Pennsylvania Omnibus (27 page)

Tom Hochstetler helped the two carry the canisters into
his stone springhouse, and the milk containers were lowered into the icy water
that flowed around the stone trough built into the wall of the springhouse. The
pure, cool water came from a spring, flowed through the troughs, then down into
a large cistern that served for the Hochstetlers’ animal-watering needs. An
overflow in the cistern routed the water back into a small creek that flowed
down to a stock pond.

The milk would be bartered for lumber and supplies, to be
stored up for Matthias’ barn-raising, which was coming up soon. Altogether,
Matthias was hopeful that when the time came for the barn-raising, he’d already
be free of any debt related to the construction. Jedediah was hopeful too. He
was looking forward to the fellowship time, because barn-raisings provided some
of the fondest memories from his childhood.

Later that evening, Matthias sat by lantern light at the
oaken kitchen table in his tiny house, and Jedediah excused himself for the
evening. He was anxious to go to bed, not because he was sleepy—he wasn’t tired
at all—but because there were things he needed to know, and the only place he
felt comfortable accessing his BICE was in his own room, lying on the
fleeces.

The meeting earlier that evening had taken place at the
house of Arthur Lapp. Standing outside with the other Amish men beforehand, Jed
had felt the intense stares coming at him; Matthias had warned him that people
were suspicious because Jed’s brother was head of the resistance. No one was
openly rude, although speakers did tend to point in his direction whenever they
spoke about TRACE and whether or not the rebels had set off the bomb that
destroyed the City.

Jed had been surprised to see so many young faces there,
even though he’d been told by Mr. Zook at the immigration center to expect it.
The average age of the men who attended the meeting was probably around
twenty-five. And when the meeting was brought to order, Jed noticed that the
elders, all seated along one wall, were perhaps only a year or two older than
the rest of the group, on average.

The meeting was conducted in English, and since most
everyone was young, the English that was used was fairly modern and would have
been considered “worldly” back in his home district. It made it easier for Jed
to follow along; he didn’t like it when meetings were held in either
Pennsylvania Dutch or the weird hybridized slang that was often used by his
elders in the AZ back home.

Ultimately, nothing concrete was decided. The meeting
served more as a forum for airing out pent-up stress and pressure than it did
as a call to action. There was a lot of complaining and accusing going on, but
the group, and even the elders, were evenly split in their opinions about who
was to blame for the bombing, and whether or not the community should continue
to trade with the rebels. Tensions eased once the topic changed to giving aid
and comfort to those who’d lost loved ones in the bombing, and the meeting took
on a more temperate feel.

The last major topic for discussion was Matthias’s
barn-raising. It was a bittersweet thing for Matthias to learn that, since
another family who’d planned a barn-raising for the next week had been killed
in the destruction of the City, Matthias’s barn-raising was now moved up. It
would be held in eight days, the following Saturday. Moving the barn-raising up
a month would create some tactical difficulties, but Matthias was excited about
the prospect just the same.

Jed noticed that the Yoders were not present or
represented at the meeting by anyone else from their family. He found that
curious, especially if they were truly working for Transport, but he still
didn’t know what to do with that piece of information. He hoped to learn more
on his next excursion into the cyber-world.

Toward the end of the evening, the floor was opened up to
anyone who had anything to say, so Jed decided that it would be as good a time
as any to introduce himself, and to perhaps assuage some fears and concerns
about his presence among the people in the community.

“I haven’t been here long,” he said. “And I’m still trying
to learn everything that’s happened here in New Pennsylvania, and even about my
brother’s role in it. As you can imagine, I’m very lost right now, and I don’t
really know what to think.  Still, I am Amish. I was born Amish, and I intend
to die that way. Understanding all of this is something I struggle with, and I
know that peace and comfort may be long in coming. I do appreciate all the love
and care I’ve received since I first arrived, and I hope to be a productive
member of the community here. I thank you all for your patience and
kindness.”

When he finished, one of the elders rose to speak. “You do
know that your brother has violated both our
ordnung
, and every other
rule we have as a people, by choosing to fight and to make war against the
government?”

“I know that,” Jed responded.

“And you know that we have chosen to remove him from our
number, as we must do, and that he has been shunned from the fellowship of the
beloved?”

“I do.”

“All right, then. This meeting is adjourned. May God’s
grace be upon all of us.”

Lying on his bunk among the
fleeces, Jed prayed to God to watch over him before focusing his thoughts in
order to enter his BICE control room. Before retiring to his bed, he’d downed a
full glass of lemonade brought over by the Yoders, knowing that the drink would
likely be laced with more Q. It was.

Almost immediately, instead of playing with the
capabilities of the system like he’d done before, he dove into the Internet’s
data on the history of New Pennsylvania and the old world. According to the
official government version, the first rebel wars had begun in the year 2018
and ended in the year 2040 with an overwhelming victory by “the forces of the
people.” The twenty-two years of almost constant battles—warfare that had
eventually spread around the globe—resulted in the loss of almost fifty percent
of the world’s population. Transport, whose power and authority had grown
throughout the period of this first global rebellion, became the sole governing
body after the wars.

The Amish had been encouraged to spread out and to farm
more land, and by 2042 the first officially protected Amish Zone—the first of
the five that would eventually be developed—was established. During this time,
in contrast to what was going on in the rest of the world, the Amish
experienced unparalleled freedom and autonomy. As had been the pattern in old
Europe, wars and starvation had a tendency, if only a temporary one, to
convince nations that agrarianism was a good philosophy.

In the years during and just after the wars, technological
advances had almost stopped, and worldwide economies either slowed or
completely collapsed. This was often called “The Dying Time.” Starvation was
rampant, and disorder and violence plagued much of the world. Due to ongoing
terrorist attacks by groups allied with the rebels, private transport was
outlawed. Roads, some of them over a hundred years old, were ripped up in order
to “disincentivize ground travel” and to hinder terrorist activities. The
Transport authority implemented the first TRID system, using Unis as the form
of currency, in 2050.

According to official government sites (or sites using
government information), colonization of New Pennsylvania began just as the
TRID system was being implemented—first with the establishment of the City, and
almost immediately after that with the transplanting of a new colony of Amish
into the Amish Zone far to the west of the urban area.

What the sites did not explain—at least, not to Jed’s
satisfaction—is why the buildings he’d seen and entered in New Pennsylvania had
looked so old. If, as the government was saying, he’d arrived on the planet in
2077, then the oldest buildings in the City should have been no older than
twenty-seven years old. Yet he’d been in the basement of Pook’s antique shop,
and the cellar had looked as if it could be a hundred years old. And where did
the salvagers like Eagles come from? And what were they salvaging? Where did
Eagles get his Go Eagles towel?

And then there was the matter of the wall. Other than
explaining that the massive wall around the AZ in New Pennsylvania was
originally built to keep wild animals and other creatures out of the Amish
Zone, the information sites that Jed visited did not explain its incredible
scale—it was higher, wider, and longer than any wall he’d ever heard of before.
From Jed’s understanding, walls such as this were built by primitive peoples to
keep out invaders and marauders, not by modern folk to hinder foxes and
wildcats.

Information about the new planet was even more scant.
According to the historical documents, scientists had identified New
Pennsylvania as one of millions of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbital
distance from suns the same size as the one that heated the Earth. Probes from
the early twenty-first century had then determined that the planet supported
life, but had no intelligent alien species at all. This was the story painted
by official government data sites. After traveling light years in suspended
animation, the first human astronauts to land on New Pennsylvania found it to
be a planet much like the Earth in every respect, except without intelligent
life. If there ever had been intelligent life on the planet, it had either died
away or departed the place long ago: no archeological anomalies or structures
had been located on New Pennsylvania.

Jed shook his head as he studied all of the information.
The most remarkable thing about it all was that people seemed to believe it,
both here and back on Earth. That is, if indeed this place and Earth were two
different planets, something about which he was no longer certain.

Tired of reading propaganda, he decided to try to contact
Dawn again. Despite numerous attempts, he found that he was unable to locate
her, or even to call up her avatar at all. Not knowing what else to do, he went
back into the master file that he’d hidden from the avatar that had looked so
much like his own mother.

He studied everything he could find in the files. Most of
the information consisted of video files of Dawn’s first training sessions with
him—when he’d still been unconscious and not aware what was happening to him.
He pulled up a file that was labeled “The Shelf,” and this one he could
almost
—barely—remember. He played the video and watched as Dawn flew him
in the direction of the west, and they ended up looking out from a great height
over the cities on the plain beyond the Great Shelf. He watched and listened as
Dawn taught him about the cities, and how the government had hoped to relocate
millions of Earth residents into these large urban centers, and she explained
how the whole plan had been a failure. This time, though, Jed noticed something
that he hadn’t seen the first time he’d experienced this vision. As he watched
it now in “third person,” separated from his other avatar self and floating in
the distance, he noticed that up in the sky some letters and numbers would
occasionally appear very faintly throughout the lesson. Then after several
minutes, they’d disappear, only to reappear some time later.

He pulled up other training sessions, and when he searched
through the videos, he noticed again that the same set of letters and numbers
would often appear for a few minutes, barely visible, and then disappear.  This
time when it happened, he raised his hand, tapped, and froze the scene. He
enlarged the area near the figures until he could read them…

AT10S

…the letters AT, then the number 10, and then the letter
S.

What can that be? A training file code? Advanced
Training? No.
He shook his head. If it was a training code, he thought,
then it should change with every lesson. He racked his brain, but he couldn’t
figure it out. He watched a few other videos, but he found himself growing very
sleepy, so eventually he had to shut down the system and actually go to
sleep.

He awoke with the first light of a beautiful Saturday
morning, but he didn’t feel rested. Out of instinct, or fear, or some other
impulse he couldn’t define, he looked around himself quickly, up into every
corner of the room. Perhaps he expected to see the AT10S floating up there
somewhere, indicating that he was still in some kind of training mode. But the
code wasn’t there. He was actually in a tiny bedroom in a tiny Amish house in
New Pennsylvania, and no matter what he thought about that, some very real cows
waited to be milked.

The assault on the Tulsa didn’t
last long. Once the SOMA was aware that his Corinth system had been breached,
he was able to secure the ship and harden it before launching a full
counterattack that scattered the enemy warships, which then retreated under the
withering fire of the Tulsa’s support craft.

It was just a probing action
, Amos thought,
but
now they know we’re here.

And now my people have another reason to doubt
me.

“We were caught with our pants down,” he told his
officers. “We got arrogant. Relied on our technological superiority.
Underestimated our enemy. Basically, we did what Transport has done for the
last twenty years. But it won’t happen again. From now on this ship is on full
battle footing at all times.”