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Johnny Appleseed 

Curtis Yarvin 

Copyright (c) 1992



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It's early morning when I hit the Tappan Zee. The alchemy of sunrise and water turns the Hudson to gold, but the bridge is showing its years, rusty and snaggletoothed. A few suspension cables have rotted through, cut low to sway ominously in the wind, or high to hunch over and dangle trawling the shining river, gilt v-wakes marking empty steel-bristled hooks thirty feet under, hoping for a bite from... what? What would bite on such a lure? Perhaps the old mills of Albany, dead forty years before the last collapse, have moldered alive, metal husks slipping into the upper Hudson, revived and evolved by the cold rapids until a new sort of salmon runs again to the sea: Jacquard-loom gills, die-cast scales, firepump heart and bandsaw jaws. I'd like to meet one someday, we could swap notes... ah, hell, I'm an old man. Forgive my meanderings. Anyway the bridge looks sound enough, so I cross. 

Someone has burned the tollbooths on the other side. Fried the fuckers in their own juices. Always wanted to try that. An incurable pyromaniac and I don't think I want to be cured, either. I pick my way through the blackened steel bones. I'm getting a bit tired, but persuade myself to scramble up one of the high granite hills on the far side. I stumble through groves of sumac, dogwood, patches of poison ivy, starting to wonder if I'll make it to the top. Falling asleep would be bad; I'm on the shady side of the mountain. Then all of a sudden a steep earth bank, a clump of pines, a glimpse of blue sky, and the summit. A patch of bare rocks. Beautiful. I stand on the highest rock and gaze out over New Jersey, the rising sun in my eyes. 

New Jersey. Butt of a million asphalt jokes. New Jersey. "What exit?" New Jersey. "Lay-deez an' gentlemen, Da Toxic Sludge State." New Jersey. "Why do all the trees in New York bend south? 'Cause New Jersey sucks." New Jersey. "Where even the skunks wear gas masks." 

But, seeing it now, I can taste the old spirit of the land, long flat cattail marshes alive with turtles and blackbirds and muskrats, thick forests of tulip and maple swaying skeletal in the winter wind and bursting out green with the sweet spring breeze, these weary granite mountains, soft and round with age, waiting patiently to see the holocaust through. So it was not so long ago, and so it will be again. Soon. 

The land is healing fast, now. Old smokestacks line the horizon, but more than a few are crumbling, broken in half or festooned with clinging ivy. I pull out binoculars and focus, morbidly, on the nearest factory. It looks like a refinery. Alive, it was a monstrosity, a belching metal beast settled like a queen ant to sprawl and spawn. Poison its food, poison its blood, poison its dung. But, dead, it has a certain grandeur to it. Difficult to explain; think perhaps of a young man, dissolute, cheeks reddened and belly padded with beer, wispy blond hair and a smug grin and the smell of cheap aftershave. Not a beautiful object, seen for what it is. Leave it out in the desert for a few months, and like grape juice it undergoes an miraculous transformation, becoming an intricate palace of ivory, a maze of clean spars and beams and smooth hollow places lying jumbled on the hot dry sand. These relics of Hoboken are the same. 

It must be almost ten in the morning by now, and rationality reminds me I won't make much progress tonight unless I charge up. Normally I find a nice wide highway to bask on like a snake in the sun, but the bare mountaintop is good enough. I spread out the solar blanket, plug in, and drift away on a nice flat rock. 

Late in the afternoon I hit the highway again. Walking, of course. You can go a long way walking. Slap, thud, slap, thud, four miles an hour, forty miles a day and my those miles do add up. Beats those old diesel-hounds any day. You just can't appreciate a continent in a car; it's too small. The water turns you around every few days. You get frustrated and settle down in a concrete box and die. The Gypsies died out when they changed their Conestogas for Winnebagos. They thought they could master the machine, but the machine mastered them, and they ended up just another tribe of welfare Indians on the wrong side of the tracks. But me? I'll be walking around for quite a few years yet. Planning on seeing the Amazon and the Andes this winter; maybe Europe next summer. 

As the sun is setting I spot a column of smoke a few hundred yards off the road. Worth investigating. A narrow overgrown path leads off the shoulder through the trees. I take it. A few minutes of mud and brambles and I come into a little dell in the bend of a stream. Tiny cottage on the hillside and an old woman working a sun-dappled cornfield hardly the size of a healthy rug. She sees me. Pauses a second in surprise, then yells with joy. "Young man!" 

I think of the Holy Roman Empire. 

She runs over and hits me with a fierce hug. "So they've done it then! Wonderful." Her face is a cracked dark-brown mudpie, her eyes are burnt charcoal, her body is short and squat, but she is beautiful. Hard not to be, these days. Society used to let its old dry into machines - tv-watching machines, gossip machines, bridge machines - but society is a thing of the past. To be old and survive today you have to be tough as nails and sweet as butter. She looks it. "Come inside and have a beer." 

I decline the beer, obviously from a shrinking stash of ancient treasure, but we go inside and talk for a while. She wants to know where I'm from. My story: a research group at Yale kept on working for a while after the collapse and found the cure. Now they have a little village going and they're sending people out to see what's left. It's not a very good story but it's believable. Though hardly uplifting. The world repopulated by roving tribes of shiny-shoed silk-tied snotheaded Yalelies? I think I'll stick with the apocalypse, thank you. 

She seems happy enough with it, though, and tells me her story. Born in '08, worked as a bank manager, married and widowed. When the bank closed she found a good patch of soil, bought some seed corn, and gave what was left of civilization its walking papers. Good instincts. We talk some more and she offers to let me spend the night. (On the couch, smartass.) I'd normally travel, but time is long and I don't see any reason not to accept. 

After she's asleep I stop pretending to be and explore the place. Finding: a small barn for a nonexistent goat. That cornfield, which doesn't look big enough to support a full-grown chicken let alone a person. A root cellar with a few forlorn cans of green beans heaped at the far end. A trash heap with the rusting shells of what looks like enough cans to have filled the cellar. I go back inside and watch her sleep. She's smiling faintly. 

She's not going to make it through the winter. This is clear. And it won't be a pretty death, not at all. A person should die happy. 

The flickering red glow casts long shadows on the brambles. The path is still muddy. The Indians had it right: destruction and resurrection are one and the same. Ash is the finest fertilizer around. 

In the morning I have a less pleasant experience. Hiking down the Garden State, the sky grayish-blue but the trees still blocking the sun, I get ambushed. The hollow sthick-thwock of a pump shotgun being cocked: 

"Freeze, motherfucker, put your hands on your head and turn around slowly." 

A crisp, spry old voice. Bet he heard that line on TV thirty years ago, been practicing it ever since. I turn around, and a man steps out of the woods. He's eighty-five if he's a day, but he's standing about twenty feet away with a big 12-gauge, and looks like he knows how to use it. 

An uncertain pause, then... "Ha! Mitsui eighty-four-C! Didn't know they had any of those left anymore. Look, pig, I know exactly what you're riding there and I know this gun will blow pieces of your nice little toy all over my fucking cornfield, so don't try anythng funny, right? Okay. So who are you? Who's riding that thing?" 

"Nobody. I'm autonomous." 

The geezer's hands make pumping movements with the shotgun. "What the fuck, pig, you think I'm stupid? Huh? You trying to fuck with my head? That's bullshit, I know it's bullshit and you know it's bullshit, and if you give me any more bullshit I'll blow your brains out through your back. You on extended recon? Got your recharge blanket?" 

"Yes." 

"Take it out - slowly - and toss it at my feet." 

I spin the small bundle as I throw it at him, hard. The air catches the crumpled sheet of silvery film and exploded it to float suspended between us for a moment, blocking his view. The sudden beat of my feet on the pavement, dart left spin and roll, a huge hollow boom, the impact of bodies, and he's on the ground and I have his gun. There's a fist-sized hole in my blanket but it'll still work. I point the gun at him. 

"Shit," and he's crying, long racking sobs. "Ah, shit. Christ, I'm sorry, I wouldn't have done it but the arthritis has been acting up something awful lately, my joints freeze up and I can't tend the corn, I don't know if I'll have enough to make it through the winter... but I used to be a cop, still have an old Mitsui controller in the garage, and when I saw you, well, it was like a fucking dream come true." He starts to cry again. "Please don't hurt me, okay? I didn't mean no harm." 

"Calm down, old man, why would I hurt you? Let's go sit down in the shade, I'll tell you a story." I keep the gun pointed at him as we walk, and make sure he sits down first. 

Statistics teaches us to see the work of prophets as mere chance. Failure was forgotten and success remembered, and so the diviners of old and the pundits of my day earned my keep. Yet it often seems, looking backward, as though they were even worse than that, as though a veil of confusion barred them from the obvious course of history. Prophets had been predicting the Apocalypse for millennia; it seems inconceivable that all of them could have missed the mark. But so it goes. 

When I was young, in the Eighties, we were told the world would end in atomic Armageddon; I practiced my own version of the old duck-and-cover, rolling and falling at the flash in my window to be safe under my bed before the blast wave hit. In the Nineties, it was environmental catastrophe; if we refused to mend our foolish ways, we would all boil, drown, freeze, or die of cancer, depending on the latest study. I spent an abominably tedious summer working in an inner-city recycling plant. The Zeros set us quivering in fear of deadly bioengineered plagues, escaped from some latter-day Strangelove's skunkworks lab or set loose by diabolical terrorists; we'd be merrily strolling down the street and suddenly everyone would burst out in buboes and cysts and cancers and die oozing loathsome fluids. I bought a designer gas mask, a garish Hawaiian style festooned with parrots and flowers and mutant fruit, and a little ring on the bottom to clip a tie on. Whether it would have actually done any good is unlikely; anyway the things went out of fashion in months. We trusted Fate and went on with our lives. The end of the world had gotten a bit old. 

When the apocalypse did finally come, there was nothing exciting about it. I got a bad cold. A lot of sneezing and sniffling for a couple days. Pretty much everyone came down with it. When we found out it was an engineered sterility virus, that everyone on the planet was permanently infertile... I don't know, it was so long ago and I don't really remember much from those days. Nobody went crazy, anyway. We assumed the scientists would cure it soon, and then we could all go on breeding, la di da. 

The years went by and it didn't happen. After a while, people realized that it wasn't going to, that the technical problems were intractable within the lifetime of the current generation, but the truth's gradual advance gave the situation a relaxed normalcy. There was nothing violent about it; nobody was being killed in the streets, nobody was starving, even the criminals were getting old and settling down. The fade of civilization was an occasional human-interest story on TV. 

Eventually the population grew too low to support a viable economy, and civilization more or less collapsed. But it was a soft collapse; no riots and barricades in the streets, just a load of old geezers dying as much from malaise as starvation. The tough ones moved to the countryside and stayed alive on small farms. 

I was running a private bioengineering research facility, up in Vermont, for Tony Petrovic. The man who'd made a billion in solar power and retired at forty to become a full-time professional nutcase. He had us working on a technique to transfer the human mind from the brain into a computer. Well, what can I say? It was bullshit. Utterly impossible. But God, Petrovic raved about it. You couldn't hold a conversation with the man without getting a spew about mechanical resurrection and psychic transfiguration of the soul and all that. He was paying good money, too. So I hired a few neuroengineers and computer types and we more or less just fooled around all-expenses-paid. No life for the ambitious, but it was fun enough. 

Petrovic died in '51. We kept working on the transfer project. Because he'd left a hefty endowment, because we'd made a few actual advances, but mostly from sheer inertia; there was nothing else worth doing. After things finally collapsed we turned our lawn into a cornfield and kept going; by this time we'd actually started to make real progress. In '70 we broke through. We had some old Mitsui remote-controlled androids, designed for undercover police work, refitted with the last generation of Neimann neuroprocessors, and a jury-rigged transfer scanner. We'd tested the latter on a dog, and it had seemed to work, but you can't tell much from a barking android and nobody was taking bets on it. 

By then I was ninety and going senile. Did I want to be the first one through, or did the younger scientists just draft me as a guinea pig? Hard to say; maybe it was both. My memories of those days are cloudy. I remember the sharp stink of anesthetic putting my to sleep under the scanner, hoping to hell I wouldn't wake up there... and waking up in the android. Heaven. My mind had needed dry-cleaning for forty years, and when I came back, the must and the mothballs were washed away. A cold shower on the brain. I was alive. 

The others wanted to try it. Naturally. We had enough equipment for everyone. But those people? Senility had left my personality more or less untouched under the dustbunnies, but, looking at my colleagues with new eyes... Tyler, who kept eighty-year-old kiddie porn mags in her desk? Berzinski, who walked imaginary dogs on real leashes? Stevens, who loved to reminisce about his glory days in the Great Chimpanzee-Fucking Project of '31 (tell him he's full of shit, and he'd just smile his soft dirty smile: "Ah, don't you wish you could have been there, too?")... these people wanted new lives? They were dead already, they just hadn't realized it yet. Even the ex-me never quite recovered after he'd lost the luck of the draw. He went all to moping self-pity. And he was a pretty worthless fuck, anyway; I should know. 

The Mitsuis were the best androids ever designed. Battery-powered with solar recharge. Titanium skeleton and electromuscular power. No internal moving parts. The warranty expired a long time ago, but my new body should last a few hundred years if I'm careful. Time enough for anything. 

I burned the institute behind me. Some of the others might have been caught in the fire, I don't know. It didn't seem to matter much at that point. Now? Now I'm just kicking around, passing time, checking out the world. I thought it'd be fun to see the East Coast the way I always wanted it to be, and I was right. 

I shut up and look the old guy in the eye. He seems a little nervous. And who can blame him? I think he's sensed that I've said more than a stranger who expects to part a stranger usually does. 

"You're gonna kill me, aren't you?" 

"Well, I hadn't really thought much about it, but, yeah, I suppose I will." 

"What the hell? Why?" 

"Well, I could say I have to, that I think you'd track me down and catch me when my batteries ran out, but that'd be bullshit, because I'd do it anyway. Or I could ask you why the hell you want to live a couple more years if your life is so unpleasant. But that'd be bullshit, too, because I really don't care. No, the reason I'm going to kill you is that the world'll be a more beautiful place without you." 

A long pause. "You're a pretty crazy fucker." 

"You might want to run, you know. I doubt it'll do much good, but it's traditional." 

Another long silence. The shotgun's hollow boom makes it permanent. 

Alone again, which is how I like it. Any place, even this rotting patch of highway with free finest-quality geezer carcass no extra charge, is nicer when you're alone. Something to do with the ancient territorial instinct, I think; the old urge to piss on a tree. I have a lot of trees to piss on these days, and it feels good. 


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