Living History - Ben Essex (brene brown rising strong TXT) 📗

Living History

Ben Essex

“Eripuit Coelo fulmen, mox Sceptra Tyrannis.”

(“He seized the lightning from Heaven and the sceptre from Tyrants.”)

-Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, regarding Benjamin Franklin. March 1778.

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

-Benjamin Franklin, 1817.

I’m flat on my back, and there’s a life flashing before my eyes.

Around me, windows rattle. The floor is shaking-the whole world’s falling to pieces. I’m on a broken train, and it’s kicking itself apart with stress and strain. It could go off the rails at any moment.

The stupid powder wig feels heavy on my head. My clothes are tight; britches and frills soggy with sweat. Behind me, the carriage doors are forced open and five men in body armour burst in. Their heads are helmeted, their eyes are unsympathetic and some of them are bleeding. They’ve just been through a battle.

The armoured men part, and someone else steps up. He’s not dressed like them, not at all. He has a great frilly beard and a tall top-hat. His clothes are immaculately tailored, coloured black. Unlike me, he doesn’t have a belly.

His face is stern and somewhat goat-like. One of his eyebrows seems permanently raised.

‘I’m sorry, Ben,’ says the man who looks exactly like Abraham Lincoln. ‘But honestly, how did you think this was going to end?’

The men advance, weapons lit with crackling blue fire. Some of them also have batons.

I tense.

So let’s review. I’m here, in the body of Benjamin Franklin, about to get my brains beaten out. I could ask myself why_? but I know the answer._

Because I had a deadline.

I close my eyes.

And at that moment, dinosaurs attack.

My real name is Jacob White. I used to have a real body. It was tall and gangly and plain looking, but it was mine.

I used to have a real job, too. I worked for the Applied Fundamentals Division of The Salmon Corporation.

What does an Applied Fundamentals Division do? I don’t really know-no one does. Applied Fundamentals is a warehouse department, a dumping ground for whatever projects the company can’t fit elsewhere. Getting to work in Applied is actually quite a big deal. It means the company considers you smart enough, flexible enough and above all unscrupulous enough to turn your hand to whatever their latest vague and seedy project might be.

The Salmon Corporation is not the most above-board company in the world. Actually, it’s run by the Mafia. I’m not sure precisely which Mafia, since they don’t exactly give out business cards. Wait, that’s a lie. They actually do give out business cards, but the cards don’t go into specifics.

The day my deadline came, I got a business card.

It was a Tuesday. 09:23 A.M. I was late for work.

This was in no way unusual for me. My lovely little box-apartment was located on the other side of the city, behind the metro-lines. Getting to the office every morning was a bit of a hike, especially to a man like me-that is to say, a lazy man.

Usually, my tardiness wasn’t a problem. I was high enough up in the department to be sure nobody was going to call me out… except for this particular Tuesday, when I got hauled into my manager’s office and glared at by beady eyes behind little wireframe glasses.

I had a lot of managers. I’d never seen this one before. He was a fat man with sausage fingers.

The Fat Man sat behind his desk. It was nice desk in, and it was in a nice room. There were potted plants.

‘Your attendance could use some work, Mr. White,’ I was told.

‘Yes sir,’ I nodded. I didn’t get promoted up to Applied without knowing how to work the system a little bit. Suck up to your superiors, bark at your inferiors. If necessary, grant sexual favours.

‘I hope you’re not having any kind of trouble at home, Mr. White?’

‘No sir,’ I shook my head. ‘Everything is A-OK, sir.’

‘Good,’ the Fat Man grunted. ‘Well, just in case, take my card. If anything is bothering you give me a call, it’ll be dealt with. We at The Salmon Corp care about our employees, you know.’

‘I know, sir.’ He gave me the business card. It was laminated, and bore the Fat Man’s name; Peter Greuze.

It’ll be dealt with. I didn’t want to ask for details, and I didn’t want to take up that offer- ever, under any circumstances. The Corp does take care of its employees. Sometimes it flattens entire neighbourhoods to make life easier for them.

‘Well,’ Greuze coughed. ‘Now that you are here, I want to give you your latest assignment in person. We have something rather special planned for Applied this year.’

‘Oh yes, sir? That’s exciting to hear.’ I wasn’t being flip. Special is exciting.

The Fat Man beamed. ‘Indeed it is. You see, we’ve decided to expand the Corp’s merchandising rights into hitherto unexplored areas. We want the rights to an American Presidents Action figure line.’

I nodded. Fair enough. Action figures seemed a little… small, though.

‘But we have certain concerns about image copyright. We want to make sure the Presidents’ images are all exclusively ours. For that, they’ll need to sign certain contracts.’

The Fat Man could see my blossoming disbelief. This was bigger, all right.

‘That’ll be your job, Mr. White. We want you to start resurrecting Presidents. All ninety three of them.’

Technically, there have been ninety-four Presidents. However, the ninety-fourth (President Huey Jackson II) was only in office for a grand total of forty-seven seconds before his office exploded, so people tend to ignore him. Since Jackson II, the institution has fallen sharply from grace. Nobody pays much attention to the Presidency anymore.

Greuze’s task was certainly something to dwell on.

Walking through a bad neighbourhood at a bad time of night, I lost myself in daydreams of Presidents past. I didn’t need to worry about being murdered or robbed or anything like that-the little salmon symbol on my jacket kept all the lowlifes at a distance.

On the horizon, there were fires. A police helicopter was tumbling through the sky, tracing a rapid path back down to earth. On its way, it clipped a shiny skyscraper; I had to wince. Even if the pilot survived that crash, he was going to be in trouble. The skyscrapers were supposed to stay shiny at all times-very rich people have paid some very big guns to keep them shiny at all times. In the city of America Little, you respect your janitors.

America Little doesn’t really live up to its name. It’s enormous; it spans two coasts and all the land in between. It’s not quite up to the scale of America Large below, but Large is mostly artificial oil fields.

I took the subway in the direction of home, spent the ride chatting to a couple of prostitutes. They wanted to know what working for the Corp was like. I exaggerated a little bit, because I like to impress people. What? We all like to impress people.

My apartment was horribly cramped, which was exactly how I wanted it. I could’ve afforded a much swankier, up-town place-or at least, a slightly swankier, mid-town place-but all that space would just encourage me to clutter. I had what I needed: A few desks, a few drawers, and not enough floor to sprawl on.

That night, I slept to the soothing rattle of the metro-tracks outside. Still trying to wrap my brain around the Fat Man’s order.

Resurrect all the Presidents.

For a few of them that would be easy enough. That is to say, all the ones recently buried. Their bones would provide just enough bio-matter to extract a halfway decent clone. The Corp performed such resurrections fairly regularly, usually in cases of criminal prosecution. Murder trials tend to collapse when the victim turns up alive again, even if only for a couple of hours.

But the Founding Fathers? Everyone pre-Millennium? They’d been dead for ages. What was I supposed to do, invent a Time Machine? Applied had already tried that. The dry-cleaning bills were ridiculous.

All right. Think about this. You’re a smart man.

I just needed inspiration.

That was when dinosaurs attacked.

Nobody’s quite sure where the dinosaurs came from. Even Applied can’t say for certain that we invented them, although it’s possible. The most convincing rumour says that they were manufactured by some Fast Food chain as part of an incredibly elabourate advertising campaign. Chinese whispers aside, the creatures now constitute the city’s foremost pest control issue.

Most of them are harmless, not to mention cute. Little blue and green lizards

sitting outside restaurants, begging for scraps. They’re sort of like kittens.

The Raptors, on the other hand, are a pain. Apparently, real Velociraptors were small and fairly timid. Whoever engineered these monstrosities had no head for historical accuracy. In my life, Raptors are big. They’re mean, they’re fast, and they can pick locks.

Some of them fly.

‘Shit!’ I yelled constructively, as a small group of the buggers broke into my flat. Three forced open the door; one barged in through the window. The former were classical Raptors, long tails and gnashing jaws. The latter looked similar, except it had wings tacked onto its back. Genetic engineering can do crazy things.

The Raptors hunt in packs; stalking via shadows. They generally pick their prey at random, except… did I have BBQ sauce with my lunch? Yes, I did. Stupid me. For reasons unknown, the smell of BBQ sauce attracts them. They can sense it miles away.

The creatures surrounded me. Claws clicking, heads cocked. The flying Raptor was stumbling about, making a mess. Its wings were too small for the tiny apartment.

I backed up, toward the kitchen counter.

The reptiles hissed, flaring gigantic nostrils. Long necks extended, and I could see salivating tongues as they crept steadily closer. About to pounce…

I thrashed for the nearest drawer and yanked out my taser Gauntlet. A hail of spatulas clattered around me.

Gauntlets look flimsy, like gloves made from copper wire. Don’t let the fragile appearance fool you; they’re deadly weapons. Pointing at the dinosaurs, I clicked twin thumb triggers. Bursts of electricity flew out from my hands; arcs of lightning. Flashes of blue tore through the room-my own little thunderstorm.

I released the triggers, and the storm stopped. The dinosaurs fell, flesh sizzling. Quite dead.

Gauntlets are an Applied product. I didn’t invent them, but I did make them extra-dangerous. Nowadays every cop carries one and every criminal owns four.

‘Crap,’ I reflected, poking the nearest dinosaur with my foot. The last thing I wanted to do was lug five reptile corpses all the way across town to the dump, especially at this time of night.

I decided to go and get something to eat instead.

Derry’s was about ten minutes walk from my front door. The food was generally worth it.

Nestled between street corner and curb, the restaurant was a fairly well-kept local secret. A dull exterior served up poor expectations.

The interior, on the other hand, was a thing of