Ohio

11 - Eyes on the Prize

When we played tag in grade school

You wanted to be It.

But chasing boys was just a fad

You crossed your heart you'd quit.

-- The Jackson Five (The Love You Save)

=/\=

They beamed behind a campus building. It was the early evening, and students should have been hurrying to dinner or elsewhere. It was a Sunday and, while there were supposed to be classes the following day, the atmosphere was more charged. Students knew there was something happening, so they strolled together and talked and there was a sense that dinner or fraternities or even studying were somehow less important than protests. Protests felt more mature, and more meaningful.

"What'll we do if we're split up?" Sheilagh asked.

"Actually, I was planning on us splitting up," Rick said.

"Ah," she said, "You're off to find a willing coed?"

"If I can. So, um, we'll witness it all and just beam up independently tomorrow. Use your Communicator – uh, in private – if anything goes awry or if you think you'll be late."

"Sure thing. You gonna use the ship for, uh, for tonight?" she asked.

"Doubtful – but it's not outside the realm of possibility. But, yanno, I'll make sure not to beam up unless I'm alone. So, feel free to take the bed."

"Thanks. Happy hunting."

=/\=

Bogotá, Colombia in 2026 was a place of faded glory. The high rises weren't as nicely kept up, and there was uncollected trash in the streets. Kevin and Tom materialized behind an oil drum near a building.

"Why is this here?" Tom asked, indicating the oil drum. There were several others nearby.

"This is a time of want," Kevin said, "You keep your own food and fuel as close as possible. Fossil fuels are almost all the way gone, but not quite. These barrels – even the empty ones – hold serious value."

"Why would the empty ones have value?"

"If they haven't been cleaned out, there's some residue. It can still be utilized, if it's scraped out properly. And if they are cleaned out, well, the value is in selling them and bluffing. Fill 'em with water, maybe with a tiny bit of residue to add a little aroma, and some sucker's bound to bite."

"You mean be cheated?" Tom drawled.

"Well, yeah. Like I said, there's poverty now. Even the richest of the rich are feelin' it. Scams like that are pretty common."

"And the poor?" Tom asked.

Kevin started to walk around the back of the building, and check for a point of entry, "Oh yeah, the poor – they go hungry, mostly. This is why there's such a huge world military – it's the promise of three squares. 'Course, they usually didn't get three squares, but that didn't stop people from joinin' up. In a lotta the smaller cities in Europe and Asia, soldiers outnumber civilians by at least two to one. And the folks who remain civilians are generally children, pregnant, elderly or disabled. But that's changing."

"How? I mean, how can those people possibly fight?"

"They shouldn't join up, but they do. And they shouldn't be taken, but they are. So you get child soldiers, as young as ten or eleven. You get older ones, in their sixties, and maybe even a few in their seventies. Pregnant women hang in there until their uniforms no longer fit. The physically disabled hide what they can – there's a huge deaf division. The mentally disabled, man, that's the worst – they go in if they can at least follow simple commands."