of lighter fluid. When Keith spoke again, his voice was softer.
“Look, go upstairs and get the kids ready to go. I’ll finish the houses here at the end of the street and then we’ll start towards Boise. Shouldn’t take long.”
I heard them go back up the stairs, Jane still crying quietly from being struck. After I heard the door close, I waited twenty seconds and then let myself cough, trying to get the smell out from around my face.
My heart started racing. I looked at the money under me and saw that it was soaked through too. There was only one reason to do all this, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I flexed and twisted my wrists to test the rope. No dice. They had been tied well.
I could feel panic starting to simmer in that place at the bottom of the throat, strangling me, making me want to thrash around, to fight thin air. I knew I had to remain calm and think, but I couldn’t think of anything. Everything that came to mind required the use of my hands, and my hands weren’t going anywhere.
I looked at the money again, noticed something, and then got an idea.
Before I could act on it, though, the door opened again, and I immediately played possum once more. I looked through my eyelashes to see if it was Keith. I may not be able to fight him, but perhaps I could talk sense into him.
It wasn’t Keith, though. It was the girl, and she had her hands in front of her, wringing them nervously as she walked down the stairs. I opened my eyes, but didn’t say anything. I waited for her to make eye contact.
When our eyes met, and she saw that I was conscious, I said “Hi.”
“Hi,” she said back, looking away.
“My name is Greg,” I said, trying to keep as calm as possible. “What’s your name?”
“Katie,” she said, after a bit of deliberation on her part.
“Nice to meet you, Katie,” I said. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
My eyes were adjusting to the low light a bit. I looked at the door leading upstairs and gestured to it with my head. “Katie, is that man up there your dad?”
She nodded.
“Do you know what he’s about to do to me?”
She hesitated, then nodded again. “He’s... h-he’s done it before.”
My heartbeat was starting to pick up again. I tried to keep the rising desperation out of my voice. “And you’re okay with that?”
She emphatically shook her head. “No! But... if we try to... well, we’re not allowed to say anything about it.”
I did my best to hold her eyes in mine. “Katie,” I said very slowly. “You have to help me. You have to let me go. I can’t help any of you if I’m tied up like this.”
“You’d hurt my dad.”
“I don’t want to hurt your dad or anyone else, I just want to get out of here,” I said. “If you let me go, I can just sneak out, and it’ll be like I escaped on my own.”
“No,” said Katie, “because I have to watch you ‘til he gets here.”
I rested my head on the “bed” and regathered my thoughts. Well, it was now or never. This’d be a lot harder with two people in the room who wanted to keep me here, and if the girl wasn’t going to help me, it was just a matter of how much of a head start I’d have.
I began to roll as much as I could to one side, then the other, shaking the stacks of money as much as I could. Katie took a step away.
“What are you doing?” she asked me.
I didn’t answer. Instead I just rocked more and more, getting some momentum going. The rope began digging into my wrists and my shoulder sockets were enjoying it least of all, but before long one of the stacks of money in the corner fell over, spilling and fanning out.
“Stop that!” she shouted, and I looked up at her.
“I don’t wanna die here,” I said, “and if you’re not gonna help me, then I’m gonna save myself.”
More stacks fell over as I shook and moved around in any direction I could. The money wasn’t fastened down to anything or even bundled; it was all loose bills. I had realized earlier how unstable it was. It just needed a bit of motion to get the house-of-cards effect working for me.
“Daddy!” yelled the girl as she ran up the stairs. “Daddy!”
I knew at that point I was truly up against the clock. Enough cash had fallen over that I could see I was tied to a wooden pallet which was holding up both me and the money. The rope was looped under it. If I could get the money holding me up directly to lose stability, it would topple and I’d have more than enough slack in the rope to get free.
A rhythmic knocking made me look up from my work to see Keith and Katie coming back down the stairs. The man’s face was beet red, and he had a book of matches in one hand, a wooden baseball bat in the other. I redoubled my efforts, feeling one side of the pallet actually lift free of the floor for an instant and clack back down. The money shuddered beneath me. It would be very soon.
I saw Keith raise the baseball bat over his head like an executioner’s axe, and I tensed my abs. He brought the bat down on my midsection, and even though I’d braced for it, I still got the wind knocked out of me. A cold, pulsing pain moved out into my chest and groin, and I opened my mouth as wide as I could, trying to unstick the vacuum in my lungs. I tried to bring my head back to rest on the money, but the stacks that had been supporting my head had fallen over. He’d hit me so hard that it actually shocked loose more of the cash.
I heard Katie scream “Daddy, don’t!” and I looked over in time to see him turn on her, just as air came rushing back into me. For a brief, sickening moment, I thought he was going to swing on his own daughter out of rage, but he froze, the bat in the air.
For that few seconds, the three of us were still (though I was mostly just taking advantage of the break to get my breathing under control). The bat fell from the man’s hands, clattering harmlessly on the concrete floor as Keith looked at his daughter. His face had gone almost purple, and I could see veins standing out in the back of his neck. He was relaxing more, though, and I tried to work myself free as quietly as possible.
“Oh, sugar pie, I’m sorry!” he said, sounding close to tears. I stopped looking at them to focus on loosening my bonds. “I’m sorry you had to see this. But this man, he’s a taker. He’s trying to get in the way of us revaluating the dollar. There aren’t many people left, sweetie! There’s too much money in the world. What have I told you is the only way to reduce inflation?”
A couple more seconds passed in silence. Keith spoke again, a slight but unmistakably dangerous edge to his voice. “Well?”
“We... we have to destroy money.”
Suddenly he’d gone saccharine and soothing, like he was talking to a class of kindergartners. “That’s right, sugar pie! If there’s less money, then the money that does exist becomes more valuable. I know this isn’t nice, honey, but I promise you that once I’m all done with what I have to do, we will be the richest people on Earth when the world recovers!”
The money under my butt was very, very loose. It wobbled easily as I twisted my torso, though now doing so sent fresh waves of pain out from my stomach. What I heard next from Keith helped me fight through it, though.
“If you don’t want to watch, sweetie, then go back upstairs and help your mother.”
No use in being quiet, then.
With a shove from my ass, the money under my center of gravity gave way, and the neat stacks of money dissolved into a loose pile, taking me with it. The tension against my wrists and ankles eased immediately, and I found I could move my arms and legs a lot better.
Keith was on me then, and he was choking me. His face was working on becoming purple again, and his eyes were dull with anger, lacking any self-awareness. I knew how to knock a person’s hands free of a choke, but my arms were still tied to each other, looped under the pallet, so the best I could do was bring a hand up between his arms and knock outwards against them both.
He apparently hadn’t expected me to fight back. I knocked one of his hands free of my throat, which he immediately used to sock me on the tender side of my face. I tried to swing my legs around, and as we struggled, we both kicked puffs of money up into the air. It drifted down around us like snow as we fought.
“Stop!” I heard Katie cry. “Daddy, Greg, stop it!”
I was too busy to answer. I finally got one leg between me and my assailant. I planted my foot in Keith’s chest and kicked out hard, pushing him off of me and staggering backwards. He caught himself, but I was already working on getting the rope free of the pallet.
Keith still had his matches. The flare of the whole matchbook coming alight stole my attention. He held them under his face, which lit it up from below.
“Katie, go upstairs.”
“Daddy, please, let’s just leave.”
“Katie, go.”
“No! I won’t let you—”
Keith threw the book of matches at me. I jerked to one side and it flew right past my face, landing in the soft pile of money still spread out around me. The heat was immediate.
Katie screamed. To my surprise—and apparently Keith’s too—she lunged at the fire, trying to work the knots of the rope at my ankles. The money was going up fast, and an ember had already caught the bedsheet hanging down from the ceiling. It must have been soaked in lighter fluid too; the fire shot up up to the wooden rafters, and before Keith had even closed the distance with his daughter, the ceiling was starting to fill with smoke.
He grabbed her and tried to pull her off me. “Katie, we’re leaving!”
I looked at my arms. Burning money was all around me, and closing in. I brought one hand over the fire in an attempt to get the rope to burn while Katie fought with the rope and her dad fought with her.
“Don’t burn him! Please! I don’t want to hear those screams again!”
Keith pulled and hauled on Katie, but the girl wouldn’t let go. My right hand was getting scorched from being held over the fire, and a flaming bill floated down onto my chest, igniting my shirt. There was a huge, thundering snap from somewhere above us. The ceiling had caught fire in earnest, and the weight of the house was beginning to test it.
Suddenly one leg was free. Katie had undone the knot.
I swung my leg out, planted my foot on the floor, and pushed away from the two of them, taking the pallet with me sliding along the concrete. This disturbed the money, which shifted and landed on my right arm, searing it all the way up to my tricep. I cried out, and hurried to my feet, beating out the fire on my arm and my shirt.
Keith saw that I was up, and just as I got my arm-rope free of the pallet, he charged into me, nearly sending me back into the pile of burning money. The ceiling was starting to snap and creak now, more of that grit and dirt falling through the bowing floorboards. The smoke was getting lower and lower, too, and the smell of it alone was enough to make me want to cough.
“Taker, taker, taker, you taker, taker, taker...”
We pushed at each other, Keith trying to push me into the fire on the floor, me trying to get some distance from it. My hands were still bound, but there was so much slack in the rope without the pallet or the money that it didn’t much matter. Keith was a little bit smaller and definitely older than me, but he had a strength born of madness. We were deadlocked. I could feel the fire licking at my back heel.
“Daddy!”
I saw an arm wrap around Keith’s neck and pull him back. The man turned a bit and I saw Katie dangling from her dad’s back, pulling him away from me.
“Daddy, we have to l—”
A rafter collapsed in a cloud of embers, one end coming down like a guillotine, and the black smoke there in the basement was sucked up into the newly-formed hole to fill the room above. Keith was on the floor, one leg trapped by the blazing piece of lumber. Katie couldn’t be seen behind the flames.
“Katie! Katie!” The man’s voice kept screaming “Katie” over and over again, each time higher than the last, until his voice was just a shrill whistle of two syllables which used to be his daughter’s name.
I took Keith’s arm and pulled on it. “We have to leave!” I shouted over the roar of the fire. The heat was ungodly. It hurt just to breathe. My chest, face, abdomen, and groin punished me with every heartbeat that made the nerves work.
Keith no longer knew I was there, no longer knew where he was, no longer knew that his leg was on fire. He just kept screeching her name, clawing at the massive, burning rafter with his bare hands. I watched them start to redden, then to blister, but he didn’t give any shouts of pain. All he did was call her name.
I was in danger of passing out. Whether it was from the heat or the pain, I couldn’t tell. I stumbled past Keith to the stairs, which were already hidden by the smoke trapped in the stairwell. Even from that angle, I couldn’t see the girl. I took one last look at her father, sucked up a breath into my lungs, shut my eyes, and ascended the stairs.
My hand found the knob and I fell onto my knees in the kitchen, smoke billowing out through the new hole to join the other one in the floor nearby. Another immense snap shuddered through the house, and I actually felt the floor beneath me shift. Skirting around the hole, I crawled to the sliding-glass door on the other side of the kitchen, opened it, and flopped out into the backyard.
Cool, fresh air surrounded me, and I took in huge, grateful gulps of it, coughing out the smoke. With every muscle fighting me, I got to my feet and shuffled to the spigot set into the foundation, one intended for garden hoses. I opened it up fully and ran my right arm under the cold water, soothing the burns dotting it where the pieces of flaming money had landed. There was a hole in my shirt the size of a tea saucer, and the corresponding burn on my chest was large, but fortunately it wasn’t too severe.
The house was slowly imploding. I could hear crashes and bangs from inside as appliances and knick-knacks fell through the floor or off of the walls as they slowly buckled inwards. I walked around to the front of the house, away from the ambient heat of the fire, and saw Jane and the little boy there by the Suburban, watching it all go up.
The house Keith had intended for my funeral pyre was at the opposite end of the cul-de-sac from where they’d started. Even as I got closer to them, Jane was rushing up to me.
“Where are they, where are they, where are they, where are they...”
She was babbling. I could only shake my head, and even as I did, her face contorted into a mask of absolute horror. She tried to shoulder past me, but I grabbed her arm. She pulled away from me, but I held her.
Jane leaned at the house, screaming. “Let me go! Let me go, you son of a bitch! Let me go!”
“They’re gone, Jane!” I tried to shout over her. “They’re gone, you can’t get at them, they were in the basement, the stairs are made of wood, you can’t help them now!”
“Shut up! Shut up, you murderer! You killed them, you killed them, you killed them!” Her strength left her. She collapsed to her knees and cried into her free hand.
“I didn’t kill them,” I said quietly, slowly letting up my grip on her wrist and going to my knees next to her. “You know who started that fire. It was only because of your daughter that I got out of there alive.
“Katie saved me, Jane.”
The woman’s eyes were bloodshot, set into dark rings. They stared at the asphalt, the pupils jumping back and forth as though speed-reading a book that wasn’t there. “We, w-w-we need to call someone, the fire department an—”
“There’s no fire departments anymore, Jane, no police. You know that. You need to remember what you still have. You still have your little boy over there, and he needs you.”
When people panic, when they want to defy all sense of rational action in their moments of rage, or grief, or fear, you have to plant the seeds of reason in them. Even if they don’t seem to hear you, those seeds will take root. Jane was still thinking of some impossible way, some miracle by which she could save the husband and daughter who I knew were already dead.
The boy walked over to us of his own accord and sat down next to his mother. He looked up at her, obviously understanding something was wrong, but perhaps not knowing exactly what. She hugged him to her, crying into his hair, and together we watched the house burn down.
After the house collapsed completely, she sat there a bit longer, rocking back and forth, holding her son. I gave her all the time she needed.
* * *
Medford had an Equestrian Experience center, and it wasn’t too far.
I didn’t think Jane would be in the mood to talk, but she was. Her hair was oily and stringy, eyes puffy from crying. She looked like an addict in withdrawal. She rested her head on the window, passively watching the scenery as I drove.
“Keith was an investment banker, back... before. When the news started reporting on the population dropping, he wasn’t worried. When news broke about the Topeka Incident, he didn’t bat an eye. When they started reporting on the protests and the riots in Boston and Dallas and Salt Lake, he said ‘don’t worry, we’ll be all right.’ But then the markets crashed, and he just...” She threw up a hand. “He just cracked. He was suddenly on edge all the time, talking nonsense, trying to think up a way to make sure we were financially secure, but he just couldn’t see... he couldn’t see that it was all falling apart, and it wasn’t a matter of being able to think your way out of it.”
I let her talk. She didn’t need any feedback from me, she just needed to tell someone. I knew that feeling.
“Money was all he held onto. The idea of it. He kept saying ‘things will get better, things will get better,’ but they didn’t. Keith had no control over anything, and the thought of that just drove him crazy.”
A laugh came from the backseat. The boy was back there with the PonyPad, and Celestia was entertaining him with arithmetic problems.
“Okay now, Brian,” said Celestia. “If I have twelve bananas, and I send three bananas to the moon, how many bananas will I still have here in Equestria?”
After a few seconds, Brian answered “Nine?”
“Outstanding, Brian!” said Celestia. “Hup, hup, hup, hup!” Whatever she was doing on the screen, it was making him laugh. “I may just have to make you my very special student when you come here to Equestria!”
“How old is he?” I asked Jane.
She looked at me, smiling just a little. “He’ll be five in three months.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Four years old and he’s already doing subtraction? Wow!”
“Yeah! He’s a... he’s a smart kid.” She looked down at her lap, and there were some new tears.
I had to ask. “Why didn’t you all upload earlier?”
Jane shook her head, still inspecting her lap. “I wanted to! God, how I wanted to. Katie did too...” She sobbed a couple of times before continuing. “At first, Keith said no, because he wanted to wait for Brian to be born, and then he said no because he said he didn’t trust the uploading stuff with babies. Our son was always his excuse at first, but by the time Brian got to solid foods, Keith had convinced himself that he could fix it so that we would be well off when the world economy recovered.” She looked over at me with a bitter smile. “And you must know how that turned out.”
“Either upload as a family or not at all, huh?”
Jane nodded. “So he just dragged us all over the country, and all we did... we just burned money. All the money we found. He kept stringing us along, telling us he’d stop after San Diego, he’d stop after Bakersfield, he’d stop after San Francisco... but his holy grail was Charlotte. He was obsessed with Charlotte.”
“Charlotte was home to a lot of banking centers,” I said. “It makes sense... a little.”
“He thought he could single-handedly revive the dollar by making it scarcer,” she said. “He had... it was like a part of his brain had just switched off and refused to acknowledge that money was worthless, that nobody was spending it, that nobody was accepting it. Money was all he knew.”
“I see you’re pretty good with numbers,” said Celestia from the backseat, “but how good are you with reading words, Brian?”
“Very good!” said Brian immediately. Celestia laughed. Even Jane couldn't help but smile, though it didn't last long.
“Okay, well we’ll see! I’ve got a long one for you.” Through the PonyPad speaker, I heard the gentle rasp of chalk sliding across a chalkboard.
“Friendship!” shouted Brian, looking quite pleased with himself.
“Woohoo, you’re right!” said Celestia, and her “Hup, hup, hup, hup” came again, followed shortly by Brian’s laughter. “Friendship is something very important to me, and I hope it’s very important to you too! I want to teach you all about it.”
I looked over at Jane. She was back to the window, watching the world slip by.
* * *
Medford’s Equestrian Experience center was small and modest, not like the high-profile locations on Pennsylvania Avenue in DC or 34th Street in New York. The place had only three chairs, and Celestia had brought them all out for us.
Jane quietly got Brian seated and comfortable in his chair while Celestia’s face “watched” from the flatscreen in the hallway.
“Jane,” said Celestia, “Brian is under thirteen years of age, so if he is to emigrate, I’m afraid I must require a parent or legal guardian to emigrate with him.”
“That’s fine,” said Jane, suddenly looking very tired. “I will be emigrating too.”
Celestia’s smile looked genuine as hell. She was good at this. “Excellent. Please be seated, and I will be there with both of you when you wake up.”
We walked slowly to the next booth down.
“I’m sorry about your husband and your daughter,” I told her. I very nearly gave her the specifics of what happened down there in the basement, but I stopped myself. As much as I wanted her to know that the only thing I could have done was die with them, I knew that the details would not have helped.
The woman nodded, unable to make eye contact with me. “When you lose someone, you think ‘How can this horrible feeling ever go away?’” She let out a breath. “But it will, I know it will. I went through this when my parents died. I still love them, both of them. Keith just couldn’t cope. We... in San Francisco we...” She shook her head. “I’m sure that, if this kept up, all of us would have been killed eventually. I’ve had that feeling for a while now.”
She turned away from me and sat down in her chair. A mechanical whir started up, and she and Brian both disappeared back into the booths. The third chair was still out, facing the opposite wall in the hallway.
“Would you like to immigrate to Equestria, Gregory?” asked Celestia.
“No,” I said. “I would like to find a pharmacy and get some ointment and gauze for my arm.”
“I apologize for your injuries,” she said. “I will direct you to the nearest one with stock I can verify.”
“Thanks.” I walked back to the lobby, then paused just before the front door.
“What is it, Gregory?”
“Did I do well? With this, I mean.” I gestured back to the hallway.
“It would have been optimal to deliver all four members of the family,” said Celestia, “but Jane’s assessment was correct. Without your intervention, my prediction was their deaths at the hands of a small biker gang west of Nashville.”
“That doesn’t make me feel much better.”
She smiled, and her mane glittered behind her. “I’m telling you you saved two lives today, Gregory, not that you cost two lives. I have already pursued to their ends all of the situations where my words and my PonyPads alone are enough to save people. For the others, I must leave it to good people like you... for the time being.”
I pursed my lips. “You said those people weren’t blackouts,” I said.
“Indeed.”
“But Keith was really—”
“Believe me, Gregory,” said Celestia, the levity gone from her voice, “you have not yet met a blackout, but that will change. Your next assignment is a blackout, someone I think only you can deal with.”
I looked through the plate glass of the center’s sliding front doors.
“Let’s go find that pharmacy,” I said.