Internet Ready Fiction (IRFiction.com)

“Walk with me…”

She closed her eyes and exhaled heavily, as if something would get easier when she did. It didn’t, but she stood up anyway. “Okay.”

He gave her a reassuring look.

“Amy, you’ll do fine. You have been training for this for a long time. This is your big break. This is your chance to shine. Don’t let nerves blow it for you.”

“I won’t, Charlie; I’ll shake it off. How much time do I have?” she asked as she pinned up a loose strand of dark hair back away from her face.

“You only have five minutes. You better get ready. Those NASA guys hate to wait,” Charlie said with a smile.

She smiled back and moved to leave the room with her old friend. They’d been in this together since the beginning. It was only right that she would spend the last five minutes before the case walking the halls of the Senate building with Charlie instead of alone in a stall of the women’s bathroom.

“Well I won’t walk in a second early. They might think they control the universe, but I intend to prove otherwise. Do you know who’s presiding over this circus act?”

“Senator Petsick.”

“Damn.”

“I know. But at least he’s a horny old b—Joe! How’re you?”

She dropped her voice to a low whisper as they started passing people in the hallway. “Stop acting so happy; it makes me look nervous.”

“Does my smile give it away?” He was beaming hard enough to give her a mild headache.

“That and the fact that I’m trying to burn holes in your head without looking at you.”

“Nah. That just makes it look like you’ve got a thing for me.”

She elbowed him sharply in the ribs. He laughed and winced. She couldn’t help but crack a smile.

“That’s a little better.” He thought to squeeze her hand, but decided against it.

They’d arrived at the massive oak-paneled doors. She touched the dark grain, and her smile went weak.

“Don’t, Amy. Don’t unless you’re going to use it to get to them. And it’s a long shot, but…I think you can really kill them good.”

She pushed her thumb against the identification panel, her features resetting into the metallic angles of a driven woman. People called it her mask. He knew so much better.

“Trust me,” she said with a hint of fire in her whisper.

The door clicked open, and the sound of chairs turning to face the new arrivals leaked out. She looked at him one last time.

“I plan on it.”

***

In the year 2017, a year of no mathematical consequence or ironic coincidence, we heard the first radio signals of distant life beyond our solar system. In a hurried panic, the international space research programs demanded funding from their respective governments to help them win mankind’s second space race. The US–hoping to play more cards than just the financial aces up its sleeves–used its connections with the UN and NATO to begin renegotiating the political boundaries above ground level. To date, no one had measured the wealth of land by the stars its infinite vertical boundaries encompassed; no one—outside of science fiction novels and television shows—had seriously considered setting international property standards based on the three-dimensional quadrants formed by every metric unit beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Statesmen and attorneys the world over battled out rights on the national, provincial, state, local, and individual levels. In the end, they all wanted the same thing: to own the stars.

Within ten years, the Interstellar Property Treaty and Standards had been defined with every nation on the map securing some corner of the vast infinity of space for itself. Everyone waited for the first space battle to take place, for space commanders to be more real to the common citizen than costumes and characters, for their eyes to open one morning to find that their sci-fi dreams were realized in glowing Technicolor around them.

The consequences of this glory were more significant and immediate to a few members of the general populace than others. While John Doe still tuned in to the nightly space-wave broadcast, hoping to decode the messages still pulsing away from beyond Alpha Centuri, a small group of scientists declared war on the US Government.

Dr. Gordon Even, Ph.D. in Conservation Biology at SUNY, discovered a loophole in one of the IPTS articles that allowed governments to break land covenants and environmental protection laws in the name of greater science. The oversight specifically allowed deforestation to gain a better view of the sky or to reclaim land for the use of any given aerospece project deemed “necessary.” Aghast at what he assumed could only be a mistake, he followed the procedures, notified his congresswoman, held town meetings, signed petitions, and waited patiently for the inherent inefficiency of American democracy to slowly churn out a satisfactory answer. Around every corner, however, he found a calmly smiling face assuring him that no one would take advantage of the loophole unless absolutely necessary. But Gordon Even wasn’t smiling, nor were his colleagues at the SUNY’s Department of Environmental and Forest Biology. The Global Warming Crisis of the first decade of the millennium had taught them how earnestly the government would respond to gentle coaxing and hard scientific data, how quickly the absolutely necessary moment would arrive when one more launch pad was needed or when another few million acres of sky needed to be clear. To these biologists and botanists, the trees of the world were their last hope at reclaiming what had been a normal, balanced progression of life before human greed overran the environment. To the government, the men and women who stood in their way of winning the race to edges of the solar system were nothing more than hippies with diplomas, born a few decades after their time.

When the dissident professors and their well-connected friends at the EPA and the US Forest Service brought their case to the US Supreme Court to debate the Constitutionality of the IPTS, jaws dropped. The scientists at NASA believed themselves entitled to the land since it mathematically guaranteed them a more successful program: more land, more sky, more possibilities for domination. The bureaucrats believed it laughable that anyone took the case seriously. After nine painstaking months of scientific evidence from both sides of the courtroom and no visible answer in sight, Gordon Even took the stand to close his arguments.

“I cannot ask you to look at this evidence and understand it all. Our knowledge of the Earth and its biology is as far beyond them as their expertise on space is beyond ours, and to you nine–who excel first in being fair, discerning, and judicious–I cannot imagine we’ve made this decision easy for you. But I do ask you to lay your hands on your desks, to feel the grain beneath the varnish. Now imagine telling a child of nine or ten that it was once alive and stood twenty feet tall, just a dwarf next to its cousins. Tell them that it was once green. That it made a rushing whoosh when the wind blew in summer, turned thousands of colors in the fall, and caught icicles and snow in winter. Tell them that the wood they see is the last of its kind because we wanted to know about something that lived so far away we didn’t even have the technology to answer it, much less get to it. Imagine explaining the injustice we’d caused that tree, the injustice we’d caused that child. You cannot possibly accept that after all this fight they have no plans for these trees and that land. You cannot possibly imagine that they will be fair-minded when they’ve fought us every step of the way. You cannot—”

Gordon Even’s words were stopped by a bullet fired from somewhere near the tall, oak doors that led into the hallway. Amy Even, age thirteen, who hung on every word her father had ever spoken to her, watched him fall to the ground as if felled like a tree.

A week after his death, Amy read her father’s speech as his eulogy, hoping it would make a difference, that she could somehow manage to finish her father’s work by rallying the people around her. But NASA’s lawyers took advantage of the prosecution’s deflated morale and won the case as if no one had ever fought them. Within a week of the decision, three quarters of Yellowstone National Park had been passively rezoned as an National Center for Space Technology Development. Their mission accomplished, the directors of NASA sent Amy their most sincere apologies and expected to see the last of her. And Amy let them have their dream.

Ten years, three degrees, and a constitutional law fellowship later, she stood outside the chamber doors, filled with ice and fire. The chill came from the metal that filled the chamber doors, seeping the last dignity of the thin wood panels that masked the face–wood that was so rare that these now antique panels could financially free a family for life; the heat was her father’s passion, welling inside her again. What should have been her father’s closing argument echoed in her mind: “You cannot trust life to those who are unwilling to preserve it simply because they lack the foresight to question their own actions. This is not a fight for trees alone, it’s a duel the people are fighting against those who would carelessly cast them aside for the sake of their own gain.” The glove had again been thrown down; this time she intended to draw first and last blood.