[A note on this story: BlackWatch originally appeared here in 2009, as a six chapter story titled The Man From God Only Knows. I never really considered the story finished, and the end was really a bare-bones version -- one that I have discarded completely for this final version.
BlackWatch
Prelude: What has come and gone
In the immediate prelude to the First Secession War, politicians from both parties in the United States turned away from long held positions of prosecuting wars against terrorists and their fellow travelers. Collapsing infrastructure led to deteriorating conditions in all major cities, food riots became commonplace after years of crop failures, while ever-accelerating income inequality -- coupled with decades of deceit from politicians in both parties -- produced an atmosphere of desperation within the American population. Long, contentious experience with overcrowded prisons filled beyond capacity with minorities -- and this only a few years after tough new drug laws were introduced -- coupled with the fractious Islamist ascendency that exploded throughout American cities when further extreme policies were introduced -- all but doomed America to civil war. The First Secession War began, innocently enough, when cities on the east and west coast effectively seceded from the Union, leaving moderate politicians in both parties helpless and at a loss to halt their precipitous slide in democratic polls. When open hostilities broke out between military forces allied with one faction or another, America appeared on the verge of collapse.
With it's military divided, conservative factions in America turned to Russia for help, while neoliberal factions on the east coast turned to NATO. Western states turned to Japan for assistance. When an American airliner strayed over during this period, North Korea struck the Pacific Northwest with nuclear weapons. Over the next day and a half, several more nuclear exchanges occurred, most concentrated in the Middle East, but one huge, sustained exchange occurred between India and Pakistan, rendering life on the sub-continent virtually extinct.
Another more problematic exchange occurred between Russian and Chinese forces, leaving Russia decimated and coastal China a radioactive wasteland. Interestingly, the former United States was hardly affected by all this, save for the destruction around Puget Sound and northwest Oregon, yet all vestiges of the once mighty American political structure had by then been swept away. With air transportation systems in ruins, and without railroads to aid in reconstruction, the cohesive network of American cities and states disintegrated, and the remaining citizenry resettled into small, sustainable agrarian communities. Life began to take on medieval qualities, but life continued.
After the collapse of America, or the so-called First Republic, neoconservative parties made huge gains in the elections of the early 2150s, and the leader of the newly formed Social-Continental Party defeated the liberalist National Front
--
just as cities were recovering and beginning to trade once again. On a platform of reuniting the former states, implementing agrarian reforms as well as new rounds of 'get tough' laws against drug use and immigration, neoconservatives swept aside liberal opposition groups and returned to power with their broadest electoral mandate in nearly thirty years.
Religious blocs within the Social-Continentals began orchestrating severe new policies, first mandating that all citizens attend religious services, and then by mandating all non-Christian religious practice be state sanctioned. A second religious undercurrent came to pass during this period: a gender-based differentiation of religious practice, with patriarchal and matriarchal branches splitting from each other, leading to escalating gender based conflict within the country's remaining small communities. These actions and reactions led, almost immediately, to the Second Secession War -- and this time North America did not escape widespread destruction.
One other force became inescapable during the latter half of the twenty-first century. The long denied, oft maligned effects of so-called climate change. After the Paris Accords were gutted in 2018, after drilling for oil and mining for coal resumed on a scale never before seen, global temperature increased at a steady pace -- until 2055, that is. Then the climate tipped, and temperatures increased dramatically. Agricultural output fell by 85% with five years and the earth's population dropped from two billion to just a few hundred million. By 2210 there remained perhaps ten million people in the land formerly known as the United States, and most of these people lived in northern, somewhat cooler mountainous regions, and only four much smaller coastal city-states remained: the New York-Boston 'mega-plex', Houston, Saint Franciscus -- and of course, Los Angeles, now known as Saint Angeles. Most trade between continents was conducted through these cities -- by sailing ship -- and regional political power was centered in these four cities, as well.
And these city-states became the locus of military power in the Third Republic, and they banded together with city-states in Europe and Japan to create a new world order based -- primarily -- on a new religious system that fused Christian and Buddhist teachings. This new religious order grew increasingly militaristic over time, and gender segregation became a much more prominent feature of daily life.
With order restored after the Second Secession War, the first round of Social-Continental Reforms, the so-called Neo-Justinian
Corupus Iurus Civilis II
, delivered great power into the hands of Law Enforcement. By-passing the courts, police officers on the street were given the power to place any person suspected of being in the Northern Tier illegally into one of several rebuilt detention facilities. Little was said at the time, though it was widely understood: those so detained would never be released, and in fact would never be seen or heard from again. The facilities so created soon became known as
Manzanars
, though the meaning of the name was obscure, and their ranks swelled with tens of thousands from the 'Southern Tier,' lands once called Central and South America, people caught fleeing their own famines and drug wars. Rumor had it that most of those incarcerated died from forced labor, but reporting on conditions inside
Manzanars
was forbidden after the first feeble attempts by frightened reporters were met with calls to disband the media.
The second element of the first round of reforms was more controversial from the start: police officers were given the power to summarily execute any person found in possession of or using any form of illegal narcotics, along with broad new powers to search for these compounds.
Drug use fell precipitously the first few months after the reforms went into effect, after the 'extra-judicial' killings began, and the number of people caught trying to sneak into the Northern Tier dropped to a trickle as well. Social-Continental politicians sneered at their liberal brethren, corporate journalists soon lauded the neoconservatives for rescuing the new republic and reestablishing law and order, but soon rumors surfaced that the police were using their broad new powers to intimidate or eliminate anti-reform opposition leaders -- and perhaps not coincidentally, more than a few liberal politicians. Still, over time not even a complacent media could ignore these new developments, for people were disappearing at an alarming rate.
Nervous Social-Continental politicians rushed through a third set of reforms; these simply modified existing code to include an element of due process, but a new class of law enforcement officer was created in the process: the Justinian, and though nominally police officers, Justinians had to complete more thorough legal training before their final appointment. The Justinian's job was to go to the scene of all crimes and verify that any arrests made were valid -- before certifying a suspect for summary execution or, in rare instances, internment. And there was one other stipulation attached to the creation of the Justinians: all would be biologically female.
And with this one simple twist of fate, a tale comes to mind...
Part I
Aurelius Krül-son sat behind an arcing row of tables in the front row of a small classroom; he yawned -- and wiped a smeary tear from his cheek -- while other cadets filed-in and took their assigned seats in the room. A fresh spasm tore through the muscles in his neck and he rubbed taut cords of tortured tissue until the pain subsided, then shook his head again as another yawn came. He put his hand out and grabbed the edge of the table as he winced through another spasm, this one deep in his back, between his shoulder blades. He felt awful, wanted more than anything in the world to go back to the dormitory and sleep for at least a week, but that was not to be, he knew, not with Codex exams less than a week away. He shook his head to clear away the fog, and wished once again the academy's PT instructors would back-off from the endless spate of late-night runs.
He opened his notebook -- Institute-issued and graded weekly for neatness -- and took out a couple of pencils from the attaché case that lay by his feet on the concrete floor. Other cadets did the same as the clock rolled around to 2000 hours, then a door beside the whiteboard opened and the week's instructor -- one they had never seen before -- walked into the classroom.
Krül-son caught his breath when he saw her, for he was quite certain he'd never seen so desirable a woman -- and desire was a very tricky thing.
The instructor was very short, not particularly slender but by no means overweight, yet she exuded an obvious self-confidence that was positively attractive; more important and certainly more to the point, he thought she was sexy, conscientiously sexy, like she enjoyed projecting authority through an overt appearance of sexuality -- and that made her a very rare bird indeed. She walked to the podium before the class and laid out her materials on an adjoining table -- slowly, quietly, her every move exuding authority -- then she grabbed a marker, strode over to the whiteboard and began writing:
'Sinn August-dottir; District Attorney's Office; Law of Search and Seizure I.' Her words on the board, like her persona, were carefully structured and precise; the lettering and punctuation left by her fine-boned hand was clipped and neat, and full of purpose. At first all Krül-son noticed was the curve of her hips and legs, but soon the wedding band on the third finger of her left hand caught his attention, yet even so his eyes wandered back over her exciting lines.
She turned to the class and nodded to someone in the rear of the room; Krül-son dared not turn around -- and it was in any event quite unnecessary. The Commandant of the Saint Angeles Regional Police Academy would be standing back there in her immaculately starched whites, checking to see how this latest class of rookie police officers responded to their new instructor. The commandant would, as was her custom, leave after the first few minutes of class; meanwhile, the instructor took up a remote and lowered a screen on the wall behind her and began reading off the highlights of what she planned to cover during this first morning's session.
Krül-son diligently began copying every word she said, ignoring the wedding band he saw on her left hand as best he could, all the while trying to wipe away his impure thoughts by writing down the rigorous rules of procedure that dripped like warm honey from the instructor's icy lips.
+++++
Lunch was always the same: protoplast steak and soy-carb noodles, a four ounce cup of enhanced water, three supplemental capsules of hormones and an iodine tab. Krül-son sat at his assigned table, in his assigned seat; he looked up from his tray from time to time and squinted at the clock on the far wall, then at radiation probes mounted on the rooms three small windows. Everything in the dining room was white -- the harshest white imaginable: the walls were white; the clock on the wall, the tile on the floor; everywhere he looked it was as if all the world was afloat on a sea of endless white -- aside from the radiation probes. These were bright yellow, lined with green and red, and everyone, everyone cast a wary eye on these displays at least once during lunch.
Everyone in the room -- every cadet, every instructor and administrator, every radiation tech -- was dressed in the same blistering white, and all but one person in the dining hall had pure white skin. The sole exception was Misogi Shibata, an exchange cadet from Kyoto, the largest remaining city-state in the Asiana Confederation. Misogi's skin was perhaps a bit darker than his own -- if it was at all -- but it was her shocking silver hair that commanded the most attention. Radiation, he'd heard, was the cause, but she was startlingly beautiful, despite the color of her hair -- and the radiation burns on her arms. For some reason the latest regeneration sprays had great difficulty repairing neutron-irradiated flesh, but there was nothing anyone could do about that, was there?
Halfway through the meal he looked up and noticed Sinn August-dottir walking into the room with the commandant, and to Krül-son she seemed almost grimly determined to keep a private joke to herself -- for as long as possible. The two women walked through the crowded main dining room and on into the private dining room reserved for high ranking staff and important visitors, and his eyes followed her path through the room.
'Naturally,' thought Krül-son, though his eyes retained the mesmerizing image of her legs, the soft arcing lifts of her hair, the grim twinkle in her eyes -- and so he couldn't simply ignore the fluttering butterflies in his gut.
"What did you say?" Pol Dänae-son asked.
