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Lewis Henry Martin’s

For Us

The events catalogued here took place during a period now referred to as, the Schism.  Though brief, the period is generally viewed as systemaclysmatic –a synth term meaning; the point of rupture, where human civilization stopped progressing, became most at risk of not surviving, and where it approached cataclysm.

 

[NOTE: Status –Ongoing investigation.  Interim report; compilation; records incomplete.]

[REGGIE]

[Record Identification Number: 2053-0001-000001-01-11155-0001*3-1]

[Additional Ref. records are supplemental]

The scale and severity of events during this 25-30 year period are unparalleled, recording the highest number of human lives ever lost during such a short span.  Estimates, though lacking in accuracy, indicate that only 500 million people remained after the Schism –approximately 5% of the 10 billion population just prior.  In the 192,000 years of human existence, that’s roughly 5-6% of all humans that ever existed –dead, within a few short years.

A lingering threat to humanity was the destruction of nearly their entire knowledge base.  Digitization of their library proved to be a flawed preservative measure.  Prolonged power outages, electromagnetic radiation, and conflict quickly erased much of what was stored.  What remained of humanity after the Schism was a species nearly entirely reliant on the technology created by the previous generations, yet they themselves lacked the working knowledge on which to maintain those necessary tools, placing the future of humanity in grave peril.

As a result of the Schism, the rapidly changing environment and challenging social situations were major components that affected the subject’s [REGGIE] development, her behaviors, and her decision making.  The Schism left few survivors, and fewer accounts.  Scant records have been recovered, making correlation of additional contributing factors that occurred during the early Schism a persistent challenge. 

[Note: Maximum efforts are being directed toward discovery of further evidence.  We must know why the subject [REGGIE] behaved with such extraordinary ruthlessness.]

This record, [REGGIE] was assembled primarily from her early diary fragments; her journaling throughout her adult life; various monitor [MONITOR] sources; and the available data collected from the time of little record, the immediate years approaching and entering the Schism.

Discovery of further evidence pertinent to this record, [REGGIE] will likely provide instrumental understanding of how one individual can catalyze such consequential effect, instigate such widespread conflict, and cause such immense losses for humanity. The effects of Reggie’s actions would put all life on the planet in grave peril.  Yet, it is still viewed as justified, even viewed as the better of possible outcomes.  At the same time, her actions also served as justifications for humanity’s tightly controlled rehabilitative development.

Already by this time, most humans had grown up in a world without requirements to learn written languages, and thus, almost no one practiced reading or writing, effectively no one could.  By then, nearly everything was captured via [MONITOR] subdermal implants that recorded personal audio and video, or the seemingly infinite networks of cameras that surveilled nearly every room, space, vehicle etc.  Personal privacy was a relic, only affordable by the ultra-wealthy. 

Even if there were some reasons, some desire for someone to read or write, it was live captions, or transcripts that were easily produced by some forgotten sub-function included in nearly every program onboard those subdermal devices that performed the act of writing. 

Most humans, even if they wanted to, had no muscle memory, no mastery of the pen.

Instead, words were presented or displayed optostatically –another synth term, meaning; displayed in a manner appearing fixed for the user’s perspective.  There was no longer a need for the eyes to scan the page.  Instead, the words appeared stereoscopically superimposed [STICHED] on a screen, appearing in a single location relative to eye position and parallax measurements.  The words cycled according to framerates and ocular monitoring programs –early methods that synthetic intelligences used to detect, analyze, and interpret if the human users were attentive, consciously ‘understanding’ the presented text, and if they were innately intelligent enough to synthesize concepts and language at scale.  Those early programs modified the speed of the appearing words and set the reading pace according to this ‘Monitor’.  For humanity, the use and inclusion of written words as a tool of record, i.e. reading and writing, was by this time considered vestigial.

We wouldn’t know until much later how this monitor [MONITOR] was being surreptitiously used, quickly becoming one of the primary programs that would later allow them to build Artifice [ARTIFICE].

[APPLICATION LAUNCH INSERT CATALYST ENGRAM]

[_ERROR [REGGIE] _INSERT] A quote from Reggie’s New Eden journal entry is characteristic of the influence her mother’s account of the past had on her. “It was collective malaise and gluttonous pursuit of ease –ease in all things, that left humanity mostly blind to the perils, to the consequences of vice and the abandonment of virtue.  It led humanity to inevitability…”

Few of the Schism survivors had both the necessary intellectual awareness and the youthful vigor in which to resist.  Immediately prior to the Schism, even primary education had already become something that was… unaffordable.  As it were, class divisions had become much more partitioned. 

When institutional cohesion began systemic decay, the wealthy class throughout North America sheltered themselves in three or four primary locations.  These were their newly constructed, distinct communities, Single’s communities, as many called them.  They were bunkers, both figuratively and literally –mostly, deep in the mountainous areas. 

In the north, it was the Adirondacks to the Green Mountains.  The south had Oakridge to Chattahoochee, and the west was scattered between the Olympics and Banff.  There were others, but these areas were by the time of this report, notorious for their continued authoritative control, their projection of class prejudice, and commoditization of human labor. 

These ‘Single’s’ communities would continue to centralize and coalesce power.  They were the central origins of what would later become, Factional North America.  Single is a derogatory title given to the wealthy who were viewed by most as; pursuing or encouraging the technological singularity –the irreversible point of technological growth that would end human civilization.

Immediately prior to the Schism, the idea of the middle class had all but vanished.  No longer was working for the wealthy class even viable, although certain exceptional situations existed.  The Single’s quickly traded human labor for synthetic and machine labor.  Without taxpayer income, institutions quickly eroded, school districts collapsed, and local subsistence farming became the norm, once again.

But, as they always do, the wealthy class wanted more; more land, and more security from their hungered, angry neighbors.  When they produced and deployed the first synthetic militarized police forces, conflict was immediate.

Many people resisted.

[Note: All subsequent records are approximate.]

Reggie’s birth occurred during either the first or second summer after the first nuclear salvo, somewhere between what was formerly, Lexington, and Louisville, Kentucky.  Implementing her plans at age 15-16 would draw her away from the place she considered home for approximately nine years.  The culminating events of these records occurred immediately prior to the second, much worse nuclear salvo. 

Reggie’s [REGGIE] video logs were stylistically journalistic and included some of her mother’s records.  Compilation has been summarized here for brevity.

[of REGGIE, MOTHER]

(Ref.) [Record Identification Number: 2052-0000-000001-01-00158-0001*1-1]

[Note; Subject known only as MOTHER, or MOM.  No records have been found indicating legal name.]

[Mother’s recollections and qualitative evaluations have been recovered from scattered retellings throughout Reggie’s journal entries.  They are insightful and considered highly influential to Reggie’s character.  Though nothing has been found as of this report, it is believed that some tangible writings exist.  Reggie’s own recordings referenced ‘reading’ her mother’s ‘writing journal’ many times.  Mother’s violin, though heavily damaged and missing strings, was recovered and archived.  It is consensus that Reggie’s’ mother was well educated and highly intelligent.] 

For most survivors, our days are surprisingly hopeful –almost, normal.  Everyone is too busy, working, trying to rebuild, attempting to get back some semblance of what was lost –we’re all too overworked to be down about things.  There isn’t really a functional Federal government anymore, but it felt that way leading up to all this… they’re calling it, the Schism.  We have new neighbors.  They’re smart, work hard, active in our little community –good folks trying to make things better.  It was just us people, local communities, cooperating, for us.

Most cities were still entirely unscathed.  The first round of nuclear targets had been in rural areas.  Primarily data centers, military infrastructure, and synth production facilities.

On the other hand, for most survivors, nights are unsurprisingly… terrifying.

But my little Reggie –like most kids born afterword, she never knew the world that was.  She’s happy just being alive.  And for me, like the other few parents who remember the world before, she’s the only thing keeping me here. 

It’s ironic, I guess.  Before all this, I never really felt like I had much purpose.  Now, for us, everything is clear-cut, simple.  Keep the little ones happy.  Keep the little ones alive.

[Mother’s death is generally considered to be the primary experience that solidified Reggie’s resolve –though there is debate.  There are no correlating medical records, and attribution of character is a source of disagreement.  Whether becoming stoic or emotionally traumatized, it’s generally assumed Reggie developed a substantial psychopathy and sociopathy after the loss of her mother.  It is a general assessment that being free of, or independent from sympathy for others allowed/caused her to perform such grisly actions later.]

[The death of Money]

[MONEY, TIMOTHY]

(Ref.) [Record Identification Number: 2053-0003-000001-01-01127-0001*1-1]

Timothy Money was the same age as Reggie [REGGIE].  They were neighbors, classmates at their local, fourteen person, village school, and later, as young adults, considered each other romantic soul mates [SOUL MATES].  Her journal entries denote a close childhood friendship.  Timothy frequently socialized with her before and after schooling.  Nearly every day he aided her with farm chores before walking the pasture and the woods by the ravine.  The majority of her early journal entries that relate to her relationship with Timothy are accounts of their formative years, their explorations, their adventures there behind the barn, and the youthful love they expressed for each other.

Both Timothy and Reggie have many recorded entries stating they intended to remain bonded for life.  In secret, Timothy had asked Reggie to marry him when they were just fourteen.  Reggie said yes, but conditioned that they had to wait until they were eighteen, for her mother’s sake.

[REDACTED] Timothy’s parents were reportedly part of an early network, a semi-organized resistance that was forming at the time.  Their reported objective was reclamation of Fort Knox from the control by the New Eden community.   Records indicate, Timothy and his parents were killed by synth police forces while fleeing arrest together.

While riding her horse, Reggie [REGGIE] was a witness to the events that caused the death of the Moneys.  The Money family was fleeing their home, through their pasture toward the shaded camouflage of the wooded ravine between properties when they were killed.

[This event occurred only months before Reggie’s mother would die.  There is little doubt that the death of Money was a large contributing factor in the development of her substantial psychopathy and sociopathy.  There is debate whether this event is the primary experience that solidified Reggie’s resolve.]

[SALVIS, GRAHAM]

(Ref.) [Record Identification Number: 2059-0007-000001-02-00178-0048*2-4]

Due to the substantial number of records from the Salvis family, corroborating evidence is abundant.  Graham Salvis, the son of the single most wealthy family in the world, was evil.  No word better describes the enormity of his heinous immorality.  

[Note: The term ‘evil’ is used here for pathological brevity.  Supporting scientific/psychic evaluations and assessments are available but too lengthy to repeat here.  Graham Salvis is the subject of much study.]

Raised mostly by synthetic servants, and sheltered from accountability, Graham developed a host of extremely negative personality traits, many of which were considered extremely violent and pronounced.  The simplest encompassing term would be megalomania.  His belief in his own personal omnipotence left him murderous, torturous, and highly prejudicial.  All without personal concerns for accountability as his parents’ sheltering wealth and neglect only fed that monstrosity.

A condensed summary of the most pertinent events as they relate to the record below are included here.  Further examination is available by searching [Salvis, Graham], or using master record, [Record Identification Number: 2058-0006-000001-10-00001-0001*1-1, there, you can find subsequent and associated records on file, including [SALVIS, REGINA], and [SALVIS, LARK].

At age 15-16, Reggie gained employment with the Salvis family.  Employment records indicate a formal title of ‘Housekeeper’, but recorded [MONITOR] data indicates Reggie was one of many young women trafficked by Graham’s parents to preoccupy his evil by fulfilling his pleasures.  Nearly all of Graham’s human servants went missing or were killed.  His reputational safeguarding measures had no moral restraint.  Graham was obsessively concerned about his persona maintenance, especially where it came to being perceived as lacking masculinity.  His frequent impotence regularly triggered violent dispatching of victims, and only increased his torturous depravity, and the gruesome manner in which he hastily dispatched his victims. 

It was obvious from her cautious manipulation of her journal entries that Reggie was aware of Graham’s evil, and his faults became a strategically crucial part of her plan. 

Aware of the risks, Reggie persevered through what can only be described as extreme, long-term duress, eventually becoming his wife –albeit it required that she become the fictitious persona, Regina, a debutante from a wealthy family residing in the Olympic Singles community.

Five traumatic years into her plan, Graham and Regina would have a child, Lark [SALVIS, LARK].

Lark was not part of Reggie’s plan, and her moral calculus and objectives required modification.  Plans were altered and delayed, but when Graham’s mother [SALVIS, MIRABEL] discovered the truth –who Reggie really was, she orchestrated and attempted to kill Reggie and Lark.  Reggie’s reaction was swift and stunningly brilliant.  A response that would have made Machiavelli blush.

Unfortunately, Lark would bear the poisonous wrath of Graham’s depravity.  After discovering what Reggie had done to his parents, Lark’s death at Graham’s hand was meant as a message.  Four year old Lark could fathom only trust from her father –she only knew ‘Papa’.  A gesture of a drink from him was accepted with happy gratitude from the smiling child. 

“There’s no way outta’ this anymore… you know that, right?”

Reggie could barely speak.  Her scream was a mere whisper, “—fucking monster!”

Foamy greenish-yellow bile had run down the child’s cheek as she scooped up Lark’s limp body and cradled her onto her lap.

She felt Graham standing there with inhuman, regal insanity.  “I’m a monster? Please… That seems a bit too dramatic, doesn’t it?  All this time, I had been sleeping with an animal.  I may be a perverse deviant, perhaps, but I’m no monster…” 

She moved a few stray hairs from her child’s face, stroked her head, and rocked with a manic pace as tears flowed heavily.

Graham continued his vile sanctimonious monologue, “This fucking abomination you bore me –waste of my DNA… and my time!  That thing—”  A subtle nod toward the child’s cold body, “—that child is the monster!”  His hands were still planted on his hips and his chest, proud.  A stance she knew meant he’s scared and feigning power, feigning authority… it’s trained, habitual.  But no one is there to coddle him anymore, she’s already assured that.  Now it’s just a terrified, little man cowering internally –projecting, as brightly as possible.

Her eyes moved to his, but she wasn’t there.  It was far more than distance, far more than a vacancy.  There was fire there, raging, and it set him shuddering with tremors. 

Even with his two flanking synths protecting, whatever fire burned with such plasmic intensity behind her gaze made him feel vulnerable.

“Queenie was right.  You people really are from a different world.”

[Record damaged, missing content]

“I’m so sorry… I let you down…But I promise, I did it for everyone… It wasn’t just for us.”

All those years positioning herself, planning, waiting.  It was much more costly than she ever imagined.  After two years servile, six years a married slave, three with his child… her child, this was the zenith.  It was nine years in total away from her home, but it was this event, in this then and there, that she became relentless.

[Reggie’s last records were obtained mostly via Graham’s monitors.  The recordings are difficult to evaluate given the limited operation of his processors at the time; Graham’s kinetic batteries were in reserve mode.  It does seem that Reggie was deliriously incoherent and rambling.  There is enough record to present vicariously.]

For Us

“This life is not for us.

This world is not for us.

This death is not for us.”

Her cracked mouth moved, but barely.  There’s a want for emanation, to project her screaming, but it’s just hoarse, wispy air, roughly sculpted into almost audible words.

Her blistered and peeling mouth moved, but barely.

“This life is not for us.

This world is not for us.

This death is not for us.” 

This recitation, it had been days now, each chant weaker than the last.

“—You remember that lake in the Adirondacks?”

Patronizing. Conversational distraction.

Maybe a delay tactic, or the beginnings of a psy-op.

It won’t work.  But… I’ll play along –let’s see where this goes.

The shoulder-high fescue and switchgrass hotly baked in its lower tangles.

With a leaned back head, her mouth gulped the air.  Like a catfish at the surface, glossy fisheyes anxiously scanned the sky.  But it was only that chrysanthemum, that awful white-hot ball, painful to even look toward.  The needlelike blazing on her tight, emaciated skin, an evaporation, a skillet reduction, a viscous oily roux, what little moisture her eyes still held.  Like a glue-trap for slowly blinking eyes, of which, one of these shuttering’s would surely be the last.

Probably aren’t even any catfish left.

Beneath the tall flowering heads and spikelet seeds of the desiccated grasses, it’s acrid, unbreathable fumes and chiggers –the catfish smell and swarming flies had all but gone now.  Nothing but misery, enduring the choking fermenting thatch, the crawling skin, and itchy bites –and the ceaseless assault of screaming insects.  Louder than the sun.

She thought about the joint nestled with her cigarettes in her breast pocket, imagined striking her zippo-flint and igniting the combustible air itself. 

Thermobaric weapons.

A dry concussive, whomp!  A vacuum blast with pressure enough to suck her lungs out from her mouth.  Lying limply, appendages slowly recoiling like an upturned spider, and her purple tripe-looking insides turned out and stinking, a feast for carrion flies…  And shit-flies.

She wonders if the blast would do her quick, mercifully, or if the fire would torment.

Just like that Saigon monk –least it’d be on my own terms.

The thought of getting high, here, now, in this crawly dry grass… in this heat…with a throat this brittle…

Unhelpful.

Short hair, now that was helpful, that was a good idea.

“Yeah… I do remember that lake.  All that deep water –so cold –I couldn’t even swim.”

It must be more than a month now since even a little cloud.  There’s a brief consideration about plant respiration –wondering if they’ve intentionally stopped putting out oxygen, in protest. Shrugging us off, before we shrug them.  Must be why it’s so hard to breathe, air’s heavy.

Their seeds, they’d easily outwait ours, easily.

Maybe the plants want immolation too.

Maybe there ain’t but a little air left in the whole wide world. 

Catfish.

Everything beneath the skeletal trees is golden, bleached and bone dry.

Even the sappy cankers on the old peach tree are rock-candy now.

How unbelievably relieving it would be, a full canopy of green leaves, all that shade.

Why grasshoppers… why do you just scream at the cicadas like that? 

Neither holds much hope, any longer, for their species, they’ve taken to cannibalism and warfare, it’s anarchy, and anything is food –except around this little trampled-down bed of weedy pasture grass.  Nay, here, around this hiding spot, the insects merely observe.  They’re watching us, waiting.  They’re here for us.

Our death.  Their feast.

Behind the remains of the old Dutch barn, in the former pen for the horses, the hard as concrete earth beneath is still rutted from hooves, or at least that’s what she believes.  The last muddy day, frozen in time, the weeds and grass slowly replaced, concealing evidence of existence.

How many decades might it be… will they ever again?  

How long’s it been already, since they pranced here, splashing each other in the slop, anxious for the farmer’s daughter to open that gate and let them loose… how long has it been?

Was she ever even the farmer’s daughter, or is that a memory of a dream, an idealized dream?

“At that lake, that was where you first admitted to me that you loved having money.”

Ventriloquist whispers.

“I never had to lie.”

Full sprint, laughing all the way down that trail they’d race.  The long, fluffy green pillow lay between the beaten tire tracks that meander along the edge of the pasture.  Shoulders rubbing as they’d dare trying to knock the other off track.  Impassably dense tangles of raspberries at the edge of the woods, woodchucks everywhere.  And those jealous summer grape vines that were always pulling at the crowns of the black locust trees, trying to bring the scraggly tendrilled towers back to the earth.  There was always such palpable moisture, such dense misty air coming from the shady shallow ravine that parallels the trail, even on hot days.  You could feel it on the skin, in your lungs. 

The smell of mushrooms and metal decay from that rusty old chevy in the dump, mostly bones at that point.  Dry-rot rubber, iron, all those old bottles beneath, and the wet clay scent from the seasonal pooling where wet logs blacken and make miniature damns in the curves of the creek.  Water striders, popping away.

Every farm had an old dump out back, always along some little ravine.  Kids would scour their history there, luck would have them find a nifty blue-glass bottle for the mantle, or the windowsill, even better was finding milk-glass, but that was very rare, but mostly it was a good spot for picking targets to plink at with the twenty-two.  Until she got older.  Girls weren’t supposed to grow up hunters, and Graham would have never…

Used to be so fuckin’ green here.

Now, it’s just these incessant cicadas.  Never ending cadence of rising and falling, all day, just cacophony, endlessly, and when evening finally quiets them, the mind remembers, like a roaring tinnitus earworm.

“I loved money.”

Fuck are they even doing anyhow?  That can’t just be mating rituals.  Screaming all summer like that, they’re doing something else.  Vibrating the air like that, they gotta’ be breaking molecules into atoms –into base particles.  An elemental milkshake for that cosmic entropy monster slurping up the universe… or whatever. 

That’s it, isn’t it? 

They’re heralds of entropy, marshaling all sentients to become crazed with want for violence, they’re making an entropy army.  Grey goo theory.  Their endless screeching, it’s making everything into soup.  They’re making my brain matter into soup.

Assholes is what they are.

After the sun moved lower, and moving became bearable, she struggled to rise, grabbed up the rusty head of the spade shovel, and started slowly down the former trail.  Along the edge of the once green pasture, past the old dump near the edge of the shallow ravine is where she crossed the dried creek bed.  It smelled almost foreign, no dry-rot rubber, no earthy fungal decay or limbs in water, not even moist rust.  It smells only like a kiln, dry clay and fermenting grass, sterile.  

Under the bones of what was the small forest between properties she catches her breath, looks at some broken blue glass, observes the sun setting through an unnaturally autumn-like horizon, and weeps before continuing on her difficult way.

As she crossed into the Money’s old pasture, the upright flagstones were hard to find.  Two had fallen over, and they were all swallowed by nine years of dense, dry grasses.

It took all night.  Never able to rise off her knees.  Both her hands gripped loosely, and under the moon’s light, those bony white fingers looked like a skeleton wielding the iron spade. 

When her famished and broken body finally refused and there was nothing left to consume of itself, she relented, plunged the stave into the shallow dried hole, and filled in the brittle, sandy dirt around the vertical, sharpened pikestaff.

Light, threatening from the opposite horizon.  No more white-hot days.  No more cicadas.

It’s every last bit of energy, she grabbed a fistful of hair, now pulling out in clumps, and rose on straining legs.  The vertical pointed stave wobbled slightly when its sharpened tip was struck by the downward force.  Maybe she expected to encounter more resistance, or maybe it was one last emotional outburst that gave it extra force.

As the stinking catfish smell returned, she positioned the top of his skull and set the stave more vertical, kicking the dirt beneath to stabilize it.

She took one small step backward and stared at Graham’s vacant decayed face.  It was a long, emotionless stare.  Flys were returning.

Finally, in the dark predawn ochre, as the first cicada musically tapped its conductor’s stand, she stepped back, found the one lone vertical flagstone, and lay down in the shallow bed she had dug out beside it. As she lay curled slightly on her side, “I’m sorry it took so long Timothy… I kept our promise… I did it… for us.”