Notices by Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)

One down, one billion, four hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to go.

The Last Soy Latte by Whitney Hall

Daenerys stood with her hand on the inside knob of her apartment door. Face mask? Check. Book bag? Check. Bunker Bootz? Check. Her choice of foot protection this day was lavender, selected from an array of fashionable colors and patterns found on the hazmat preparedness aisle at Target. She had been in more of a marigold mood, but decided indulging her own fashion whims was less important than showing solidarity with her LGBTPSQ allies who (unbelievably, in the year 2049!) were still forced to pay for their own in-vitro fertilization, embryo rectification, and species or gender transition procedures in some Unity Regions. Smart phone? Check. Daenerys (of course) had an identification chip implanted in her hand, but had not yet been able to afford the implantable smart-screen stamp, so she still had to carry her exsomatic device for some purposes.

Trudging down four flights of stairs in her heavy, acid-resistant boots, Daenerys’ mind was as blank as the pale, yellowing walls of the stairwell. After leaning her full weight against the thick metal door to open it toward the street, her senses were overwhelmed with smells and sounds. Sewage, chemical runoff, and food waste stench emanated from the sludge on the street, dulled but not completely blocked by her snug mask. Sounds from diesel engines and honking horns painfully penetrated her ears. If only the anti-progressives had listened to reason in the pre-Unity era, and passed the Green New Deal before it was too late! But the dominant Pallid regime had implemented short-sighted, selfish, and capitalistic policies, and subsequent generations were forced to live with the resulting contamination.

Historically, Pallid culture had done so much damage. Cringing with shame, Daenerys felt the weight of the collective crimes of which her skin was emblematic. She had learned at Amazon Unity Region University that the guilt she bore was embedded in her DNA and that there was no available gene therapy to correct it. Though her debt to the Melaninated could never be fully paid, she was obligated by morality and by law to make every possible effort to mitigate the damage. Of course, she would have been happy to undertake the pallotype suppression exercises even without the threat of being fined or jailed. It was the right thing to do. And the medley of African, Indian, and Asian music that was softly playing at all times in her dwelling unit was actually kind of nice. If it kept her brain from falling into pallotypical mental patterns, which as a Pallid she would always be prone to do, well, that was a just a bonus. The small electric jolt that emanated from her implanted ID chip when Daenerys used archaic, pallocentric language (like referring to Unity Regions as “states,” a common habit of Allies who were old enough to remember life pre-Unity) had been far less pleasant, but by now she had mostly purged herself of the forbidden terms, so it was no issue.

The reparative equalization fees were another contribution Daenerys was happy to make. As the first head of the Department of Reparations, Secretary Ocasio-Cortez, had explained many years ago, Pallid slaveowners had kept one hundred percent of the product of Melaninated slaves’ labor, so allowing Pallids to keep twenty percent of their own earned income was comparatively generous. Considering how difficult it was for Daenerys to manage on twenty percent of her own earned income, she felt immensely grateful for the mercy displayed toward her by the Melaninated.

[continues]

“Daniels, you and Jürgen are with me over the first opening to my right. Luc and Sergey, follow the path of the second one.”

A sequence of “rogers” arrived, and the hypersonic bombers aligned their trajectories, the single delta formation splitting into two diverging echelons. Jones could see something coherent stirring behind the moving clouds. He tried to check the reentry vehicles again and saw a confusing mass of tendrils covering the sky miles above him, still moving, but a few of the warheads survived and streaked toward their targets. To his left and right his visor highlighted the other squadrons adjusting their tracks.

A flash.

The active glass from his cockpit and visor saved him from being blinded as designed, but it still came as a surprise—he hadn’t thought any of the missiles would get through. The walls of the smoky mesa shifted again, and now Jones had a feeling that it was recoiling.

“Good luck, boys!”

He almost yelled as they crossed the wall—the limit at which the cloud would usually react to intruders—and for a few seconds nothing happened. The last of the rusted Antarctic ice he could still see underneath vanished beneath the auburn cloud cover. Boosters ran out, and Jones maneuvered to follow the gash in the red storm, keeping as far from the menacing swirls as possible. Then all hell broke loose.

Tendrils of red smoke exploded from the cloud below, the undergrowth to the forest that had risen to stop the missiles, which had just now began to recede. Jones swerved right to avoid one that had positioned itself right across his path and broke left to evade another that rose straight at him. The filaments hung still in the air for a moment as if considering their course of action, then started shifting, the ones they left behind being reabsorbed by the mass below and many more forming ahead: a pulsating web spun like lightning by an invisible spider to catch supersonic flies.

“Looks like it’s getting smarter.”

[continues]

Jones nodded and walked off, toward the gates of the launch base that had been grafted into the small town. The round-topped mountains there were of a hard blue basalt covered in deep layers of rich topsoil. They were also old as the ages, and no seismic activity had been detected there ever since people started watching for such things. That made the place, according to those in charge, perfect for an underground launch base. It had seemed to Jones an excess in caution at first, but now he knew better.

He reached the main gate, little more than a block beyond the small park, and was quickly waved through to the elevator bunker. With a quick pause for a last look at the lightening sky, he stepped in and immediately felt the floor dropping from under his feet. The trip down took little over a minute and the capsule dropped him off a few paces from the briefing room.

Most of the other pilots were already there, filling the rows of seats in the small arena. A large screen behind the stage showed a three-dimensional schematic of the Earth, centered on the south pole. Red covered everything up to around the thirty-fifth parallel, following an irregular border. It struck him as dangerously close.

General Matthias was at the podium. The last pilots walked in right behind Jones.

“Good morning, gentlemen. As you can see,” he tapped the thick line that marked the edge of the cloud on the screen, “the red smoke expanded another few hundreds of kilometers since last night, continuing the surge that started five days ago.”

The pilots, seasoned and trained as they were, took in a collective breath. Officially everything to their south had been evacuated, but they knew many people had refused or been unable to leave. Their own town was supposed to hold only military personnel, yet many of the locals—like Karl—remained.

[continues]

Jones wasn’t very optimistic, and he knew that Karl wasn’t either. Little of what they had tried so far had managed to slow down the advance of the smoke, much less reverse it. But nothing had been as extreme as what they were about to try.

“You should have left with the rest, you know.”

The town had been emptied of its regular denizens months ago—the smoke was getting too close. In the last night it had gotten perilously closer.

“I have had my amargo in the morning here in this bench since I was a child and the sky was blue, Colonel, and it’s not a cursed cloud that will make me leave.”

By amargo he meant the infusion of ground up green leaves that he drank from a calabash gourd, a custom that seemed to take hold of everyone who moved to that part of the country. Some of his colleagues were still astounded that Jones had refused to even try it.

“I know, Karl, but I still worry.”

“You don’t have to, Colonel Jones. Good luck today, I’ll say a prayer for you.”

Karl, Jones knew, was a Catholic, which to him sounded strange. He was used to associating Germans with Protestantism, but he still didn’t know much about the history of those Germans who had colonized the south of Brazil centuries before. Maybe they had been Catholics all along, maybe they converted in the predominantly Catholic country. He had the feeling that this would be his last chance to ask. He didn’t.

“Thanks, Karl, we’ll need all the prayer we can get.”

[continues]

The light coming from the bottom of the well grew brighter—the ignition flame had activated. He didn’t even pay attention to the final countdown, just felt a sudden pressure as he sank into his seat, saw the circle of sky growing rapidly as flames shot past the canopy and suddenly he was out and rising. The sky grew blacker and the stars brighter as reports from the command center streamed in through the radio. A clang, and the rocket was gone, his bird was free just as the day’s first rays of sunlight reached him.

Argentina rushed past below him, titanic clouds of dense smoke streaking the surface, now like the Earth’s own bleeding wounds, now like the tentacles of a lovecraftian beast gripping the world. They grew larger and more numerous as he sped toward the ever-shifting horizon, a crimson glow rising above the limb of the planet. Jones could now make out what looked like a violent sandstorm from which the glow emanated.

“Your distraction is arriving, boys, prepare to engage boosters.”

Jones checked his main screen, where myriad arrows converged on the south pole—one large group arrayed from the South American side, a mirror image of that from the Australian side, and several smaller formations coming in from above on all sides, well ahead of the bomber waves. The largest live ICBM launch in history, and it was the distraction.

He checked the position of the closest missile swarm and searched for it in the sky. His visor quickly highlighted them, up and to his left, moving in considerably faster than he was.

“They’ll cross the estimated reaction threshold in five seconds.”

Right on cue the cloud woke up. The scarlet sandstorm wall receded as if taking a breath, and a red colonnade rose at impossible speeds, sprouting branches as it grew—a forest of dead trees, many-fingered skeletal hands reaching for the incoming missiles, their long shadows reaching far to the west.

The first blinked out, then the second, then they started vanishing too fast for Jones to tell the order. Two managed to get through, though, and split into twenty independent warheads, their limited evasion systems doing what they could to throw them into diverging arcs. New branches of red smoke coalesced around the nearest pillar to intercept those, but he had no time to follow the action above: the signal arrived and he flipped the switch that would activate the booster rockets built into his bomber.

Suddenly crushed against the back of his seat, Jones focused on the sight ahead. The red sandstorm had done much more than recede: entire canyons had opened through it as it rose to fight the incoming nuclear bombardment.

[continues]