HEPHAESTUS

I was sixteen when they said it was harmless.

I was twenty-four when they said it could no longer be ignored.

By 2025, everybody knew the name Hephaestus— a virus which made conception difficult for a growing number of people. My wife and I had it; at least one of us did. So did a lot of people we knew. The birthrate had dropped by half, but the full effects of this were not yet realized.

By 2037, the majority of job openings had grown impossible to satisfy, and the first in a long chain of American corporations filed for bankruptcy in November and didn't last the winter. Families weren't being made, houses weren't being sold, property value was plummeting. Shareholders across the mortgage industry dumped their stocks for pennies. Homeowners were forced off their property for sanitation problems in the empty houses that surrounded them. My wife and I were relocated to a complex that could be more easily maintained. Houses covered in boards surrounded us.

With competition for jobs so rapidly declining, so too did college enrollment, followed by college tuition, followed by colleges. Soon you wouldn't need to be a doctor to teach a person how to be a doctor. The "legitimate" doctors flocked to Baltimore, where an organization was forming to preserve their traditions. Desperately sick people the nation over flocked to them by the thousands.

The birthrate was still dropping. In less than ten years, the world's population would be halved. Abortion and stem cell research were universally outlawed.

In 2046, thirty years after the virus was discovered, an assassination attempt was made on the American president. Under interrogation, the would-be assassin confessed that he had been hired by Lester Senco, the CEO of America's last major corporation. A month earlier, Senco personally begged the president for a multi-billion dollar subsidy, and had been turned down. No evidence involving Senco in the attempt was ever found. The would-be assassin and five police officers were killed by an IED en route to trial. No culprit was ever found. Senco's Chicago-based company went bankrupt the following year.

Many young people stopped working as the estates of big families funneled into what few remained. The government tried to get some of the money back, imposing heavy taxes on funerals and making social security harder to collect. Civil liberty unions in partnership with attorneys-at-law the nation over put heavy limitations on their ability to do this. The televised debates became personal and sometimes violent.

My wife was relieved that she could afford to bury her father, but we were both worried that money may no longer matter soon.

These were just a few of the matters leading up to the catastrophe of 2065. The country had become so recklessly decentralized and divided, so cut off from the world, that people stopped obeying the government altogether. Taxes were impossible to collect, the guilty impossible to arrest. People did terrible things to each other in the streets, in parking lots outside of schools, on sidewalks right outside of cafe windows. Some angry pundits suggested mankind didn't deserve freedom. All of this came boiling over as Hephaestus was only beginning to show signs of slowing down. The government had no choice but to act.

And so, in 2066, the Founding.

The order was non-negotiable: all American citizens were required to relocate to one of seven cities and the suburbs that surrounded them. Their options were Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. The government sent the military to gather all the people and bring them to these seven cities. The first to arrive were allowed to choose their job and location. Every healthy person fourteen to seventy-two was required to hold an occupation. What was once known as the United States had now become the Seven Cities of America. The global market was no more; a world that was becoming integrated culturally and economically had receded to isolation among nations.

It's an uninviting and perhaps superstitious notion, but I feel I must add that there was never a point where Hephaestus infected everybody. Just enough, it seemed... just enough to lead to this... To exactly this...

I was sixty-six when I was taken to Baltimore. They put me right to work. I made zoning maps for a local branch of the National Homeowners Association, which helped the city accommodate the flocking migrants.

In the summer of '68, I was diagnosed with cancer. I could still work, but the branch had the courtesy to ask. The Medical Establishment of Baltimore (flanked by my wife) argued with the NHA that I should not, and that asking was intimidation. I remember there was a big to-do about it. Made the papers. I ended the rebuttal when I finally decided to remain at home.

The cancer went into remission. By the autumn of '72, it was gone. I had my life back. Since I only had a month left on my work mandate, once again the company asked if I wanted to come back. Once again, I turned them down.

Now is the year 2113, and I am a hundred and thirteen years old. I have outlived my wife and everyone I loved by twenty years or more. The disease is still upon us, but not as it was all those years ago. The population has stabilized. The three cities to the west have their coalition, the three cities to the east have theirs. Each of these six cities is managed by a skylord. Chicago does things differently. I'm not sure how. No one goes there.

I'm probably the oldest person in my city, certainly the oldest I know, possibly the oldest in my country... what's left of it, anyway. I am the only one who fully understands the history of the old nation, the old world, having witnessed the tail-end of it in my childhood. They don't really teach children about that world anymore, and of course they have their explanations for that. They have their explanations for everything. As far as they're concerned, the world began when the virus did.

There was a time, in the few years just after the Founding, when they strove to fulfill the demands of the past. But for better or worse, the past is dying.

And so am I.

Looking back at what I've written, it seems I had less on my mind than I thought. There were other personal things I had planned to include. But they're not so important to me right now.

It would give me some comfort to be able to write onto these pages the history of the world, if only the shards of it I can remember, along with my personal commentaries, with the assurance that these pages will survive long enough, or be taken just seriously enough, to be read by someone. By anyone. But I don't have that assurance. And I'm running out of time.

A young nurse hovers over me, longing to be somewhere else. Ninety years between us might as well be a thousand.

Outside the hospital window, my people press on.

May goodness find this broken land, before something else does.