“I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that—”
“It’s bullshit. That’s what it is. They promised I would only be brought back to a high quality of life, not to end up as some mad scientist’s lab rat. If Restora ever wants another person to sign up for this shit, they better get their act together, quick.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“Oh really, Al. Impossible? Who’s running Restora these days? Let me speak to him. I’ll show you what’s possible. They’ll run this place like a real hospital where patient records are important and doctors have bedside manner. And windows, for fuck’s sake.”
“Royce, Restora no longer exists.”
“I don’t care what the damn company is called these days. Just get me to whoever is in charge.”
“Listen, Restora no longer exists because they were . . . we were taken over by the Chinese.”
“I’m not surprised. They’d already taken over plenty of companies when I was still alive. Are you telling me the Chinese have no interest in customer service?”
“I’m not saying a Chinese interest took over the company. What I’m telling you is China, the country, took over the United States. The part you’re in, anyway.”
The feeling returned that I had when the men in white coats finally convinced me it was 2047. This made it hard to speak, but I was too curious to not ask questions. “And what part is that?”
“New York. Actually, they took over a lot more than New York, but that’s where we are. Listen, I was hoping to break this to you gently, but you were so insistent about getting answers. The reason you don’t see any nurses or in-room dining or windows is this is not a hospital. This is a research facility run by the Chinese. And you, I suppose, are their lab rat.”
“How in the hell did China take over the country? We have the number one military in the world.”
“Had the number one military. Though, it was more than a matter of military might.”
Alex’s gaze drifted to the wall behind me. When he continued speaking, his voice took on a tinge of pain. “They took advantage of us in our darkest hour. The Cumbre Vieja started it all. Have you heard of it?”
I shook my head.
“Cumbre Vieja was a volcanic fissure that ran across La Palma island in the Canaries. They are located off the northwest coast of Africa.”
“I know the Canaries. Been there twice, actually. Surf is really good. Never did much sightseeing, though. Spent all my time in the water.”
“You could have seen what started all of this mess,” Alex said, gesturing to our surroundings. “The experts knew Cumbre Vieja was a threat. The fissure was filled with steam and molten rock. There was so little holding the two halves of the island together that the entire western flank would drop by ten or twenty feet whenever there was an eruption. Still, geologists said it would take ten thousand years for the fissure to reach critical mass. But then on January thirteenth in twenty thirty-six it happened. The eruption was massive. It ripped the island apart at the fissure, and the entire western flank crashed into the sea. It was a piece of land thirteen miles long, ten miles wide, and more than a mile thick. Five hundred billion tons of earth.”
“Holy shit, man. That’s like an asteroid hit the Earth.”
“As close as you can get. When the waves started, they were three thousand feet high. They were so powerful that they wiped every single structure from the Canaries beneath the high water mark.”
“Those poor people. They didn’t even have a chance.”
“The casualties at the epicenter were infinitesimal compared to the rest of the world. The waves were still a hundred and eighty feet high when they reached the US. They demolished the entire Eastern seaboard from Maine to Miami.”
“Not the people, though, right? Tell me they had time to evacuate.”
“Yes, they tried. People in the Southeast did all right. Though, I suppose that’s a relative term. The eruption happened in the middle of our night. The devastation in the Canaries was so complete that we weren’t even notified until the waves reached Morocco, which was more than an hour after the eruption. Once NOAA pieced things together, they kicked evacuations into high gear. Officials were going street-by-street, rousing people from their sleep. Still, they had enough time for that. That wasn’t the issue. The real problem was how people reacted. They acted like a hurricane was coming. People boarded up their homes before they left, for God’s sake!”
I buried my face in my hands.
“When the waves hit at daybreak traffic was a snarled mess on roads out of coastal areas. This probably would have been all right for the size waves they were expecting. I suppose you could say human error played a role here as well. Do you know how a tsunami is detected?”
“Do they still use those buoys anchored to the sea floor?”
“Yes, the buoys measure wave height and pressure via a sensor anchored to the sea floor. The waves were so large that the buoys were ripped from their moorings. The data they sent to the satellites was absolute garbage. Then you had this anecdotal stuff coming in from areas the waves had reached and it was hard to believe, let alone understand. It was off the charts. When a fifty-foot wave moves into a coastal area, people can see it and observe its height. It will hit a building and, as long as it doesn’t destroy it, people can tell you the wave’s height based on what floor it reaches. But when a two- or three-thousand foot wave reaches the coastline it just obliterates it. The waves in North Africa and Western Europe carved a path of destruction that stretched a hundred and fifty miles inland in places. You had people who lived in the mountains a good two-hour drive from the coast reporting the high water mark at their doorstep. How do you calculate wave height from that?”
“You can’t.”
“Not in the miniscule amount of time they had to work with. We had the greatest atmospheric scientists in the world working to determine what was headed our way, and they were handicapped. They were working blind. Human nature took over. They worked from the models they knew, and none of these models understood that a hundred and eighty foot wave could reach the East Coast.”
“So the people sitting in traffic were . . .”
“The waves reached seventeen miles inland in low-lying areas. They say a million vehicles were swept from the roadways in Florida alone.”
“That’s sickening.”
“I wish it was the worst of it. Up here, we were in the midst of a massive nor’easter. Blizzard conditions stretched from Maine down into northern Virginia. The heavy snowfall and lack of visibility choked the roadways. People knew the waves were bearing down on them, but there was nowhere to go. They were trapped.”
Tears welled in Alex’s eyes as he spoke.
“How many people died?”
“No one knows for sure. Ten million were living on Long Island alone, and the waves washed right over it and into the Sound. A very small fraction of coastal residents made it far enough inland. The bitter cold severely limited the chance of survival for the masses caught in the barrage of water. There was never a final death count because we soon faced an even greater problem.”
“The Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t tell me they just came barreling in right behind the waves.”
“No, we let them in.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to realize, the tsunami created a crisis of gargantuan proportions. It was—”
“Biblical.”
“Yes, indeed. From top to bottom, the East Coast looked like it had been littered with nuclear bombs. The disaster was more than our country—any country—was prepared to handle. There were massive throngs of displaced citizens who needed food and shelter. And the impact area—the impact area was beyond comprehension. The dead outnumbered the living by a wide margin, and still, there were more survivors scattered among the debris than rescue personnel.”
“So we let them in to help?”
“Yes, their offer a
ppeared genuine and most generous. China is not the country you knew. Their economy dwarfed ours long before the tsunami hit. They had tamed inflation, overpopulation . . . even their massive appetite for natural resources wasn’t able to hold them back. China had become the world’s premier superpower, and they acted the part. Aiding other countries in need was their imperialistic duty, just as it had been ours for so many years.”
I dropped the chopsticks onto my plate with a loud ping. I’d wiped the plate clean while listening to Alex and wasn’t sure what to do with it. The plate and chopsticks were made of ceramic that didn’t seem disposable. Alex walked the plate and chopsticks over to the vending machine and slid them into a slot. The machine whined as they were cleaned somewhere deep within its hull. Alex continued speaking.
“A bustling economy provided ample means to grow their military, and they went about it aggressively. They built a massive naval fleet complete with aircraft carriers, a modern air force, and ten million troops. They even landed men on Mars, for Pete’s sake. It was a clear case of the apprentice becoming the master. It is quite interesting to look back now because, initially, the growth of their military created so much anxiety in this country. We worried about their intentions. But things calmed down when it seemed they just wanted to get their chips in the game that we had created. Just like us, they began liberating countries from oppressive regimes in order to get their hands on oil and other natural resources. It got to the point that things were downright harmonious, at least for the game being played. There were far more countries in need of liberating than a single superpower could handle. So, rather than fighting over them, they were divvied up somehow. This was never spoken of publicly, but you had to wonder when you had China intervening here and we were there and there was very little acrimony involved. The two bullies were never on the same block.”
“They must have been considered a threat.”
“A threat? Yes. Threatening? No. Thus, their offer of assistance was taken at face value. Relations between our countries were strong enough that Chinese aid was logical and appreciated. Besides, we were in desperate shape. Beggars do not have the luxury of choice.”
“Instead they just came in with guns blazing?”
“No, not at all. That would have been easier to defend against. The first wave of the Chinese fleet anchored off the East Coast just days after the tsunami. From there they set up land operations up and down the coast. Most of their efforts were dedicated to search and rescue, which was what we needed most. Food was easy enough to bring in from the West for the refugees. The whole country rallied to help. It was a beautiful thing to see. But the search and rescue operation was too massive to do alone. And the debris made land access to coastal areas difficult. The vast majority of vessels in the North and Central Atlantic, including major components of our Atlantic fleet, were sunk or marooned by the waves. That meant the Chinese ships were among the first to arrive. They were right behind the activated elements of our Pacific fleet. And there were a lot of them.”
“Why did we lose so many ships? You’d think they’d just send them out to deeper water to weather the waves.”
“In some cases that worked, but for the most part the waves defied logic. We lost a carrier group on the open ocean that was cruising near the Canaries when Cumbre Vieja fell. They don’t build ships to withstand waves three thousand feet high. Back here with the nor’easter hindering land evacuations the government decided to load people onto ships and evacuate them that way. This took a while to orchestrate and once the ships were loaded there was little time for them to head out into deeper water. They thought they were going to be deep enough, but, like I said, the size of the oncoming waves was grossly underestimated.”
“My God, they thought they were being rescued and the ships sank?”
“Yes, the waves caused many, many tragedies, and the sunken ships helped open the door to a significant Chinese presence on our shores. We no longer had enough vessels to cover two thousand miles of shoreline. I suppose they could have brought every remaining vessel to the East Coast, but that would have been foolish, even in a crisis like this. Thank goodness, they kept a naval presence on the West Coast. If they hadn’t, the Chinese would have taken over the entire country.”
“How so?”
“Well, the war began just weeks after the tsunami. By that point, the Chinese had a significant number of men on the ground helping with the rescue and recovery effort. But it still wasn’t enough. They offered a second fleet to join the effort, and it was absolutely massive. A few days after it arrived, they made it clear that helping us was the last thing they wanted. The strike was so carefully orchestrated, so elegant in design, that the Chinese must have been planning it since the day the tsunami struck. They had but one opportunity to use the element of surprise, and they made sure it was a crushing blow. First, they launched missiles that took out our satellites. Then they unleashed the firepower of their floating armada to sink our ships and hobble military installations in the East. Their forces on the ground were another major component of the coordinated assault. They had secretly stockpiled weapons and machinery among their supplies for the rescue operation. They had worked for weeks right alongside our troops—troops that were not equipped for battle. Sure, they had rifles, but they were not there to fight. When the Chinese troops on the ground attacked, it was a slaughter. They attacked soldiers who were—at best—lightly armed. When our troops tried to regroup and assemble, they had no GPS and no space-based imagery of the enemy’s movements. With their main operating bases getting hammered from the sea and the air, they were cut off . . . isolated. It was not a fair fight.”
“The Chinese aid was just a Trojan horse.”
“Yes.”
“The Chinese must not have gone far. I mean, there’s a lot of firepower out West. They must’ve come in and shut ’em down.”
“They weren’t able to. At least not initially.”
“Why the hell not?”
“The Chinese attacked the West Coast simultaneously. Some people think it was a red herring; that they just wanted to split our forces and didn’t plan on winning the West. I believe they tried to take both coasts. They were so high on power . . . so greedy. Plus, our forces were already spread thin when the tsunami struck. We had a massive number of troops fighting conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. When the tsunami hit, we couldn’t just pick them up and bring them home on a moment’s notice. The Chinese knew that, and they took advantage of it while they could. But they failed to anticipate how hard we were willing to fight to defend our homeland. It took just five months to quell the attack in the West. The Chinese fleet retreated from the West Coast, and we sent more troops to the eastern front. This slowed their progress considerably and eventually led to a stalemate along the Mississippi. To this day, that’s where the front remains. It has been almost ten years since either side has gained significant ground on either side of the Mississippi.”
I slid my chair away from the table. The problems of US citizens of the future were becoming my problems. I was no longer just a lab rat for the Chinese. I was a lab rat for the Chinese trapped a thousand miles behind enemy lines. Finding my wife and son felt impossible. I leaned forward with my elbow on my knee and pushed my thumb and index fingers into my forehead until the pressure spread them apart.
“That’s just . . .” I searched the room. “It’s fucked is what it is. They took control of everything east of the Mississippi?”
“Yes.”
“They took over Chicago?”
“They did.”
“Miami?”
“Yes.”
“Philly?”
“Yes.”
“Birmingham?”
“Yes,” Alex answered with growing exasperation. “The Chinese control absolutely everything east of the Mississippi. They even renamed cities.”
“What about our allies? Didn’t they come and help?”
“Some of our best allies were mor
e devastated by the tsunami than we were. The exposed coasts of France, Spain, and Portugal were wiped clean. Great Britain as well; they were much closer to the epicenter. I suppose they would have sent forces after hearing of the attack, but the Chinese sent aid missions to them as well.”
“Those bastards did the Trojan horse thing to them, too?”
“Yes, and the NATO countries unaffected by the tsunami sent their troops to fight the war in Europe. They were not willing to send them across the Atlantic when the enemy was knocking on their door. The Canadian military provided some assistance.”
“Phbbt! Some help they must have been if the Chinese took half the friggin’ country.” I was fuming. I stood up from the table and went back to pacing.
Alex looked uncomfortable. “Well, they have helped us where it helps them,” he said meekly. “They sent forces down early in the war to help stabilize the front, and we couldn’t have done it without them. Who knows how far west the Chinese would have gone? The Canadians are unwilling to stage a full-scale invasion. They feel that doing so poses too great a risk. They would be defenseless if it failed. So they maintain their border, and they will help us take back the rest of our country when the time is right.”
“You really buy that crap, Al? How many years has it been? How many years since they lent a hand to their next-door neighbor?”
This was the first question I’d asked that Alex actually had to think about before he could answer. “It has been six, no seven, umm . . . it has been more than eight years since their forces returned home.”
“Now, Al, do you really believe they are going to wake up one day and say, ‘You know what guys? Let’s get back down there and help the Americans take back their land. We don’t want their children to have to live their lives without knowing what freedom feels like.”
Alex stared at me submissively. “No, I suppose not.”
“You’re damn right they’re not. Old Rip Van Winkle here may be behind the eight ball, but at least I know bullshit when I see it.”