Interlude
19 April, 2085, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Students are young. Thus, they are subject to the fads and fashions of the young. Perhaps more importantly, they are fickle and generally contrary. If the older generation is traditionalist, patriotic, religious, the students will be antipatriotic, nontraditionalist, and irreligious. If on the other hand . . .
There was snow on the ground. Not that this was particularly unusual in Boston in April. But for there to be so much snow on the ground? The students were pretty sure—indeed the consensus of the world's scientific community was—that it was the dread phenomenon of global cooling, caused by failure to create more heavy industry in the Third World, in accordance with the mandates of the Kyoto IV Treaty.
Nonetheless, that phenomenon of global cooling was not what had the students out in their thousands in protest. Rather, it was the restrictions on free speech explicit in the latest UN Treaty on the subject.
And so, to show their defiance, as university students are wont to do, some thousands of them crossed over Harvard Bridge on their way to Beacon Hill, bearing banners stating such seditious and antiprogressive sentiments as, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the Freedom of Speech" and "The Declaration of Independence was Hate Speech." Tsk.
The protestors' intentions were to cross all three-hundred and sixty four point four smoots (and an ear) of the bridge, then proceed up Massachusetts Avenue to Commonwealth Avenue. From there, they were to march by the site of the Boston Massacre, then go to the Common where they would present their grievances.
Students in Massachusetts came from all over, even the dreaded red states of the deep South. The governor, however, was a home girl. As such, she, too, was progressive. And the plain and open expression of all those unenlightened banners was anathema to her. Fortuitously, however, she was the commander of the Massachusetts National Guard.
"The adjutant general says his birds are ready to lift now, Governor," announced an aide. "Flight time about twenty minutes."
"Tell him to hold," the governor ordered. "We don't want to miss anyone."
There had been a lot of research into nonlethal weapons, over the years. There had been developed rays that caused the skin to suddenly feel painfully hot. Similarly there was ultrasound that stunned and disoriented. Some caused an unbearable itching and still others created nausea. All of those, however, tended to disperse crowds, rather than drop them in their tracks for convenient collection. So there was gas . . .
The choppers came in low, skimming the townhouses of the Back Bay. Dropping to treetop level they skipped over the Public Gardens. At Charles Street they began loosing a gas, invisible, tasteless, odorless. Wherever they crossed protestors dropped in their tracks.
Watching the scene from her office, the governor misrecited:
"By the rude bridge that ached the flood,
Their unprogressive flag unfurled,
Here once the protesting students stood,
And got gassed and shipped to another world."
"Where do we send them, Governor?" the aide asked.
"First to jail, then to court and then to Southern Columbia," she answered. "It looks like that's going to be our dumping ground for unenlightened malcontents."