I wanted to spend the day after Benedict Mulroney died at the Arboretum. It was a beautiful early August day, the sun was shining and there was a cool breeze. I got up early and popped over to the LLC to wake up a grumpy stoner to sell me a bag of good, imported British Columbia Bud. It wasn't cheap, but today wasn't a day for the crappy Phillip Morris "marijuana cigarettes" authorized for sale at 7-11. It was a good day, and I was going to enjoy it.
If I hung around the apartment all I'd hear about was how Deputy PM Rachel Harper was no better, and hooting about how Benedict Mulroney was Canada's worst Prime Minister since his father. I didn't want to argue about it, I just wanted to enjoy the day; there would be time enough for that later. The thing of it was, as much as Mulroney's father was Canada's favourite boogeyman - he died in prison serving a sentence for treason after everything came out about his deals with that German businessman to subvert the Canadian military - he wasn't that bad. He was at least effective, when he wasn't selling us out, while his son presided over the dissolution of the nation.
I sat down and loaded my little pink pipe, plucking apart one of the deep green, white speckled buds. This was going to get much harder to buy with BC in a different country now, and I was going to enjoy it all to myself. Well, myself and the trees. I'd share with them. I lit the pipe with my Hello Cthulhu Zippo ("Works even in the depth's of R'lyeh!") and inhaled a deep toke of silky white smoke. I didn't smoke often, so I quickly sank down, feeling the rough bark against my back, and running my fingers through the soft grass.
"Remember the rules, Missy. They're no different just because that's not tobacco: you stay six metres away from any building or pedestrian right of way." A campus rent-a-cop nagged at me. Damnit, I thought I'd wandered far enough into the foliage.
"Yezzir!" I chirped. I wasn't going to let him spoil my day. I flipped him off to his back when he walked off to bother someone else.
"Sarah! There you are!"
Urgh. My hiding spot failed me. I waved noncommittally at Alan, my roommate, and he wandered over to join me and the trees. He sat cross-legged in the grass, smoothing the pleats on his green tartan parochial school jumper. I handed him my pipe and lighter.
"No politics! None!"
"OK! OK! Truce! I come bearing gifts." He dropped a large paper bag on the ground in front of me. "I haz algae chips!"
Well, I was kind of hungry.
Alan and I were biological engineering students. We weren't supposed to grow anything without a long, stodgy review process and a "socially, legally, and bio-ethically sound justification." That did not include "because it's nummy". In theory we could only bootstrap a new organism with the department gene synthesizer, but most of us had our own illegal versions now. The department synth was faster, but ours could use the community developed OpenWetWare BioBricks, even the ones the Bio-Ethics committee wouldn't approve. It could also ignore the licensing and mix Monsanto and Synthetic Genomics patented genes.
Like most students, we used it to make free junk food.
I took a chip from the bag and looked it. It was dark green, and slightly iridescent, like most things we made from algae. I popped it in my mouth and chewed experimentally.
"Mmmm, spicy!"
"Do you like it? I spliced a capsaicin producing BioBlock into a nutritious OpenWetWare algae strain. I'm gonna call it piri piri algea, or palgea for short. It's 40% carbs, 35% protein, 25% fat and 100% yummy."
"Om nom nom nom, wut?"
"Eats it Ms. I-can-haz-cheezeburgr. It's good for you."
Alan poked me affectionately in my freshman 15 belly.
"Rawr, @feministhulk smash your puny body normative ideals!"
I raised both fists and mock Captain-Kirk punched him into submission.
"Noooo.... I surrenders! I likes you when you're green!"
We collapsed into the grass giggling. We spend the rest of the day smoking and spouting pop culture nonsense to the Arboretum trees. Alan kept his promise and didn't mention politics once. It was a good day.
I stewed over a lumpy mass of bioplastic in our apartment lab (which our muggle friends would insist on calling a "kitchen"). If I'd grown this on an OpenWetWare platform, it would be an ultralight, supertensile and nigh bulletproof sheet. I was trying to grow it in the Monsanto approved cell that I'd be legally allowed to submit to the school, but it just wasn't working.
Alan came into the lab clutching his Android tablet and gave me one of his I-know-you-don't-want-to-talk-politics-but looks. I sighed. I wasn't getting anywhere today, so I'd indulge him. "OK, Alan. Let's hear it." I led him out to our living room and sat us down on our ratty couch. "Are the Americans plotting to steal our toe bones? Are the Westboro Baptists planning to protest kittens?" He wasn't biting.
"No." he said in a small, defeated voice. He looked down at his skirt, fidgeting with the pleats. I scooted closer to him and took his hand. "What is it?" This wasn't like Alan. He'd rail on about any social issue you'd let him, injustices real and imaginary, but always with a smile, and always with an idea to make it all better.
"There's a draft." he said quietly. "and I think there's going to be a war."
The Americans had been rattling their sabres at Washington and Oregon for weeks. There would have to be a draft if they were going to do anything about the succession - nearly half their soldiers just walked away when ordered into a "police action" against other Americans. Even I had heard that there was a draft bill being rushed through Congress, but we were safe north of the border. I squeezed Alan's hand. We both had a lot of friends who wouldn't be.
"It'll be OK, Alan. The Americans haven't had a real draft for nearly a century, and even then, at the height of their empire, it nearly destroyed them. There will be a lot of fun protests and political bickering, but it'll all blow over. If they actually start shooting it'll turn California and probably Texas against the East. If you'll cheer up I promise I'll even go to a protest with you, so long as you promise not to get us arrested." It wasn't working. Alan looked up at me with wide, teary eyes.
"No." he squeaked. "Here."
He pushed the tablet into my hands, showing me his feedreader open to his Canadian politics trawlers. I skimmed the headlines.
CBC | Bill S-52: The Canadian draft The Globe, Mail & Star | Is S-52 constitutional? Unfortunately yes. The Tyee | Human Resources Canada suspends student loan program: grist for S-52? Torontoist | Will S-52 pass? Maybe
My eyes bulged and my lips fumbled out a bewildered "What?"
"They want to make everyone between the ages of 18 and 25 who's not enrolled in classes march around the country smashing printers, and they're pulling our student loans to make sure we that aren't."
I squeezed the tablet hard. Its piezoplastic screen nearly cracked.
I took a breath.
"Pack up the lab. How much palgea do we have?"
Alan looked sheepish. "Um, a lot. It doesn't spoil once you press the moisture out, so I just let it keep growing. There's maybe 50 kilos in the closet."
I smiled and put the tablet down. "Alan, that'd feed us for months. Pack it all up, and whatever stuff you need. One bag of clothes, and make sure some of it is cold weather gear. We're getting the hell out of here before that bill passes."
We packed up all our lab gear, food and some clothes into my imitation Tata Voyageur SUV. I'd made the chassis to look exactly like the official version that rolled out of the plant in Windsor, but everything else was my own custom work based on open nomad designs. It had an SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) engine, so it could run on unmodified algal oil that I grew alongside Alan's palgea on the roof. All I had to do was drain off the water and squeeze the oil out of an algae mass, and I'd designed a presser into the SUV that let me dump it in straight from a bioreactor.
I thought I'd have to argue with Alan about my one bag of clothes rule. He had an order of magnitude over his body weight in clothes, even though everything we wore was grown from a biomesh that could never stain and didn't need to be washed. He was good, though. Mostly. I checked his bag, and it had almost all of the essentials; a heavy coat, several cashmere-like sweaters, and of course, a half dozen printed skirts, tank tops, jumpers and several pairs of sandals. There was a little room left in the trunk, so I let him have another bag. I had to make sure he packed some boots, socks, and thermals.
"Are you sure about this?" Alan asked, looking back at our cheap apartment building. "Maybe it'll all blow over. No one's even sure the bill can pass."
"Maybe it won't. Maybe a month from now you'll be teasing your silly, panicky roommate. I can deal with that. I'm not ok getting shanghaied into fighting on the wrong side of a civil war. Are you?"
"Well, no..."
"Look, if we drive all out in shifts, we can be in Vancouver in three days. If it all blows over, we can drive back again in time for class. If it doesn't... we'll be out of reach."
I closed the trunk and got in the car. I pulled up our route on the dashboard Android - skirt east around Toronto on the 401, then north on the 400 until it became the Trans Canada Highway, and west all the way to Vancouver. It would be a little faster to drive through the States, but more dangerous. Things were more volatile south of the border, and it was probably best not to let Canada Border Services know where we were headed.
It was an uneventful trip, with endless searing blacktop bisecting tall green fields of switchgrass through late summer Manitoba, and then Saskatchewan. We ate palgea and bothered fast food franchises for their waste frying oil, which we filtered on the roadside to supplement my declining stockpile of algal oil.
We were just outside Calgary when Radio 2 interrupted the end of a Rachmaninoff piece. The aged, warbling voice of Tom Allen cam on and told us "Well folks, I'm being told S-52 passed in the House. Everyone between the ages of 18 and 25 will be expected to register for the Canadian Selective Service System within the next 30 days. Tune into Radio One for more, or stick with us for Beethoven's number 7."
I had to pull over. I hadn't really believed it would pass. I thought we'd all be laughing about my quirky run for the hills of British Columbia in a month. Alan was looking out the window and bunching his fists around his printed Starfleet-issue gold accented skant.
"We'd better get across the border quickly. Do you want me to drive?"
"Yeah." I pulled my blanched knuckles away from the plastic steering wheel, and got out of the car. I looked west into the foothills of the Rockies as the sun sank below their peeks, saturating the deep green of the conifers growing up their slopes. "Let's go." I said, turning my back on the flatlands of the east.