Temping as an authoritarian
Published in the Umbrella Factory Magazine
“Kismet,” Frank clucked at the mail before him. In his left hand, a stack of bills stamped “FINAL NOTICE” and “COLLECTIONS” in an alarming red font included his car payment, student loans, Visa, the mortgage, and a brown pouch containing his divorce papers. In his right hand, a single envelope held a flier showing Sky Troopers blasting off with desert mountains in the background. The headline read, “Uncle Sam Wants to Give You $100,000!” And that was just the signing bonus. A Sky Trooper recruitment flier. If he put his hands together, Frank’s mail held the solution to all his problems. He could say goodbye to debt and the failed business and relationships that brought it. Ordinarily, Frank wouldn’t even consider working for Uncle Sam, but times were hard and, like his jailbird father used to say to justify his own sins, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”
The Sky Troopers were a small army founded by the last president to play cavalry or wingman to the other American armed forces as required. They were given the equivalent power, training, and high-tech weaponry of an elite fighting force. Once the president green-lighted the Sky Trooper program, he assigned its construction and management to Mother Nature, the artificial intelligence operating Earth since the last century. No sooner did he have his army, the president begin wielding the Sky Troopers against his political opponents and to quell the manifold problems clawing at America’s effete throat. Mini rebellions flared in every major city. Immigrants were flooding in and couldn’t be deported fast enough. The unemployment were on permanent picket line around government buildings. Student protests packed every college town with liberals from miles around. Churches were surveilled for the potential of dissent. Impromptu concerts popped up all over the country with only youth in attendance. The internet roared with voices easily silenced. Graffiti called for a permanent end to Mother Nature and her Sky Troopers. Headlines around the globe proclaimed that everything was a-okay.
The Sky Trooper program was an invitation to the underground militias to take up arms themselves and each other. The militias blew up gas stations, banks, and post offices. They swore a blood oath to anarchy. They didn’t care which party the president came from as long as they killed him dead. The next congress shared this opinion and checked the president’s power, ultimately impeaching and ousting him. The Sky Troopers were reassigned. They were now accountable to local police, who used them for any trouble worthy of their martial skills and ambulatory artillery. Frank considered himself a political atheist, but money, as they say reflexively, is money. Even if meant working as a temporary authoritarian.
Under ordinary circumstances, joining the Sky Troopers required extensive background checks along with a battery of physical and psychological exams. Not to mention several years of training. But years of intermittent violence had shown the need for additional domestic armed forces. Not nice cops with psychology degrees who could talk a tiger down from a tree, but the sort who recognized physical might as the only relevant force in the universe. There was no negotiating your way out of an interaction with a Sky Trooper. Frank’s precarious financial situation gave him no choice but to make his mark on the dotted line.
Training sorted out potential wackos, schizos, pretenders, and hardened those who brought total commitment and unquestionable loyalty to the table. Some were young and itching to see action and prove themselves to themselves, their partner, or whomever loomed largest in their psyches. Most recruits were middle age like Frank. Less impetuous. More balding. Men looking for a second chance at life. Few looked like they could do a pushup. The unfortunate and hush-hush truth was that the Sky Troopers were presently taking all comers - even if they suffered from felonious tendencies, rampant cirrhosis, or were twelve-inches away from losing a foot to diabetes. The middle-aged joiners roamed in packs and acted aggressively, portraying their ostensible vitality, showing that strength in numbers could overcome their multifarious physical disadvantages. Only combat would unite the groups.
At graduation, they were given anti-gravity combat suits and their general order: capture all Recessives. Everyone was now eyeballing everyone else. What colors were their new brothers? How old were they? Were any women? It didn’t matter. Patriotism was the watchword, the only answer the officers wanted to hear. “I love my country so much that I’m willing to give my life for her,” was the level of commitment they demanded. The officers wanted soldiers as tough as two-dollar steaks but got mostly mashed potatoes. Thanks to the combat suits, individual Sky Troopers could not be identified (or prosecuted) by sight, they were anonymous killers with enormous killing potential.
Beneath their helmets, Sky Troopers ranged the color spectrum from shades of lily English White to light Hispanic White under their helmets (Hispanics that appeared White). There were Asian and Indian patriots too. Everybody had to eat, after all. What’s more, regardless of their own color, every Sky Trooper seemed to have a racist chip on their shoulders. Every race held a small, witless minority who loathed an entire other race. Frank was beginning to wonder if being a racist was a prerequisite for the gig. Did he look or sound like a racist? Given his acceptance and immediate promotion to team leader, he must look like the type of guy who thought going after Recessives with Uncle Sam’s permission was his idea of a buck-wild Saturday night. There was fun to be had and money to be made. It didn’t get any better than this.
The company line: anyone not of an approved skin tone or without the gene edits mandated by Mother Nature was considered a Recessive and needed to be separated from society. Every day, Frank and his team were either given a list of names or an index card of a certain color of people to collect. Sky Troopers were to match the card beside the suspect Recessive’s face and, if the shades matched, they were cuffed for the long ride to the hoosgow.
Eliminating Recessives would take years. Mother Nature didn’t want to raise any suspicions that fomented unnecessary rebellions. There were simply too many Recessives and not enough Sky Troopers to police the entire country. That’s why Mother Nature devised a system to remove equal numbers of people with a certain skin tone for an equal period of time until there were only half left. Then she moved to the next hue. She assigned the Sky Troopers to a different hue every day, just so an entire group of people didn’t vanish simultaneously. She didn’t want to raise suspicions and was mindful that they capture a small number of Recessives each day. Sometime days she sent down a list of names as thick as a dictionary. These would be the revolutionaries and the people considering rebellion. The number of Recessives vanishing from city streets on any given day was knowable only be Mother Nature. She managed that information along with the new genes she encountered in her massive data center.
Recessive children didn’t look as perfect as the children born with the genetic options selected by their parents. Some differences were subtle. Other differentiations were more than the world of the future - as planned by Mother Nature - could tolerate. A newborn may appear perfect from every angle but bear the genetic markers of a potential future serial killer. That’s if he didn’t die an early and very painful death from cancer. Then there were the obvious Recessives who could hardly survive ex-utero, let alone being born with fins, gills, or actual frog’s legs. One future athlete had two sets of lungs to match his two hearts. Sometimes vital organs were missing and the child perished naturally. The genetic mysteries surrounding these births were the subject of the country’s top scientists. The possibilities for humanity were endless. Looking toward the future was like facing a mirror facing a mirror that gave the perception of a grand hallway protracted to infinity.
A healthy child, properly born, was everything a parent wanted. They intrinsically believed, as did every human, in the approved social mores of their society. Differentiation in intelligence existed because children were intended to grow up to be on specific career tracks, such as leadership or manual labor, for which they would require certain skills. There were hundreds of professions that fell in between those two extremes. The former could enrapture any audience with his oratoration and present illuminating ideas that moved their society forward. The latter would be strong as an ox, full of energy, and possess an inability to be bored. Their focus on work was as deeply programmed into them as their hair and eye color.
Some Recessives were born the old-fashioned way - without the expertise of gene editors or artificial intelligence. Born only with the combination of its parents DNA - and without the added benefits of superior DNA for a specific career track - these children would be considered second class citizens. The children themselves had divergent brain patterns. They got into more trouble at school than normal children and rarely achieved academic success. Some were assumed to be jealous of normal people their age. Others bore malevolent intentions toward people who fit in seamlessly. The more Recessives Mother Nature inadvertently produced, the more disparate the Earth appeared.
Whether a well-born, law-abiding citizen or a Recessive with an unapproved view of the world and its history, everybody knew the Sky Troopers were the world’s best defense against Recessives. Although few could explain what they were doing and why that required defense. It was the job of the Sky Troopers to suit up in a government-issue anti-gravity combat suit including a bulletproof balaclava, strap-on automatic weapon, snap-on revolver in an ankle holster, and a Batman-esque utility belt complete with accessible impact baton, a pack of zip-ties, flash bangs, and bear mace. Bruce Wayne have drooled green with envy. They would be his weapons against the waves of Recessives roaring toward him like a tsunami ready to release its murderous cache of water upon the land and drowning everyone incapable of running faster than an airliner flies.
Tonight, the Sky Troopers were charged with ending a protest at Detroit University - a group of college kids howling away at the subhuman way the Recessives were treated. They believed that everybody deserved equal treatment. That we should all get an equal amount of money deposited into our bank accounts every week. That everyone had the right to see a doctor when they were sick. That we had the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as our early ancestors. Shaking his head, Frank was pretty sure these kids didn’t have a clue that was the very same life their people signed away to Mother Nature generations ago.
He proudly stepped into the combat suit he’d worn on countless missions. Since joining up, Frank was out-of-debt, close to affording a ring for his girlfriend, and the leader of his own Sky Trooper team. According to the government, Frank had spent his whole life without a purpose. That’s why everything felt so pointless to him. When Frank discovered his reason for being - much later than most - he found a Sky Trooper dwelling inside himself. He was a patriot and a warfighter by nature, but never until he joined up. He could never be anything but a Sky Trooper. He watched proudly as his team used their rockets to slow their descent and land in a perfect circle surrounding the picketing students. Armed with lethal and non-lethal deterrents, the Sky Troopers looked like they hailed from a distant, high-tech future. When Frank ordered the protestors to “lay on the ground and put your hands behind your heads,” His voice was deep and sounded robotic coming out of a tiny speaker on his helmet at a shocking 110-decibels.
The Sky Troopers made quick work of the terrified and the rebellious. The deterrent used depended on the weapon brandished by their opponent. Wielding bear mace at a Federal officer merited a bean bag to the solar plexus fired at 70 mph from a 12-gauge shotgun. Batons were used against baseball bats. Protesters sporting lethal weaponry were greeted with live ammunition, their bloody pink spray christened the other protesters into their soon-to-be, much more obedient reality. The fight was over as soon as it started. The remaining kids bolted in every direction.
Minutes later, a long line of black buses with Sky Troopers stamped in red on the side arrived to collect the still ambulatory protesters. Ambulances shuttled back and forth to local hospitals with the wounded and the dead. The evacuated would never make it to the detention center. Food and medicine cost money. Where they were going, there was no economy, only a deepening dark chasm - the genesis of an abyssal mass grave. The hole in the ground was reserved for protesters and anyone not yielding to the recently passed Real Truth Act, which enforced draconian punishment on anyone who disagreed with the official government position on any topic.
The mission came off without a hitch.
Later that afternoon in the locker room, Frank distributed beers to his Troopers. They noshed on pizza and caught the tail end of a Lion’s game. Eventually, Frank split for home. Tomorrow would be an early roll call. No sooner had his head hit the pillow did he thank God for his job and Uncle Sam for his paycheck. He lamented having to detain people for the color of their skin, and his impotence to do anything to help them. It was extraordinarily dangerous to be a Recessive ally. The worse the economy became, the more the government directed their propaganda machine against Recessives until it was dangerous for them to walk the streets. Job security, Frank thought sarcastically.
Door knocks were scheduled for 0200 tomorrow. In the locker room before they lit out, Frank distributed mug shots of the suspects who had gotten them out of bed so early. From the style of their hair and foreign clothing, they looked more like immigrants than Americans. He guzzled a black coffee and shook the cobwebs from his brain. These people were to be collected and deposited at the newly minted, billion-dollar Detroit Immigration Detention complex.
They were moments from departing when the locker room door exploded off its hinges.
Frank and his troopers hit the deck and brandished their weapons, but it made no difference. The invading Sky Troopers already had the man they wanted face down and shackled: Frank.
“You know me!” Frank cried desperately after he’d been zip tied. “Look at me!” His team stared at the ground, refusing to meet his eyes. “I’m legal, damn it. I’m freakin’ Italian!”
The arresting agent leaned in close to Frank and whispered, “We changed hues this month. As of now, you’re on the wrong side of that Trooper suit. Now, be a good example and get on the bus without making a fuss,” the officer’s words drizzled maliciousness.
“Look. At. My. Face.” Frank spoke in staccato as if to assist a non-native speaker, praying desperately to get through to this fellow Trooper. “I’m not even slightly brown! This color is olive,” he pointed at the skin on his forearm. “Olive!”
The anonymous Sky Trooper held up an index card and matched its hue to Frank’s face. He blew a bubble that popped near Frank’s nose. Neither man blinked. “Close enough for me.”