Revolution

Prologue

Friday, December 31, 2077 11:50 pm

            To an uneducated observer, one from a different time, unfamiliar with the easy rhythms of the modern, peaceful world, the city spread out over the wide valley would appear to be sleeping a righteous sleep. An odd sight on the eve of the New Year; by all rights, the streets should be brimming with a cheering, drunken mob. The girls should have been wondering who would kiss them at the stroke of midnight. The boys should be either protecting their conquests, like the proud predators of Africa, or lurking around the edges, sniffing for the vulnerable and injured like hyenas from the same dead continent.

            The city should be alive.

            Instead it lies in a writhing, silently screaming slumber, observed by a single thin man who stands patiently smoking a cigarette. He does not look at his watch – he does not own a single timepiece of any sort – he simply waits until the moment feels right.

            He is the solitary watchman of another revolution.

*

            Finishing his smoke, Jerome Francis Abelard III, Grandson of the New Buddha and only two-eyed man on Earth, flicked the butt off the high balcony. He watched it spiral out of sight, a single orange fairy in the night, and turned to the dark room behind him. In a moment of indecision, he sighed, a deep wracking action that would have been a better fit on someone forty years his senior.

All the power in the world and none of the glory.

He rubbed his forehead for a moment considering his meager options. Wake up one, or more probably a few, of the girls -- asleep in their draining cradles and cut the power output of the building slightly – and drown himself in the rites of Caligula? He wore a lupine grin at the same moment he discarded the idea. Pliant, placid flesh did not suit his palate tonight. It was regrettable. They fired something deep in his loins, something that never was fulfilled no matter how pornographically perfect their performances. But that undefined reaction always led to the same result: blood spilled, and the Monitor clucking at him to give it a DNA sample for cloning and take the third eye, become just another Dreamer.

He would never admit, even to himself, that there were moments where the idea sounded tempting, but he had observations to make.

His next option was even more painful: summon the Monitor and amuse himself by arguing with it. The watchful, maternal computer was versed in all philosophies and tactics of debate, but lacked any of the cunning to be interesting enough to warrant the effort. Abelard would never make the observation, since he lacked necessary frame of reference, but arguing with the supercomputer was like arguing with an extremely precocious child. He started to mentally move forward to the next option, then stopped and retraced his tracks to thoughts of the Monitor.

The Dreamers would be partying in their sleep tonight. Fighting, making love, celebrating the coming New Year with a ravenous, violent ecstasy that would keep the Monitor moving quickly to make sure every spark of emotional energy was properly siphoned off to the power grids that needed it most. Tonight the Monitor would be incredibly distracted. It was always most vulnerable on the old holidays. Since he had spent Christmas Eve taking each of his harem around his twisted world, he had missed the opportunity. Tonight, his sadistic libido ebbed.

With a spring in his step, Abelard entered his cavernous suite. The lights snapped on to his footfall. Lush couches, more than even he and all of his girls needed, jumped into bright clarity. Tables of oak, and cedar, some of them a century old, were arranged in front of the couches. He stepped to the couch that was centered in front of the large screen on the main wall, and flopped on it like a teenager left home alone.

He tapped the modern table in front of him, three times quickly and one slower, and a thin, black keyboard folded out. He flicked a key and the screen jumped to life, showing a graph with huge spikes, dotted with small valleys. He grinned to himself. Oh, the Monitor was busy tonight. It seemed every Dreamer was in the throes of some sort of violent passion. Another flick of a key and the graph disappeared, replaced by a short list of names with small lines beside them that were sedate when compared with the first graph.

Whistling, Abelard selected the fourth name, one whose graph showed slightly more output than the others. He paused whistling long enough to chuckle at the poor fool’s work assignment: cigarette factory. Abelard was the lone smoker on Earth. He could chain smoke for the rest of life, and all of his descendants, no that he would technically have any, after him for a thousand years and still not break into the current supply. With a wry grin – thinking of one of his first lessons from the Monitor: “idle hands stop to feel” -- he went back to whistling, scheduling the poor schmuck with the pointless job for a third eye exam to correct the output. He then opened the command center for the eye care center and reset the instructions to lower the controls on the eye. Cigarette boy was in for an interesting year.

No one was there to appreciate the irony, but Abelard had this thought at precisely the moment when 2077 CE rolled into 2078 CE and one revolution ended and another began.