Asylum Flight

by Oscar Deadwood

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

He retrieved another book about World War II, and it too, made no mention of the Holocaust, it was as if the attempt to exterminate the Jews had been of no importance during the war.

He then went to the computerized encyclopedia. He typed in the word ‘Holocaust’, and clicked on the search button.

No results were found.

Almost starting to panic, he looked in the encyclopedia for other points in history, events in his lifetime, where he knew an attempt at genocide had taken place, Rwanda and Bosnia to be specific.

Again, nothing, there was no mention of a Holocaust or even genocide.

It seemed apparent to Ben — unless his mind was playing tricks on him and his memory was failing — that something or someone was trying to hide history, trying to sweep it under a rug. He couldn’t be the only person who remembered learning about the Holocaust.

And then he realized that only a powerless Natural would have the same memory as he. The knowledge of the Enhanced probably matched what he found on the library shelves, and the Enhanced had all the power in this country and most of the world. Naturals, like Ben, were people who eschewed altering their brains for religious or aesthetic reasons. Ben didn’t want his mind to be at the mercy of some corporation operating a computer, some corporation that had apparently been altering history.

And then Ben, in an instant, realized the true nature of the Flight: it was a geriatric holocaust. Anyone eighty-five years old would board a plane and be exterminated somehow, in ways that Ben could only guess at — probably poison gas that would circulate through the cabin of the plane.

Why? Why would the elderly be discarded in such a horrific manner? Ben could only come up with one answer: the burden of Ben’s generation, the baby boomers, on the long-fragile health care system. Why take care of them? Why spend billions upon billions of dollars caring for the elderly who typically needed constant medical attention when it was much more cost effective to get rid of them?

So, Ben spent his last days in the library, trying to find a means of escape, a means to avoid the Flight.

Sadly, in this world of neuro-transmitters and Enhanced police, Ben had no means of escape unless he fled to another country, but that was impossible. His car had been taken away when he moved to his apartment, and there was absolutely no way he could buy an airline ticket and fly away. No airline, no ticket agent, and none of the airline police would allow him access to a flight anywhere, and even if he could travel, he couldn’t take his savings with him: he was only allowed to withdraw a thousand dollars a month. The government wanted to make sure a soon-to-be passenger left money behind, rather than spend it away.

But on this day, the day he was accosted by the policeman, the library provided inspiration, a spark of an idea that seemed foolish. “But what the hell,” Ben said to himself, “anything beats dying.”

Ben was reading the newspaper via the computer screen under the surface of his favorite table. It was a story about the garbage wars. For years, Ontario had been sending its trash across the U.S. and Canadian border into Michigan. But five years ago, Michigan ran out of space; it had become literally packed with garbage. Now, because of some environmental agreement signed thirty years before, Michigan was sending its garbage into northern Ontario, where there were miles upon miles of uninhabited land.

Canada had a few Enhanced, but not like the U.S., and, more importantly still, from what Ben could deduce, there was no Asylum Flight; people could still die of natural causes in Canada.

Ben stayed in the library until it closed for the evening. He walked home underneath the heavily illuminated sky. He was the only pedestrian on the sidewalk going to his apartment building, and he was greeted with an ad about estate planning. Ben had a decent sum of money left to pass on. He saw an image of his son in the sidewalk screen, sitting with his own wife and children in what looked like the inside of a church. Though it was an ad, it seemed more like a governmental public service announcement, thanking Ben for his service to society, and what a gift it was to be able to leave money behind to the next generation, as one would have no use for money after the Flight.

“Thanks Dad, for the wonderful life and the hard-earned inheritance, we’ll make sure it goes to good use,” his son said, as he touched the head of his children, a young boy and a girl already Enhanced. They always seemed frightened of Ben, as if his Natural intellect made him seem like a stupid and crude beast.

Ben went home to his apartment, the sound of the television filling the air in every corner of his two rooms.

He would throw himself in the garbage, he decided, and try to go to Canada. He hoped that being under mounds of trash would keep the signal from his neuro-transmitter hidden, and he hoped his body wouldn’t be crushed as it went underneath piles of trash. “But what the hell,” he told himself, “I’ve been to Vietnam, I can handle a little bit of garbage.”

Ben had seen the slow-moving freight trains laden with garbage pass through Royal Oak on a daily basis, usually as the dawn fanned out across the small city. The trains headed to Detroit, just a few miles to the south, where the trash was loaded onto cargo ships on the Detroit River. From Detroit, the trash headed north through the Great Lakes and into northern Canada.

“Simple enough,” Ben told himself as he packed a tote bag with bottles of water, a few boxes of crackers and cans of tuna. He dressed himself in layers of clothes and taking all the money he had in his apartment, (about two grand, money long ago stuffed underneath his mattress) and shoved it in his wallet.

The train tracks cut a diagonal swath through downtown Royal Oak, and they ran less than a hundred yards from Ben’s building. The train was forced to move slowly through Royal Oak as it was densely populated.

And Ben caught the train the very next morning, painfully hopping onto a boxcar with his tote bag slung over his shoulders and his arthritic knees protesting as he climbed the ladder to the top of the car. The boxcar was open on top with a mound of compacted garbage rising over the rim.

Ben hoped no one saw him. Though it was early, a few aerocars were traversing across the sky and Ben was too afraid to look up and see if any belonged to the police.

But no one seemed to notice. Ben allowed himself to drop into the mound of trash, and he slid into the corner of the boxcar, his body hidden in the shadow cast by the boxcar’s walls.

The smell of the trash was overpowering, almost nauseating. Ben started to gag, but then he remembered Vietnam where he smelled things much worse. “Toughen up, Bosworth,” Ben told himself. “It’s just a pile of trash, it ain’t like a pile of dead bodies covered in maggots.”

Ben made himself comfortable as the train reached the Detroit River, and the boxcar sat in a freight yard for almost two days before an ancient crane loaded it onto a large freighter.

Ben had always loved the water. He liked taking his son boating and fishing in the northern part of the state when his son was a small child. He desperately wanted to climb to the top of the garbage and stare at the water and at the shore as the freighter sailed slowly and surely through the Detroit River, north into Lake St. Clair and into Lake Huron.

But he couldn’t. Even as the boat sailed into the open water of the Great Lakes, the sounds of aerocars and helicopters and airplanes littered the sky, and Ben couldn’t risk being seen. He didn’t want to be caught. He didn’t want a swarm of Enhanced police to grab him and drag back to Royal Oak and force him onto some airplane.

Several days passed as the boat headed north and Ben imagined a change in the climate. The air was less hazy and cooler than it was around Detroit and Ben could smell its freshness even though he was surrounded by the odors of petrified food, used diapers and other smells distinctly human.

The boat finally docked, and Ben guessed he was somewhere on Lake Superior’s northern shore. It sounded as if he was docked in a fairly large city. Thunder Bay maybe, as his mind recalled the maps he loved to pore over as a child and lately as an old man.

He hoped the journey would be over soon. He had exhausted his supply of food days ago, and he had only a bit of water left, not to mention the results of his own bowel movements and urination that lay scattered around his corner of the boxcar. Ben could hear the busy sounds of the dockside; the whine of forklifts zipping along the pier, the hoarse voices of longshoremen shouting directions and insults at one another and the lapping of the water against the hull of the boat and the concrete wall of the pier.

“I actually made it,” Ben said audibly, impatiently waiting for the boxcar to be lifted out of the boat.

Ben had never considered his options at this point. How would he separate himself from the trash? How would he find shelter before he would be taken on what he guessed to be a train, getting dumped somewhere in the nearly uninhabited wilderness of northern Ontario?

He worked out a rather crude plan. He would climb to the top of the trash heap as the boxcar was lifted out of the boat. He would then scan the dockside in an attempt to scope out the lay of the buildings, and he would drop himself out of the boxcar as soon as it hit the ground, landing on the side away from the crane, hoping no one would see him. He imagined himself quite the sight; an old and stooped man stained with the color and odor of a ton of refuse, a sight that would be sure to frighten an unsuspecting longshoreman.

The boxcar rose into the air just hours after the freighter docked. Ben felt a tinge of exhilaration as he rose into the air, not unlike his first airplane ride so many years ago, the thrill of taking off into the air for the very first time still quite a happy memory.

He felt the boxcar climb, and Ben eased his stiff body onto the pile of trash, and squinted his eyes against the sun. It was the first time he had been out of the shadow of the boxcar’s corner, and he tensed his body, waiting for the descent onto the pier.

But the descent didn’t come. The boxcar remained suspended in the air for several minutes, and Ben could hear the crane’s ignition shut off.

Fear rose from the base of Ben’s stomach and up his throat, causing him to vomit. He wondered if he had been discovered, but he would soon wonder no more.

A black and unmarked and very official-looking Lincoln aerocar approached Ben from the Thunder Bay skyline. The aerocar stopped just above the boxcar, and its hatch opened up, allowing a ladder made of rope to drop to the boxcar.

A man in a blue, one-piece uniform climbed quickly and deftly down the ladder, and Ben thought he looked familiar.

The man landed on the trash heap softly and with a smile. “I have a ticket for you Mr. Bosworth,” the man said with that Enhanced leer that Ben loathed. The man was fifty-something, squat, muscular and broad-shouldered, with a military style crewcut and silver wings pinned to his chest.

Ben’s fear grew even more as he recognized the man. It was the pilot from the talk show Ben had watched the day before his last trip to the library.

Ben backed away, to the edge of the boxcar.

“And by the way, Mr. Bosworth,” the pilot continued as Ben climbed to the edge of the boxcar, his frail body swaying in the cool northern wind.

Ben looked at the pilot with hope in his eyes. “What?” Ben answered quietly.

“Happy Birthday!”

As the pilot moved to take him, Ben fell backwards, down to the concrete dock far below.