Inertia and Momentum

Chapter 1: The General

With halting steps, Larken Marche paced before a digitized map of the world in the form of a slowly rotating holographic globe. Her cane trembled as she watched another blue pinpoint of light flip to red, this time in Europe. She clipped her cane rapidly against the floor as she walked around it, keeping time with its slow rotation, and unable to pull her eyes from the live-updates that tracked elections and local movement activity. Too many red pinpricks of light speckled the wall before her. 

Larken slammed her heron-headed cane into the ground hard enough to leave a crack inthe tiled surface. She turned away from the globe for a second to get her bearing back. The trees beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows conveyed a mozaic of oranges, yellows and reds, sprinkled over the greens of the ubiquitous evergreens. She took in a breath of stale, recycled air, pivoted, and resumed her walk.

“You need to stop pacing, Larken,” Dandelion LeMaire chided. Larken glanced at her in time to see Dandelion’s eyerbrows lowering back to her work. “You’ll blow out that repair work on your back.”

The burn above her tailbone told Larken that Dandelion was probably correct, as she so often was. But Dandelion should have known by now that telling Larken to stop would have little effect. She continued her frenetic pace, furious at the short memories of society.

“It’s all falling apart,” she said, harsher than she meant. “It’s harder and harder to get through. Nobody’s listening.”

The cool touch of Dandelion’s fingers on her shoulders moments later stalled Larken’s chaotic tapping. She clenched her teeth and forced air out through her nose.

“It’s happening too fast,” Larken said, spitting out the words while the unrelenting fingers dug into her shoulder muscles. A knot of pain released and she closed her eyes. “The United States is holding, for now. But almost everywhere else in the world is flipping red. Liberti Custodi are taking over.”

She opened her eyes again to ensure she knew where to point. The blooming wisteria plant overflowed with clusters of flowers touching her desk surface, reminding her that they needed to be pruned. Dead leaves lay scattered across the faux-hardwood beneath her feet. Larken turned to her left and pointed at the digitized map on the wall. In the middle of the United States and then toward the east coast, a sprinkling of red lights spread across the country.

“Even here, Human Pride Movement are making inroads in the middle of the country. And look along the East Coast there,” she said, pointing toward Virginia and North Carolina. “Blue, no, wait…”

A flickering blue light redirected her vision as it changed to red, about thirty miles north of the cosmopolitan city of Caldwell, Texas. Larken clenched her teeth.

“Lost another one. Caldwell proper is solid blue, but how long can it stay like that if we keep losing everything around it?”

“HPM promises freedom and prosperity, Larken. It’s seductive to some. They’ll see reason eventually.”

“A false promise. And to appear to deliver on it, they’ll subjugate every freed model back into servitude.”

Dandelion shook her head. The scent of apples drifted down from her sandy-blonde curls and, combined with the continued kneading of her shoulders, forced Larken’s muscles to slacken more. The aroma of her, and her strength and steadfastness, soothed Larken’s nerves as much as they could be.

“There are no freed models according to the law, Larken,” Dandelion reminded her. “But look.” Dandelion pointed to the rest of the country. “Look at all that blue. HPM should be worrying, not you.”

Dandelion’s fingers dug into Larken’s shoulder muscles, weakening her knees as she closed her eyes once more. She felt Dandelion direct her toward her seat, and for half a second, resisted, before she resigned herself to the guidance and caned her way to the ergonomic chair that was supposed to help her back heal, and probably would if she ever sat in it for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. The fingers found more stiff muscles to knead. Larken lifted her left hand and placed it atop Dandelion’s, stalling the fingers for a second. When the fingers began moving again, Larken rolled her neck to one side. She could almost forget about the map as she did. Almost.

But once the existential fear relented its control, more mundane fears that it had been hiding bubbled up. The litany of mundaine things on her todo list never seemed to measure up to the importance of impending fascist take-over, but that didn’t make them nothing. 

“I need a new desk,” she said.

“That can wait, can’t it?” Dandelion asked, not letting up.

Larken let a quiet moan escape.

“This is where people meet us to volunteer, or donate their time and money. They want to know that their money is being used sensibly. The drawers won’t even open on mine.”

“Because you sensibly picked it up second-hand.”

“Last time someone was here, I had to get a pen out of your drawer because mine was stuck so badly. The look I got…”

“My drawer? How did you get it open?”

Larken cracked one eye and gave Dandelion a half-smile.

“Easy,” she said. “I used a crowbar.”

She could practically feel Dandelion scanning the office for a crowbar. Really, it was the head of her heron-headed cane that she’d wedged in the crack. She’d almost broken the beak-tip off in the process.

“I’m kidding,” she said, after a handful of seconds. “It was this.” She lifted her cane into the air for a second then let it slide down until the base rested on the floor.

“I don’t know that we can find one in the same design, new,” Dandelion said.

The office was barely twenty feet from one side to the other. Larken’s composite faux-eik wood desk was a bona-fide antique, though one that was falling apart. Styled like a writing desk from almost a thousand years before the antique had been made, she’d once seen the crooked drawers as quaint.

“It doesn’t have to look exactly like that,” she said, motioning to her right. “Just I have to have room to write.”

Dandelion’s desk was more of a utilitarian design, with one single drawer that slid out effortlessly—for Dandelion. For Larken, it took both hands and bracing, because she didn’t have roughly ten times the strength of any human. That super-human strength made a lot of things look easy, and right now, Larken counted herself fortunate that said strength that extended all the way to the tips of Dandelion’s super-human fingers, channeling ease into Larken’s tense and throbbing back.

“Look at what’s happening in the France,” Dandelion said. Larken’s eyes involuntarily swiveled to Paris, one massive blue circle weighted by almost a hundred million people. But that was all. One giant blue splotch in an ocean of red. The red had begun to bleed into Germany, too, working its way from the French border eastward and covering nearly half of the state. Larken let out a sigh that lingered in the air.

“The United States would look like that without you,” said Dandelion. Whether or not Dandelion was right, it didn’t feel like enough. In the last four years, the support Larken had found on the west coast had spread through much of the nation. Everyone knew who she was now. The fame brought to her the ability to reach most influencers she wanted to, as well as her share of stalkers and a cadre of death threats from armchair HPM enthusiasts.

“Maybe that’s true,” Larken agreed with a weak smile. “And HPM hasn’t tried to attack us in a while either.”

Dandelion smirked. It was a good and convincing smirk. Larken’s heart warmed at the evidence that their practice was showing dividends. Dandelion was getting quite good at human nonverbal communication.

“That’d be kind of hard since you took over their Bremerton Compound,” she said.

Larken turned her attention back to the map.

“Speaking of the French Block, Iberia is turning,” she said. “Even after that push to get all opposing parties together to try to get rid of Liberti, it didn’t happen. They waited too long.”

“We warned them,” Dandelion said. “Same as France. It won’t take long before Germany, Italy, and Portugal fall if Paris does. But that’s not here.”

She was right. All Larken could do internationally was watch and continue to help contain their United States version of the global facist movements. She slumped into her ergonomic chair in a way that definitely wouldn’t at all help her back. She needed something more positive. Larken motioned with her hand and the globe spun as it revealed United Africa. At least there, the lights were all blue, from top to bottom of the two massive glowing continents that constituted the whole of United Africa. She closed her eyes and honed her focus on the fingertips pressed into the knots in her upper back.

“Think they’ll listen?” she asked of Dandelion.

“Even Africa can’t stand alone against the rest of the world. How long until the Liberti trashes trade agreements? They have to listen.”

“But can Oliver convince them?” she muttered, partially to herself.

“Why wouldn’t he be able to?”

So far, nobody beyond the United States borders had taken her seriously. But Larken’s brother had become a formidable diplomat in the last year, visiting fourteen countries in all.

“No reason,” Dandelion said, leaving unsaid the conversation they’d repeated already ad nauseum.

“He’s been doing a lot of reaching out,” Larken said. “Fourteen countries in the last year alone.”

“I would too if I had to come home to her.”

“His motivation doesn’t mean he’s not good as a diplomat though,” Larken said, feeling the heat in the back of her head rising. “He’s trying hard to get us international support.”

Dandelion said nothing, and Larken knew why. She didn’t have to. Travel was fine, and as long as he used his own trust fund to do it, that was even better. Otherwise, she’d have to ask for results, and as Dandelion didn’t say, there were none to be had.

“I’m just surprised he was able to get the Induna to meet with him,” Larken said.

“I can agree with that. They don’t normally entertain just anyone. Maybe that’s a sign that at least they see the problem with some sense of importance.”

“Maybe,” Larken said. “And they’re doing okay there anyway, aren’t they? But what about Mexico?”

“You can’t do that. Mexico’s not your problem, and it’s not fair to you; frankly, it scares me. You’re looking for a problem to solve. Can’t you be happy for a little while that the United States, at least, is weathering the storm so well?”

Dandelion’s even tone didn’t betray fear, but her fingers did. When Dandelion became scared, or whatever it was that she identified with fear, one sure way to know was to be in her grasp at the time. Her fear hurt because she ignored her strength when she was afraid. Dandelion seemed to realize this, stopped her massage, and then worked Larken’s levitating chair around until they were face-to-face.

Larken used to think of Dandelion as the android. The idea that the slight woman with freckles who now blocked her view of the globe was anything other than human had evaporated the longer she knew her. No, the skin-clad synthetic wasn’t Caldwell-beautiful; she hadn’t been genetically engineered for the sex-trade. Those models were so perfect that the corporation that made them, had had to introduce tiny physical flaws to make them seem more real. Dandelion wasn’t like that. She wore badly-done smokey-eye make-up and a base that tried and failed to hide her freckles. But what made Dandelion even more attractive was that beneath that smooth synthetic skin tissue lay a spike of insecurity from which she never seemed free. Larken felt that spike in her own heart.

Gold-flecked green eyes stared like daggers into Larken’s brown ones with an intensity that told Larken it was time to stop sulking. “You’re going to have to let some things go.”

Larken wasn’t good at letting things go. She hadn’t let HPM go when they kidnapped her brother, and she limped today because of it. Nor had she let things go when her friend Sam had been captured and tortured by the same group. Too many people suffered in too many places for Larken to slow down or stop. Still, Larken sometimes pretended to let things go for a while, and that allowed Dandelion to pretend to believe her. Larken willed the tension to ease from her facial muscles and forced her lips up into a smile. Only then did Dandelion’s mascara-thick eyelashes waver from their obstinate openness.

“Good. Besides,” Dandelion told her, “today’s lunch with Molly, remember?”

She closed her eyes at the mention of her brother’s unfaithful alleged life-partner. If she could undo introducing them, she would. It was time for round number nine-hundred something of trying to convince her former best friend Molly to at least pretend to be faithful.

“Are you sure it’s today?”

“Every month,” Dandelion responded with her usual endless patience allowing not even a hint of derision in her voice.

“What time is it?”

“Nine-oh-eight in the morning.”

“Shit. What are we doing here, then? We need to go home.”

“Exactly.”

Dandelion shoved the chair forward with one hand and didn’t give Larken her cane back. Larken had no choice but to let Dandelion guide her through the automatic doors and out onto the volantrae landing, where a streamlined bird-shaped Falcon awaited them. Larken took a breath as she looked out from the volantrae launchpad over what used to be the Bremerton Reclamation facility. The smokeless spires of the factory stretched up to the sky, two intact, and one crumbled halfway to the ground. She knew what those towers had been for, and kept them as a reminder that the site used to be responsible for the sanctioned murders of hundreds of models a day. In stark contrast, a nearby valley showed the trees she’d had planted had taken root well, and they stretched up over single-family home. Leaves of red, green, and yellow shimmered in the morning sun.

The cold air bit at her, causing her to pull her thick kimono tighter around her neck as she looked down on the cleaned and filtered pond that was once used to discard undissolved human remains. Koi fish swam languidly just beneath the surface. Everything below she’d had a hand in creating. For a second, Dandelion’s words sunk in: she had done this much, at least.

Was she really only twenty-two? It seemed like yesterday that Molly Kostic had first announced her interest in Larken’s brother at their high school, Brighton Academy. The atrophying muscles of her permanent disability had aged her beyond her years. The babyfat over her cheekbones had long since been sucked dry, producing a gaunt, listless face. Sometimes she imagined she was her own ghost.

Dandelion gently lifted Larken from the chair and into the back of the standing volantrae. It was something Larken could easily have managed herself, but Dandelion was faster and Larken was so light that Dandelion lifted her without any sign of a struggle. Fastening Larken in was a quick task, and then Dandelion returned the ergonomic chair to the office while Larken watched other volantrae zip by along the skyway nearby. Dandelion slid into the seat next to Larken almost before Larken knew she was back. 

Larken squeezed Dandelion’s hand absently as the volantrae lifted off into the sky. She was lost in lost in thought about what mood Molly might be in without Oliver there for balance. Then her thoughts turned to Dandelion, who seemed to be watching the trees go by in fascination beyond the opposite window.

“Why do you do this?” Larken asked, as she reached over and plucked a wayward strand of blonde hair away from Dandelion’s face with her fingertips.

“Do what?” Dandelion turned. The sun caught the gold flecks in her eyes, dancing like little sparks above her smile. Her cheeks stopped just short of dimpling beneath wide eyes, and a dusting of freckles crossed over her nose.

“Nothing,” she said, her gaze unwavering.