The Terminal Velocity of a Cat — Chapter 1
Let’s say it’s a hundred years from now.
Well, I did say last time that my next piece was likely to take longer.
I didn’t anticipate it taking this long, though. After months of plugging away at it I’ve now completed a first draft that clocked in at almost seven thousand words and am close to completing a second draft that will end up at well over eight thousand words.
While I’m happy to say it’s come a long way already, it still needs a good amount of work — and chief among that work will be boiling it down to something considerably less than eight thousand words. Sometimes you have to go forward before you can go backwards; that’s the saying, right?
Further complicating things, I sustained a pretty serious foot injury about a month ago which has diverted a lot of my energy recently and dashed any remaining hopes of having it ready to publish this fall.
The good news, though, is that the accident didn’t stop me from finally completing the first draft of my novel after almost five years! A few of you may remember that this moment’s imminence was one of my motivations for starting notepad.exe in the first place: as an opportunity to sharpen my editing skills and prove to myself that I was ready to take on the task of turning the 64-thousand-word monstrosity sitting on my coffee table right now into something I’m actually proud of.
So now, to make amends for my extended radio silence ‘round these parts, I will allow the snake a quick nibble of its own tail and share with you the first chapter of my book, The Terminal Velocity of a Cat, as it currently exists. I cannot emphasize enough that this is my first draft — which is not just to say that it isn’t up to the quality level of what I’d usually share here, but also that it’s substantially incomplete: it will give you a sense of the story’s premise and tone but there’s very little finesse to the writing at this point, or atmosphere, or theme — pretty much just the bare minimum of detail I felt necessary to get from moment to moment.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that his books were constructed as a series of jokes — each section of text, whether it be dozens of pages or as little as a couple sentences, began with a setup and concluded with a punchline: a steady drip of resolutions meant to satiate the reader as they progress, rather than stockpiling that feeling for the very end and hoping they stick around. My goal is for each chapter of Terminal Velocity to function as a self-contained essay, in which the plot details are related in service of a core argument or theme, with those ideas then amassing into something larger by the book’s end. Frankly, that aspect just isn’t there yet.
That said, I don’t hate it. And with probably another couple years of editing work in front of me, we’re far enough out from anyone reading this thing for real that I don’t terribly mind letting a bit of it out into the world to tide interested parties over. And, again, as my way of apologizing for the long gap since my last piece, and likely at least another couple months before the completion of the next one. Rest assured I’m still at it — I’m just holding myself to a very, very high standard here.
Enjoy!
ζ¹ = -1
Let’s say it’s a hundred years from now.
You accept that there will still be people in a hundred years, don’t you? Plenty don’t seem to, but they still get out of bed in the morning. Still show up to work on time. Still get laid and produce new people of their very own, bound for that future world of which we’re so skeptical. Let’s assume those new people somehow manage to keep the world turning, and proceed accordingly.
A bicyclist rides along a dusty trail on the side of a mountain. This is Zane Munroe, bicycle guide to the inquisitive and able-bodied. Zane is a lithe woman in her early thirties, her naturally medium-brown skin perpetually tinged by sun and soil, her tight shoulder-length curls inattentively pulled back into a bun. After a long day of ushering travelers from one point of interest to the next, Zane is on her way home when her oxygen regulator starts beeping angrily at her.
She squeezes her brakes, smearing a short path in the dirt. She doesn’t bother pulling over; this road doesn’t get much use and is scarcely worthy of the word to begin with. Her oxygen tank is mounted above her back tire and she twists around to her right to get a closer look — the regulator’s diaphragm has started peeling loose. Not urgently so, regardless of what the beep would have her believe, but enough that Zane’s not about to go back out tomorrow without replacing it.
Is the oxygen absolutely necessary? In other circumstances Zane might admit that’s open to interpretation. Up here in the mountains, hundreds of miles from anything you could reasonably classify as civilization, the carbon dioxide level is a tolerable thousand parts-per-million or so. But pedaling your ass up and down the Shoshone Range for ten hours a day bears little resemblance to your average day job and is more akin to scuba diving aboveground.
And then there’s the visitors to consider — Zane has lived out here her whole life, but even the most fit city-dwellers are thoroughly acclimated to the loving embrace of a municipal-scale dialer and wouldn’t make it more than a few miles before passing out. Zane learned early on that setting a good example was easier than dragging oxygen-deprived dentists and middle managers back into town before she’d had a chance to spend their deposits, so she put a month’s income into an oxygen system, and after almost five years without incident, the damn thing has finally begun betraying its age.
Zane pulls her travel pack from its spot opposite the tank. She folds back the weathered cover and flips regretfully through the day’s income: ten packets of assorted seeds sourced from the labs in SanFranCo. Six packets of kale, the crop-economy equivalent of loose dimes. Hardy growers even in the cold months, versatile in the kitchen, perpetually popular but with a low ceiling in terms of enthusiasm. Two packets of carrots; moderately popular but also pretty common. One packet of cucumbers. Zane happens to love cucumbers personally but they’re not all that valuable in the market so she lowballed their worth even further to that morning’s client in order to get her hands on the real prize: a packet of tomatoes.
One of the most aggressively engineered vegetables back in the day, a good, old-fashioned tomato has by now become hard to find, even this far from modern farms — which are more akin to outdoor laboratories than anything you or I would recognize as a “farm”. Zane’s client must have realized this because he’d held back on it when their negotiations had started; luckily for her, city folk are used to the land-o’-plenty and can’t generally negotiate their way out of a burlap sack. Knowing her tour routine inside and out means that Zane’s mental bandwidth had been free all day to imagine the end products of those tomato seeds: obviously the three S’s (soups, salads, and sandwiches) that make up the backbone of her diet, and she’d probably break down and eat the first one whole like an apple, but best of all, sauce. Pasta isn’t all that torturous to get your hands on despite grain and wheat being outside the local purview, but it’s been over a year since she’s had anything that could be described with a straight face as spaghetti sauce, and abundant seasoning only gets you so far.
That’s probably off the table now, Zane tells herself, but no sense jumping to conclusions until she sees what’s what at the market. She hikes her bike around to face back the way she came and makes her way to town.
“Town” in this case is a former Nevada ghost town called Berlin — here in the present it’s the “Berlin Historic District”, but let’s suppose that in a hundred years it’s a real town again, and a robust one at that. As the country’s major metropolitan areas become ever more major and ever more metropolitan, all the backwoods jerkwaters start to fill up — relatively speaking — with a mix of the rugged survivalist types who were living out there already and the crunchy bohemian types who had finally parted ways with modern life and traded off-the-grid for off-the-reservation.
Since not being neck-deep in other humans is the whole point of living in the sticks, the newbies quickly spill over into yet more remote, even unpopulated, areas like the Berlin No-Longer-Quite-So-Historic District. Repopulating a cherished piece of Americana requires a bit of paperwork, of course, but the Nevada Parks Department isn’t exactly brimming with human resources by this point and if some hipster families want to occupy and maintain the area on a full-time volunteer basis that sounds like a pretty good deal, no?
The original structures only got them so far, of course. For both practical and aesthetic reasons the average home in the District isn’t terribly distinct from those built a couple hundred years earlier, albeit sturdier and sporting a few technological bells and whistles — solar rooftops, mostly. But the rugged individualists who’d made up the avant-garde of Berlin’s restored populace were definitionally not what you’d call community-minded, and had put most of their time and resources into their own bespoke habitats. When certain infrastructural needs did make themselves felt the bare minimum of expense was typically deemed sufficient.
Hence, the market: a six-thousand-square-foot tent purchased from military surplus and situated at the crossroads that were the closest Berlin got to a downtown. Originally built for medical quarantine, its only concessions to glamor are occasional circles around a yard in diameter where the dull gray material has been cut away and replaced with clear plastic “windows” to allow a useful amount of natural light. Not that they’re doing much of that at present; the sun is quickly disappearing behind the mountains to the west as Zane approaches and the town’s solar lights are beginning to kick on.
Her bike light has been dead for weeks, but her approach is illuminated plenty by light radiating from the former stamp mill. At the moment Zane would guess it’s hosting the District’s nigh-perpetual pinochle tournament, once a monthly affair that over the years had metastasized into an almost nightly one.
Off to the side of the market entrance is a large metal god-knows-what left over from the stamp mill that functions as a bike rack — a rusted-over ribcage-looking thing just sitting there in the dirt because the local bicyclists don’t have enough pull to get some cement put down. Zane wedges her bike between two of its “ribs”, twists a couple latches on the back, and hefts the oxygen rig off and over her shoulder — the bike she’ll leave unlocked but the rig is both more valuable and easier to run off with — then strides toward the entrance.
Just inside the first opening, in the tiny “decontamination” vestibule that came with the territory, Ken Zigmund is manning his usual post. The dark-skinned, wiry man a few years Zane’s senior knows her well but shifts reflexively into his salesman persona nevertheless, a banal smile snapping into place. “Good evening, Zane!”
“Anything new, Ken?”
There isn’t, but he feigns a glance over his fistful of pamphlets just the same. “Oh, I’m afraid not. Lucky for me the old stuff never does get, ah, well, old.”
Don’t let the stammering fool you — this is a long-practiced routine of theirs. There hasn’t been a new Pahlavi transcript in almost twenty years. Devotees around the continent — around the globe, really — are always issuing some new thinkpiece on the known materials, but Zane never had much interest in anyone’s secondhand interpretations, and even if she did she could get that stuff on her chatterbox weeks before it worked its way down the pike to someone like Ken — though he’s always been pretty discerning himself. No serious Pahlavist out here is about to waste paper and ink, let alone their personal time and energy, disseminating some tossed-off nonsense about how the latest hit serial maps onto the Christmas Tree model or whatever, no matter how much it’s catching fire in the cities.
Zane politely moves on and into the market proper. Several rows of vendors unfold before her, lit by a web of small lanterns strung along the tent’s ceiling. About half of it could be mistaken for a present-day farmer’s market: fruits and vegetables; assorted breads and baked goods; canned jellies; butter; et cetera. No one is technically selling seeds themselves; instead a large trade counter is set up by the entrance where non-vendors can barter their handcrafted whatever — pottery, linens, various other tchotchkes — for however many seeds they think they’re worth, and then trade those seeds to the vendors for what they really need. If seeds are the District’s currency, the trade counter is Wall Street. Never much of a crafter herself, Zane bypasses all the rigmarole by doing tours for seeds up front.
The back half is an assemblage of the really dedicated crafters and machinists and hardware merchants — people with one foot back in civilization who can maintain a steady supply of the technological odds and ends people still make use of out here. Once or twice over the years a big solar corp has attempted to establish a presence but the locals’ aversion to consumerism has become damn near superstitious; they’ll take a decade-old refurbished panel over the shiny new model every time. Only way to know the bugs are worked out, most would say.
One of the bigger tech vendors, understandably, is Lana’s O² — three tables lined up end-to-end with every model of oxygen tank and filter you could imagine. Lana Melandinidis herself is a tall, thickly-built woman in her early forties. Unlike Zane she’s a second-generation Berliner, having inherited the oxygen business from her mother. She’s conspicuously muscled from a lifetime of hauling tanks, with a belligerent manner even by District standards. It’s fortuitous that they’re good friends, as Zane suspects Lana could and would spin her over her head like a baton if the mood struck her.
Lana is haggling with Old Asher as Zane approaches her table. Or rather, Asher is attempting to haggle with a brick wall cunningly disguised as a human.
“Come on, Lana! You were dying for broccoli last month!”
Lana pinches the top of her nose. “A month is a long time, Ash. And one packet wouldn’t have been worth two e-tanks even then.”
Zane clears her throat, offering Lana an out from the conversation. Asher settles on one tank for one packet of onions, mutters a hello to Zane, and moseys along. Zane hoists the oxygen rig onto the table with a perfunctory thud.
Lana squints at it. “Didn’t think I’d see you this week,” she says without looking up. “What’s up?”
Zane taps the regulator. “Leaking diaphragm. If it didn’t have the alarm I dunno that I’d even have noticed.”
“Good to know that works at least.”
Zane braces for the hit she knows is coming. “So what exactly is my warranty situation here?”
The District doesn’t really do warranties. You pays your money and you takes your chances; a break is just an opportunity to learn a new repair. Lana detaches the regulator from the tank and holds it up to the light, ignoring the question she knows is facetious. “You’re luckier than you know. My providers don’t carry this model anymore but I still have one that came in ‘bout six months ago.”
“A whole regulator? We can’t just replace the diaphragm?”
“I don’t have the tools for it, and the only components on hand are the ones on the other regulator. If I just gave you that diaphragm the rest of it would be useless.”
Zane slumps her shoulders. “How are you doing on carrots?”
Lana’s eyebrows go up. “Might do, but you’re talking…five packets?”
“I can give you two and four of kale.”
“Kale does me no good right now, someone brought a whole bunch in the other day and flooded the market.”
“Two carrots and I owe you a favor?”
“I built you that rig, Zane, that’s as far as my charity extends.”
“You said that was a birthday present!”
“And what is present but another word for charity?”
Zane’s shoulders slump and her heart sinks. She takes a long, protracted breath, then reaches into her bag and pulls out the tomatoes. Her dear, beloved tomatoes. Slaps them on the table.
Lana tries not to react but just enough light comes into her eyes to tell Zane the deal’s clinched. “Plus the two carrots?”
“Come. On.”
“Okay, fine, that’s fair.”
Zane mimes professional interest just long enough for Lana to swap the new regulator in for the old one while inside she mourns the spaghetti dinners that will never be. As she makes her way out of the market some guy she’s never seen before calls out to her from his table.
“You have a weapon in that bag? I’ve got bullets for every make, guaranteed.”
Zane rewards the speaker with a moment’s appraisal. He’s about her age, clean cut. Even if she’d never been here before she could tell he’s new; there’s a weathered quality people get from living in the District — anywhere in the Wastes, really — that comes through no matter how properly you put yourself together. A layer of grime, both real and psychological, that never totally washes off. If he was fifteen it would be a tougher call but no one makes it to thirty around here with fingernails that clean. This guy’s definitely a subscriber.
“No weapon, but thanks,” she calls back.
Zane resumes walking but the man isn’t ready to abandon the sale just yet.
“I’ve got those too, then! Have you ever fired a handgun before?”
Zane, several feet past him and counting, calls back “nope!” and thankfully that’s that. Another way to tell he’s new: Zane isn’t exactly on great terms with Berlin’s established roster of gun merchants. Half would just as soon not be responsible for an armed Black woman in town and have made that clear one way or another; the rest have learned by now that Zane is thoroughly uninterested and wouldn’t waste their shtick on her.
And they’ve had ample opportunity to try — you know how it’s impossible to buy anything in a department store without first going past the makeup counters? Guns and ammo play a similar role in the market’s back half; after food, they’re the thing people are next most likely to be here for. While most city-dwellers — subscribers in the local parlance — have never tasted non-lab-grown meat, out in the District hunting is alive and well; the area’s indigenous wildlife somewhat less so. Not to mention that uniquely American stand-your-ground attitude that drives some people into perpetual preparation for the invasion of a government that barely exists anymore, and for whom the District is about as tempting a target as the North Pole.
On her way out Zane passes Ken silently as he sermonizes to an older enby couple. The material certainly has its fans but anyone who can keep up with him for more than two minutes must be a true believer.
She re-mounts the oxygen rig and heads home, at last. The sun by now is long gone, and the ambient lights of civilization gradually give way to moon- and starlight, which is again overpowered by phosphorescence as she turns off the road toward her homestead. Most people living outside of the town center make a point of keeping their light pollution to a minimum, but the unoccluded night sky brings back some childhood memories that Zane does her best to avoid — not to mention that having plentiful powered lights carries the added benefit of discouraging others from settling nearby.
Despite what a name like “the Wastes” might make you think, plenty of the rural United States remains suitable for farming, even in a state as dry as Nevada. As the carbon dioxide chased people out of the low-lying areas, those without the sense to flee to civilization gravitated more and more to the cleaner, cooler higher elevations, and with proper attention and cultivation, narrow bands of the state’s many mountains had proven sufficient for subsistence farming — nothing like the breadbaskets of the old American west, but enough for small communities like Berlin to get by.
All of which is to say that Zane’s property is mostly crops, with a small padlocked tool shed off to the side into which she can just about stuff the bike. After doing so she swings by her coffee crop to check on the cherries. She kneels down next to one of the plants, pulls her keychain out of her bag and squeezes the fob, which blurts forth a respectable beam of light. Taking a branch in hand, she inspects its string of fruit — after months of green they’re finally starting to show flecks of pink, meaning only a few more weeks until she can begin harvesting the beans. Zane ponders the remainder of her existing coffee supply; at a guess she can either switch to half cups for the next month (madness, in other words) or keep drinking her usual amount and have to trade someone else for an extra couple weeks’ worth before her own beans are ready. She makes a mental note to plant more next year, then stands, wipes the dirt off her jeans, and heads to the house.
Zane’s home is scarcely worthy of the term, just a fair-sized living quarters, a cramped kitchen area in the back, and a bathroom. While the solar roof, standard for the District, is the only obvious outward sign of modern technology, Zane had bartered an old-model chatterbox from Ken’s parents a couple years back and mapped it to the living quarters, giving her something roughly akin to a contemporary media experience. The thing uses almost all the power she can muster, but it covers so many bases single-handedly that she doesn’t need much else. Best of all is an app that helps monitor the health and growth cycles of her crops, something that Zane has always struggled with — hence tours being her primary hustle.
Zane unlocks her front door and quickly steps inside. As soon as the door’s airtight seal is back in place, the low hum of her air scrubber kicks in, quickly tidying up the funky outside air that she’s let in. The chatterbox acknowledges her presence as well, turning on the lights and activating her music playlist.
Wait. No music. Did she leave it on mute, or…?
Zane hangs her shoes on a rack by the door and turns to see a strange woman standing in front of her. She’s late middle-aged, thin but broad-shouldered like Zane, with pale, freckled skin and shaggy dark hair mottled here and there with gray. Her green eyes are — they’re familiar, is what they are. A memory comes to Zane’s mind: a figure wearing an ancient, patchwork flight suit and helmet, lifting the helmet off to reveal those same eyes, surrounded by a softer face and longer hair, but definitely the same face before her now. The eyes glisten with sudden moisture, and with a reedy voice, the face speaks.
“Hi, honey. It’s mom.”
