Chapter 9

Manhattan, 2012ce

Financial District

Sebastian Adon was always reading a book, though he never seemed to finish any; the title of the one in his hand now which was 1984, the year his documents had told to him that he was born.

 

Seated on the roof he could be seen from any number of vantage points or sniper posts. The roof of 140 Nassau street was adjacent from the Woolworth building with is copper green spires and the five story City Hall; as well as just three blocks from Police Plaza One; and below it the holding cells for all of the cities concentrated perpetrators. While no book in the Unites States of America was a “banned book”, 1984 was certainly a “flagged book” because the Department of Homeland Security viewed it as a “gateway book” to subversive thinking. By late August of 2012 it was not so much that the American public didn’t know how to read; simply that they chose not to for the most part. It was quite unusual for families to ever turn off their televisions; “telescreens” as described in the book. And while these devices were not two way transmitters; there was virtually no corner of Manhattan not under surveillance by a networked feed of public and private CCTV. Some guerilla efforts in Breuklyn, Queens and the Bronx has rolled some of that back; but Manhattan was fully watched.

 

Especially since September 11^th, 2001 when the towers came down and the security state rolled out into the open, like it had always been there.

 

In 1984 there are three world powers described; Oceania (the United States and England), Eurasia (Russian and the EU), and East Asia (China, India, Japan) and they square off in endless resource wars in the rest of the world. Although each power block claims to have competing ideological differences; such as Chinese Communism, Euro-Socialism, or Capitalism; each simply utilizes the ideological coloring to distract their respective populations from the real system of control.

A book within a book; in 1984 the heroes discover something called ‘the Brotherhood’ which is distributing ‘the Goldstein Book’ which explains the way the world is; a system called Oligarical-Collectivism; an international corporate oligarchy devoid of ideology which utilizes endless warfare as a means to dispose of productive labor and surplus value. The wars supposedly fought for control of resources in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa are actually utilized to keep the population terrified, patriotic and get rid of wealth that might otherwise trickle down and create valid middle classes.

Class consciousness is parlayed into hate and war mongering and fear. The book which describes a young couples efforts to join this clandestine network; the Brotherhood end with their capture, torture, and betrayal of each other.

Typically read in American colleges Political Science classes; George Orwell’s tome against authoritarianism of all kinds, alongside his more pedantic novel Animal Farm are used as part of the American Oligarchies perpetual indictment of Socialism in general and Russian Socialism in particular. Although the book is set in England, Oceania is clearly America; and George Orwell was himself a Socialist, shot in the face while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Sebastian owns many copies of this book. He likes giving it to lovers and friends on their birthdays. While he is unconvinced many have ever read it cover to cover; it is better reading and more radicalizing than say, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Days of War, Nights of Love or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America or World System Analysis. Which are all very good books, but you have to be open or free minded to absorb them.

The book was waking Sebastian up though the others didn’t realize it.

This was perhaps the critical realization of the Z.O.B. underground. That to fight the mental slavery imposed on the American working class; a sophisticated range of media and parapsychology would have to be utilized to free minds. The release of Matrix, Fight Club, Hunger Games and a whole industry of black market films designed to erode this mass socialization had been deployed throughout the decade. Thinly veiled metaphors and overt subversive media made it through the censors; but it was in the bathhouses that the underground used to deprogram.

 

Bathhouses were of course Russian mob money laundering facilities and black market steering sites with the right references. And though the kinds had been worked out slowly; the movement soon learned to deprogram efficiently; using the bathhouses as “wake fields”. It was long known that the American Oligarchy was using Nano-bots in the water supply, social programming via television; as well as spraying from planes a chemical that encouraged tiredness and obesity. It was fully known that between alcohol, sports, TV, feature films, and schools the public was put to sleep; believing the American Middle class was quite large. While in fact the distribution of wealth was quite comparable to anywhere else.

They had utilized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to squander the decade’s surplus and manufactured a financial crisis in 2008 to further consolidate their economic gains. Now 1% of Americans controlled 47% of American wealth. And 85 people on earth were worth as much as the bottom 3.5 billion. And the planet was dying to boot.

Sebastian Adon was reading his favorite book on the roof, where two weeks ago he dreamed he had fallen seventeen stories with a young woman named Natasha Andreavna. But everything was a dream now. He had been put sleep by the resistance after completion of his last job; a messy raid in Syria. What that meant was that he was now thinking three dimensionally. That he couldn’t see the parallel worlds; couldn’t see all the possibilities. Didn’t see his past and future lives.  Didn’t know that he had spent the last twelve years as staff sergeant in a vast international underground, a member of the Zionist movement.

The sun was out, it was completely beautiful. From the roof he can look up in the bourgeoisie fish tank called the Gerry Building shooting 104 stories up blue glass. He doesn’t remember anything about a wife and child. Doesn’t remember Kibbutz Ain Dor. Or Kibbutz Sde Bokr. He doesn’t remember his Pararescueman training in Cuba, Haiti, or Syria either. Science is a hell of a drug.

And doesn’t remember at all when he stood on this roof eleven years ago, wearing a flicker mask to hide his face and with a shoulder to air missile launcher to put a flaming hole in the World Trade Center.

 

He wakes up on the same roof. A burning sense of shame, of failure or is it the booze. Is it the late nights, the rigors of studying something he might have learned before in another life.

 

What year is this is the first thing he wonders. His gut says 2012, but that mean he’s in the future. Doesn’t it?

How many jobs has it been, and where’s Natasha? Is everyone ok? Did everyone make it out of the ghetto? Who has my back? Is my back got?

They gonna kill us all, them brutal pigs.

His mobilblat goes off. It’s a Telegram 2.0 text from Tanya. It’s a YouTube video, of the Soca artist Ricardo Veshanti, followed by a selfie of Tanya. Which is a signal for notification that the Trinidadian Special Forces have landed.