An Interview With Jenny Parker (ANC 5A)

Jenny's arms were folded, in the angry way. "So of course I called the day of. I take a drive around my constituents' homes every day, lookin' for something to fix. And so I see this, call WASA. Where are they? I called the next day. Nothing. I called the next day. Nothing."

Jeff, the City Paper journalist, nodded and held his recorder about a foot and a half away from Jenny's face. "So then you decided to get out here and protest?"

"I wonder a lot of things. I mean, yeah, I decided to get out here and raise a stink. That didn't do anything. The other ANCs wouldn't join me in solidarity, even though they all pretty much have the same problems. It's like--we all have things exploding. Sewers stink, water mains break, pipes don't work, we go without water, electricity, I mean--say nothing of Internet or anything. We know enough that that's all luxury. But, hell, the whole city's gone bad. I hear the crust creakin' all the time. I knew that stilt was gonna go. Why haven't we, you know--done something about it? As a people?"

"People have. I mean, the CPACers. They blew up most of Woodley Park. Some of the animal cages in the zoo got blown open, too. The cheetahs finally got the zebras. It was terrible."

"Okay, persons have done something. But I mean, we got a whole city with horrible problems. Some people say the whole country's like this. Everything's broken. Everything. Where are the people? I mean, I'm a person, I am doing something, singular. Where's the solidarity?"

Jeff threw up his hands for a moment, while still holding his recorder.

Jenny harumphed. "You throw up your hands now. Let's go for a walk around here. Then you might change your mind."

Moon People: An Introduction

Amos was one of the colonists that chose to go without a last name--it was a way to represent the break with the millennia of civilization on earth. It was also a good way to further avoid any kind of pestering from the police--not that there was much police presence on the moon, moon people being so fiercely antigovernment and all.

So, avoiding the police:

Amos sold lunar tires in the lunar state of Franklin. So did John Birch Byerson. JB had been lowering prices like a madman. Amos didn't get how. Amos had made the switch to slaves, and JB hadn't. Amos had his brother Abraham raid a tire manufacturing plant over in Columbus (, Moon), and Birch still bought tires from Goodyear. Amos had been constructing ledgers for John Birch Byerson's Tirerama, based on dumpster-diving-retrieved documents (dumpster-driving services care of Abraham). Dumbass Birch didn't shred anything. Still--JB's tires were about twenty dollars less than Amos's, and freaking JBBT still pulled in more than Amos's Discount Tireyard, and at a profit! Amos slashed prices, and people stayed with JBBT. Amos had his marketing people do massive surveying; the data showed that people just "trusted" John Birch Byerson, for whatever reason. So Amos learned that JB was going on a hiking expedition outside of the oxygen dome over the last weekend in February, and Amos followed JB to the mountain range, and Amos walked up to JB, and JB said "Amos, what are you doing here?" and Amos slowly, but successfully, drove a screwdriver through JB's helmet.

This was the moon.

The [Advisory Neighborhood] Commissioner

Jennifer Parker stood at the intersection of Eastern and Rhode Island Avenues NE, looking out at the weird curving wall of snow that sat on top of Mount Rainier, MD. On account of the slightly-above freezing temperature beneath the crust, Ward 5 UnderDC didn't get snowy--just wet. But Maryland didn't have the phenomenon of a giant dish or crust or whatever it was above, so it got snow. The warmth of Ward 5 and all the UnderDC parts adjacent to Maryland or Virginia allowed parts of those states to not be snowy when the horrendous late 21st century storms fell--but snowy parts fell within eyesight of UnderDC, and so from any spot on the border of DC, you could see what Jennifer Parker saw: no snow, and then an elliptical wall of the white stuff.

But the wall of snow wasn't the thing that worried Jennifer Parker. It was the burst water main on Rhode Island Ave that was spewing brownish liquid. This particular water main had been broken for a little over a week, and she had yet to see any crews from the DC Water and Sewer Authority even check out the main break. She had called DCWASA the previous Monday, but had heard--on the occasions that her electricity had flickered on and she could get news--that roughly every member of nearly every city service crew available, WASA included, was doing a massive repair job on the stilt above Ward 3 of UnderDC and all of the infrastructural disruptions caused by the swaying of the stilt.

But nuts to the stilt, Jenny thought: she wanted to cause a ruckus about this water main. It made her angry. Once again, the people on that freaking crust got their stuff repaired, all while, by all indications, nearly nothing else in the city was working. She wanted to convene the Ward 5A Advisory Neighborhood Commission, of which she was a Commissioner, to have a meeting at the water main and call some press, but the other commissioners had too many problems in their own parts of the ward. So here was Jenny, waiting for a City Paper reporter to come by and report on her water main problem. But lo--the reporter was almost a full hour late now. Traveling around the city was crazy these days, what with potholes the size of cars going unfixed for years, exploding water mains everywhere, and the whole problem of the swaying stilt. But still--Jenny had been waiting for a long time. She wanted somebody to care about the damn water main.

At about the forty-five minutes of waiting mark, a ten-year old boy came riding up on a bike. He was, along with Jenny, the only person on the street. She watched the boy from down Rhode Island until he rode up to her and stopped. "Hey ma'am," the boy said, putting on his brakes, and putting his feet on the road. "What're you doing standing by that nasty water?"

Jenny smiled. "Trying to make a point."

"What kinda point?"

"That somebody should care about us. What's your name?"

"Christopher Arnold Washington Junior."

"That's a fun name, Christopher Arnold Washington Junior."

Chris smiled. "It is!"

"How old are you, Chris?"

"Ten. How old are you?"

Jenny laughed. "Forty, honey. Where do you live?"

"Myrtle Avenue. Where do you live?"

"Oh, just a tiny bit away from here. Newton Street. I, uh." She considered whether she should tell the boy that she was from the ANC, and decided not to; what ten year-old cares about the ANC? she asked herself. "I'm just waiting for a news reporter to come write about this water main breaking."

"Oh, I don't know if any reporter's gonna come to that."

"And why not?"

"'cause it's boring!" the boy said, grinning widely, rolling his eyes and spinning his head around as he said "boring." Right as Chris said that, a heavily-bearded thirtysomething fellow, also riding a bike, came into view. Jenny peered at the moving figure, and then he was in front of her and little Chris.

"Oh hey," the man said, doing the same brake-and-stand thing that Chris did before. "I am so sorry. I'm the City Paper reporter. Name's Jeff." He held out his sweaty hand for Jenny to shake. "Got a heck of a water main problem here."

"Indeed," Jenny said, tentatively shaking Jeff's hand. "What took so long? You're, like, almost an hour late."

"I know, I know," Jeff said. "But, uh, there was something weird about Newt Gingrich running away from some conference and going into space. We don't usually cover that kinda stuff, but then there was this like crazy three-day riot maybe 'cause of that or something and a stand-off at the hotel where the conference was, and a bunch of young corn-fed conservative kids just blew up half of Woodley Park on top of the crust. Like just this morning. I had to go cover it, but I came over as quickly as I could."

Jenny stood, her eyebrows furrowed, arms crossed, processing what the young guy just said. "Hrm," she said. "So who's this Newt Gingrich and why's all that more important than my water main?"

Excerpts from Newt's speech at the 2087 CPAC

Note: Power was down across the Atlantic seaboard, and all CPAC speakers had to use a megaphone. The regular recording equipment was shut off, seeing as it was a drain on the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel's generators. The speech, or parts of it, were copied down by conference participants; the excerpts below are edited from several different notes.

My sadness is deep tonight, fellow revolutionaries. Our so-called President's inability to deal with our increasingly literally powerless society means that many of my dearest friends, including George Will's Undying Electronic Presence, the third robotic incarnation of John Boehner produced this year, and the "Repeal the Fourteenth Amendment" cyborg dance team--they can't be with us tonight. But I, revolutionaries, am with you, until the stars take me.

Note: Starting around 2040, members of both parties began referring to the opposite-partied occupant of the White House as the "so-called President." Some commentators bemoaned this as yet another symbol of ever-degrading partisan strife. Democrats claimed the practice started with Republicans; Republicans claimed the practice dated back to the George W. Bush years, and was first voiced by Democrats; the Patriocrats claimed that the term was encoded, in secret dissolving ink, in a combination of laws including but not limited to the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Social Security Act, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986; the fringiest of the fringe Patriotcrats and a few of their armed followers claimed the "so-called President" concept was found in the 22' by 22' cube containing all the world's gold, such that said cube containing all the world's gold had/has inscribed on it an edict from William McKinley himself mandating that no one holding the position of President of the United States shall actually be elected, and shall actually be chosen by a committee comprised of the de Rothschilds, the Morgans, Mark Hanna and his descendants, and the Comptroller of the Currency.

Should we bemoan our problems? Should we bemoan the fact that Interstate 95 has a gaping hole above the Delaware Memorial Bridge? Should we wail that we don't have working trains, that half of our airports aren't equipped to control air traffic? Maybe. And maybe liberals should admit that years of the government having any hand in infrastructure didn't work. Oh, they whine: how are you supposed to maintain or build any new infrastructure when you basically refuse to raise taxes for the better part of a century? My revolutionaries, I say: that is a dumb question. It's them talking about old solutions to new problems. More taxes to make government work? If Charles Krauthammerpod had the charge to get over here, he'd sum it all up in a word. "Nonsense." Maybe "Absurd."

I just want to--

Note: At this moment the generators powering the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel ran out of fuel. Lights went off. CPACers started murmuring. Some stories tell that Newt yelled, "--talk about American Solutions!" Other reports claimed that Newt led the crowd in a chorus of "USA! USA!" Others said that Newt told CPACers that the "so-called President was turning a once great America into the United States of Atrophy." The record is contradictory. Within twenty-four hours, Newt had apparently moved his launch date up, and was in space.

Atlanta, the vast Midwest, Washington DC - Late February 2087

The pack of mules died. The WMATA Metro, rumored for nearly a century to eventually break down entirely, broke down entirely.

*     *     *

"Newt?" It was Old Friend calling.

Newt held the phone at a distance, and heard the tinny voice of his friend. It was gray outside. An airplane was smoking in a field out in the distance. Newt's house was powered by multiple generators, and was not affected by the wide-scale power outage.

"Newt?"

"Yeah," Newt said, his voice cracking, holding the phone out. He closed his eyes, swallowed, regained his composure, and held the phone to his ear, fiery and ready to talk like nothing was wrong with him. "I'm alive. How are you?"

"Oh, fine. I've been learning to live without electricity for years." There was an extended silence. "So have you heard any reasons why roughly nothing is working?"

"Pretty standard infrastructure problems, really. If only we had privatized it, we would have been okay."

Old Friend was quiet again. "Are you still going to space?"

"Private industry, my friend!" Newt yelled. Newt felt excitement again; his brain was clicking with policy ideas. He grabbed a nearby napkin and started searching around for a pen. He couldn't find one, and remembered he was having a conversation, so it was only civil to actually talk. "I mean, it's still going off. They're good at what they do, the Mellon company."

"Hrm," Old Friend said. "Have you heard what people are saying about you?"

"Ha!" Newt said. "The Intergalactic Culture War? I mean, those people are crazy, the ones that say I'm going to come back and announce that. Irresponsible. I'm a sensible guy, Old Friend. That's why you voted for me as Speaker."

"So true, Newt."

"And anyway: the Moon People have already announced it."

The Robots Whirred

George Will's Undying Electronic Presence raised his voice to a library shout, incensed as he was about his inability to pick up baseball transmissions--and then he himself went dead. Boehnerbot 2087^2 had just finished demonstrating, on the House floor, how big some bill was, when his eyes turned into tiny white dots in the center of darkness, like an old TV tube. Newt was riding the Peoplemover, wiping away tears, when the Peoplemover stopped. Snow fell on CrusDC, and the grating system didn't grate or heat--so CrusDC got an accumulation of snow, which was the cause of much laughter in UnderDC. The mules that pulled the one Red Line WMATA train kept pulling that train, though, unaffected as they were by the general US-wide computer shutdown.

After an hour, things started working again. But Newt cried for want of a solution to a problem he didn't understand.

Up to Now!

A new narrative post each day, even each week, is probably a lot to read. So as a way to help new readers make sense of what the hell is going on here, here's a quick summary of the events up to now:

Plot points:

• Newt Gingrich, old and yet still alive in the year 2087, is finally getting launched into space. He's going to use a private space flight company, in case you were wondering. Newt's always been pretty obsessed with space, so this is a logical step.
• Rumors circulate among the journalistic folks that Newt is going to use this trip as a means of (1) supporting the notion that life on the welfare-free moon colonies is successful and should be replicated in the United States, on Earth, and (2) claiming irrefutable evidence that a Christian God created all things. Of course, point (2) is not a controversial thing (if you're Christian, obviously you're going to support the idea that a Christian God created all things), but some journalists, circa 2087, are spreading the rumor that Newt will return from space to claim evidence of God and THEN declare an Intergalactic Culture War (whatever that is). You know how journalists are, with the rumors.
• In 2087, Washington DC gets so much snow that the city has been elevated by giant stilts. There is CrusDC, the top part, where Newt lives, and then UnderDC, where there's some sort of vague underclass (and it's hard to have a dystopian future without an underclass that literally lives under a city). There's a complex grating system whereupon when snow falls onto CrusDC, snow falls through slats, and gets heated and liquified. Accordingly, when it snows, UnderDC receives lots of nasty, hot rain.
• Oil has been found underneath the Potomac River, where the Potomac Oil Company drills--but without complaint from bougie folks, since they generally live on CrusDC.
• Newt has a financial stake in both the stilt/crust operation, and the oil operation.

Character points:

• When Newt faces rejection these days, he gets very emotional. If he gets emotional in Washington DC, he travels back to the Atlanta, Georgia area, and rides the Peoplemover at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, which makes him happier.
• Newt has always had fans among both conservative and moderate Republicans. A moderate Republican, and former member of Congress who has given up his name and titles and goes only by the name "Old Friend," is Newt's best friend. Old Friend is upset about the state of the world, and is protective of Newt.