12 Jan 2050, near Luke AFB, Phoenix, Arizona
It was shortly after dawn when Rex McLure awakened. At
first, he couldn’t remember anything. But as he quickly and
instinctively checked his limbs to verify he was still in one
piece and surveyed the smoldering wreckage scattered on the
ground perhaps a hundred meters from where he lay, the events
preceding the crash began to come back to him. He had been
forced to crash land the Raptor after the ship had been
critically wounded in the air battle. He was amazed to be
alive. He had managed to glide the ship in at a steep angle
and find a patch of barren terrain to use as the crash site.
From the looks of the wreckage, the Raptor’s automated
ejection system must have jettisoned him shortly before
impact. He silently thanked the engineers back at HQ for
perfecting the ejection pod system which had effectively
removed him from the exploding wreckage and placed him safely
out of range of the ensuing firestorm. He realized his
grogginess was the result of the injection given to him as
part of the ejection sequence to temporarily dull his senses
and allow his unconscious body to roll with the forces of
ejection and impact, preventing him from injury due to the
instinctive tendency to brace the muscles against them.
As he pulled his muscled, well-exercised, six foot frame
out of the ejection pod and stirred himself to his feet he
discovered that, other than some cuts and bruises, he had
sustained no real injuries in the crash. Collecting himself,
he noticed his communicator light was signaling messages
awaiting his attention. He punched through the messages:
“Enemy attack successfully repulsed. Four friendlies
confirmed dead, one unaccounted for, twelve enemies confirmed
dead. Report immediately.”
He keyed his communicator as he spoke: “Four oh two
calling Starpoint.”
Almost immediately the base responded: “Four oh two,
this is Starpoint, state your position.”
“You mean you don’t know that?” he responded.
Then he remembered the hit his ship had taken had
knocked out communications, including any way for the base to
know where the Raptor had gone down. He immediately
activated his personal locating beacon, which had been
automatically disabled during the ejection sequence as a
precaution against possible enemy listeners in the area.
“OK, Four oh two, we’ve got you now. Stay put and we’ll
have a team to you shortly. We’re getting nothing from the
ship. What’s its condition?”
“Total loss, I’m afraid,” he said, gazing at the
smoldering wreckage.
“Roger, Four oh two. Sit tight and we’ll send a team.
Starpoint Out.”
“Four oh two Out.”
Rex could hear the sounds of continued action in the
distance, but the area where he had landed seemed quiet,
although he knew he’d have to stay alert as he waited for the
rescue team. He walked a short distance and sat down,
leaning against a scrubby desert tree to wait. As always,
now that the need for immediate action was temporarily gone,
his thoughts turned first to his wife Sally and young son
Ricky. As he allowed his mind to wander, he kept up his by
now instinctive scanning of the skies and ground in all
directions, watching and listening for any signs of
approaching action. This hadn’t been much of a life for his
family and he looked forward to the time when they could
again live a normal life in peaceful times.
The past months since the Breakdown had been anything
but peaceful. After silently thanking God that he had
survived the crash and for giving him more time with his
beloved family, Rex’ thoughts turned to the freeman who had
hired him six months earlier; Hal Richardson was his name.
He wondered what it would be like to be a freeman, able to
wield enough economic clout to secure sovereignty services as
a free individual. Warfare had become a localized phenomenon
after the revolution, which had confirmed the end of the
effectiveness of centralized projection of force.
He thought of the good old days, when the relationship
of a “citizen” to his or her government (determined normally
by place of birth) had conferred freeman-like status on the
citizen, with the government serving the needs of its
citizens and protecting their lives, liberty and property.
The language had been so grand: “A government of, by and for
the people” and limited by strict constitutional safeguards
to a few essential functions.
The old America had been founded on those dreams so long
ago, and had worked well for a time, creating a level of
general peace and prosperity the world had never seen before.
As the years passed, though, its government had steadily
increased the size and scope of its power. This development
had been due not only to corruption, but also to the need to
deal with both internal and external threats until, in the
years before the Breakdown, the “citizens” had begun to feel
more and more like subjects and, finally, victims of coercion
and outright theft in the name of the “common good.”
But the Breakdown had changed all that. A few had seen
it coming in the latter years of the 20th century as the
Information Revolution took off. They had warned of the
twilight of sovereignty as traditionally understood and had
coined terms like “megapolitics” and “the third wave” to
explain how it was to happen.
Although Rex was not of the academic or scholarly bent,
he could see that, in retrospect, their arguments made sense;
it had all seemed to boil down to the logic of violence. As
the cost of centrally projected offensive force (Pax
Americana) had risen and the cost of decentralized defensive
force employed by numerous rebel forces had fallen, it had
simply no longer been possible for the governments of the
economically advanced countries, led by America, to forcibly
maintain free markets, free trade and political stability in
the world.
The more he thought about this explanation, the more
troubled he became by it, since he had been raised as an
idealist to strongly believe in God and God’s direction of
world events, in the idea that the good and right triumphs in
the end, in altruism and in the value of voluntary
cooperation among individuals. His strongly Catholic
religious experience along with deep family and community
social experience rebelled against the implications of the
new order. The events of the Breakdown had seemed to support
the realist idea that raw force determines the order of
things. This explanation seemed to leave out God, to imply
that might makes right, that self-interest rules and that the
basic explanatory principle is the threat and/or use of
physical force, in other words, the “rule of the jungle.”
Rex had been a policeman before the Breakdown. His
family had lived in a suburb of Chicago, a place then in the
heartland of the United States. Since coming to America
from Ireland many generations before, his family had had a
tradition of being military men or policemen. They had
always strongly supported the virtues of law and order and
were ill-prepared for the changes when they came.
The changes came slowly at first, in the world’s
political backwater areas and in America’s and other
industrial nations’ larger cities. They began as an increase
in ethnic and tribal tensions and civil wars in the third
world, a marked increase in the seriousness of social
problems in the developed nations, increasing political
factionalization and a steady rise in the number of sovereign
entities after the end of WWII.
Despite the best efforts of centralized powers
worldwide, the rate of change increased. Riots broke out in
the cities, fringe groups gathered in the countryside. The
centralized institutions of power could have handled these
situations (and did until the latter part of the era) a
handful at a time, but the huge number of these localized
power grabs eventually overwhelmed them.
In the U.S., the turning point had occurred in Miami
when the Chief of Police announced that he could no longer
guarantee order in the city. He advised those able to leave
the area to do so. Within weeks, the same scenario had
transpired in most other major cities, with violence and
terrorism quickly overwhelming the available forces of law
and order. Common people had been shocked to witness the
collapse of the “Thin Blue Line” of police and military that
stood between civilized society and rampant disorder.
Mercifully, the chaos had quickly stabilized into a
standoff between the major contestants for power. These
various groups approximated the “special interest groups” of
divisive politics that had increasingly battled for power in
the years before the Breakdown. Only now, the “war by other
means” of political and economic competition had translated
itself into war by warlike means. There were armed groups
based on race and gender, corporate and religious
affiliation, political persuasion and, of course, small knots
of survivalists dotting the rural landscape. The former
relatively small number (hundreds) of the world’s centralized
“national” dispensers of military and police power fragmented
into many thousands of wielders of force, vying for control
over their local domains.
As it became clear to people that they could no longer
depend on outside help for their defense, they quickly banded
together for common defense against roving armed marauders
and other organized groups. Perhaps the most interesting new
faction were the capitalist “sovereign individuals,” or SI’s
as they became known. These individuals were wealthy enough
to hire their own police and military functions, starting
companies that specialized in offering these services and
contracting them out to fellow SIs and other groups as well.
The internal structure of these groups differed widely.
Some seemed to represent a throwback to an earlier, tribal or
feudal era, where those unable to defend themselves flocked
around a “chief” or “lord” who would do so, for a percentage
of the fruits of their productive efforts. Others seemed
more like communities of equals based on the principles of
self-government and common responsibility. Still others
resembled corporations, with either a single SI or a small
group of powerful leaders at the top of a hierarchical
organization, with responsibility and rewards decreasing
toward the bottom of the hierarchy, but with the overall goal
being preservation and enhancement of the corporate entity.
Rex and the other hired warriors he worked with had been
among the early hires of Hal Richardson’s private military
organization; Force Projection Specialties (FPS), and had
been dispatched on numerous defensive and offensive missions
since then. The goal of the current mission had been to
protect an FPS supply depot from an attack by a group of
well-armed roving marauders. These marauding bands typically
stood for no cause other than satisfying their own lusts for
adventure, wealth and power and bore a strong organizational
resemblance to the big-city street gangs and mafia-connected
groups of the former era.
In one sense, these events had represented the defeat of
the ideal of democracy by capitalism, the end of the dream of
equality before the law and equal protection by the law.
Governments were simply no longer able to continue the
redistributive policies that had taxed the strong to
subsidize the weak. Rather than freedom and justice for all,
which now seemed a naive dream, the new order embodied a
hierarchy of means and rewards, where the level of freedom,
justice and other values formerly claimed equally for all,
was now available in direct proportion to the level of wealth
available to those purchasing it.
After perhaps half an hour of waiting and reflecting on
the events of the recent past, Rex was jolted back to reality
by the sound of the rescue chopper landing nearby. As Rex
jumped to his feet and collected his things, his two friends
and fellow mercenaries Duke Abraham and Mickey Sproul
scrambled out of the helicopter and ran to where he was
standing.
“Are you okay, Rex?” Duke shouted above the roar of the
helicopter’s engine and blades slicing through the air.
“Yeah, just a little shaken up.”
“Can you get back to the chopper?”
“Sure, let’s go.”
The three ran back to the waiting chopper and clamored
aboard, and being the last in, Duke signaled the pilot to
lift off as soon as he cleared the edge of the door. As the
aircraft lifted aloft over the scene of the battle, all four
men were able to survey the results of the battle that had
just taken place. The supply depot had sustained some minor
damage, but was largely intact. Dotting the arid landscape
were the smoking remains of several fighters, both enemy and
friendly, including Rex’s ruined jet, becoming smaller and
blending into the overall battlefield scene as the chopper
gained altitude. In addition to the aerial battle, there had
been ground fighting near the depot which had resulted in
most of the losses on both sides.
Rex was anxious to contact his wife Sally and young son
Ricky, who were living back at the staff quarters of FPS. He
didn’t look forward to the detailed debriefing session during
which the mission analysts would pick his brains for any and
all details of his perspective of the events of today. It
suddenly occurred to him to ask about the four fellow
fighters who had perished in today’s fighting.
“Who didn’t make it back today?”
“Baker, McFarland, Neal and Shattuck,” Duke responded.
“They were part of the ground force defending the Depot
before the air support arrived. Sorry Rex, I know you and
Shattuck were friends.”
Rex didn’t know the first three, other than seeing their
names and faces occasionally in FPS reports, but Bill
Shattuck had been a friend and comrade in arms for four
months. They had participated in many missions together and
Rex and Sally had enjoyed many social occasions with Bill and
Joy. He grimaced as he realized he’d likely be assigned the
task of breaking the news to Joy.
“Why weren’t we called in earlier?” Rex asked.
“The perimeter alarm failed to detect the breach. It
looks like the bad guys may be getting smarter on tactics.
HQ says one of the perimeter boxes was tampered with shortly
before the enemy force was discovered near the Depot.”
“Hmmm,” Rex uttered absently. He was still smarting
about the loss of his friend. He had seen many good men lost
since he’d joined FPS. Although the attacks had grown rarer
as relative stability had been reached, everyone still lived
in a state of constant fear of the next attack. No one was
really secure. This was the price of life in the jungle.
One of the great benefits of working with FPS was the
excellent news and analysis provided by the organization.
The old media outlets like CNN and the other major networks
were gone, having collapsed along with all the other
accessories to centralized political power. Although the FPS
news staff was relatively small, it was able to provide
clear, incisive analysis on what had led to the Breakdown and
the daily events now resulting from it.
While FPS news reported that the Breakdown had been
negative in many ways, especially in the increased level of
resulting violence and the sense of constant uncertainty and
danger which plagued everyone, one good result was that the
emerging sovereign powers were being forced to be more
accountable to their “customers.” Indeed, before the
Breakdown, the idea of government as being the servant of the
people had been all but lost. Those in government had come
to see things in exactly the reverse arrangement: that the
people existed for the benefit of the collective, represented
by government. It was true that different people wanted
different things from their sovereignty provider, with some
preferring more protection and therefore more control of
their lives, but by and large people were receiving what they
wanted from their governing organization, enforcing its
accountability to their needs and wants by the ready ability
to break off the arrangement and join one of the many other
available services. This view of government services as
being more of a contract between service provider and
customer was, in fact, a distinctive feature of the
post-Breakdown emerging order and was in sharp contrast to
the pre-Breakdown view of government as lifelong,
cradle-to-grave provider of needs (or stealer of resources,
depending on one’s view). The hope was that eventually the
violence would diminish as the balance of power stabilized
further, with each individual contracting with their provider
of choice for exactly the sovereign services they desired; no
more, no less.
After a short flight, the helicopter approached an FPS
base about fifty miles from the scene of the Rex’s crash. As
the craft lowered toward the heliport, Rex could see a small
group of men mingling nearby, waiting to welcome the
returning soldiers. Rex pondered how he’d handle breaking
the news to Joy after the obligatory debriefing session. He
wasn’t looking forward to being the bearer of this bad news
but it would be good to see Joy again and try to comfort her
as best he could.
...to be continued