Background notes from "Chasing Spring", a very unformed novel in progress that envisions a better way, given the choice, that I’d like to predict things will be. It’s not for publication – just for the refinement of my own personal vision…

Cabeal – 12/5/02

This is a first draft of a historical segment written in the last couple of hours – possibly part of the mid- book – possibly only notes - and inspired by my contact with Gary Brooks Waid that helps to place my main protagonist square in the middle of a radically different time, some decades from now, when sovereignty is esteemed, utilizing the energy of love for cultural change is normal, and humans are collectively having to face more serious problems than the petty hierarchializtion of their most short-sighted desires.




“...Ellyn was right about one thing: his mother, Ion or not, had been instrumental in the original Covalency's Amnesty Coalition, and without that movement not a single one of them would be in the Corps right now.

She'd gone to war, in a sense, taking up the work of her husband when he'd been arrested and then incarcerated for the environmental and social crimes of Ion's parent corporation, a global resource-distribution spider he'd led at the time of the final Accounting.

He - like a few dozen others - was eventually imprisoned to satisfy a much-abused and highly-bilked international public who, to their shame, should rightly be blamed for settling on the paltry pay-back of seeing some few individuals burn, while the main body of the cash-sucking organism gorged on the wastrel's feast.

But her husband's leadership of Ion, Inc. had netted them a huge sum, well hidden and cared for by those who'd benefited most, for even at this late date - or perhaps especially so, given the feudal state of the emerging and youthful Globality - it remains a rule among Chieftains, no matter how green to the green they are, that they look after their own, and limit the retribution on family and friends their wars send back their way. When the chiefs can't contain the collateral damage their desires bring down on their peers, they stop being chiefs.

Armed with the carefully preserved and almost endless material wealth of Ion, Inc. and The Ion Trust, she'd energetically campaigned to alter the laws that imprisoned her husband by pushing for the release of all those imprisoned for non-violent and administrative crimes. What she hadn't anticipated were the strange bedfellows who first joined her fight and then lovingly won her war.

At the time, the Approved Molecular Codex that Ion, Inc. had pushed through the old G-13 via treaty and contract had just been standardized into the resource categories that led to the formation of the infamous Carbon Cartel. The subsequent destabilization of global financial and familial arrangements that had functioned nicely (according to its beneficiaries) for centuries, and even millennia, sent unexpected economic ripples through the system via technical and cultural innovations that repeatedly caught the Old Guard off guard.

Without these ripples, and the threat of more, the Ionic faction might never have decided to back her, content to let his father end his days on the Gulf Pen Ship. And, had that taken place, the Corps would never have taken its present shape, Ion would never have fallen when it did, nor risen where it did, and Ellyn wouldn’t be here now, to remind him of options he’d rather not remember, not when he ached so to kill something that screams when it dies.

There are some who say the United States' first Civil War would have come out very differently if its leaders had just waited a decade or more. Twenty years later, and technological advances in milling and manufacturing would have radically changed the landscape of slavery.

Under those circumstances, the original disagreements between the centralizing and under-funded early American government and its more far-flung satellite profit-centers - the internationally precocious Southern States with an agricultural bounty that Europe coveted (sans Washington's cut) - might have remained uninteresting to the bulk of a far-way public, unconvinced that sacrificing its sons and daughters in the name of an industrial hegemony across the same sort of geographical gap that separates Afghanistan and Wales was the rightful path of a free and respectful Nation of Equal Peoples.

If that particular cost of war had not lain such a burden on the Americans, nor created the habit of one part of that nation's compulsive and profitable disenfranchisement of another, things might have played out very differently in the one hundred and fifty years that followed.

But in 1869 they couldn't wait. They had no way of knowing, or even pretending to know, what might happen, much less to choose a future in a way that served their methodologies of certainty, and they'd long ago left their public oracles and auguring behind.

By 2019, however, they'd managed to hold off the war within, keeping their fears of the future at bay with sophisticated trend analyses, mind-numbing entertainment that distracted trigger fingers on the hands of the chronically unfulfilled, and layers of credential-encrusted service work that functioned like insulation between the harsh dramas outside and the fragile egos within. It wasn't perfect, but the sky was not on fire, and to most that was a sign of progress.

And then a miracle of sorts - a completely unplanned product of the confluence of seemingly unrelated events - had happened, expressed as one of those bifurcations that sometimes split the linear track of the unfolding day-to-day, slicing it clear up the middle like a fat rib of DNA, and reality went down a whole new path, dancing along on the pheromones of the human heart's hunger for a one true love.

Somewhere, and it's not certain where or when, the hearts of women around the world coalesced like that original proto-creature formed by the dance of those first cooperating eukaryotic cells, each sharing the burden of survival with that endgame of safety and reproduction uppermost in its collective mind.

Hungry for connection, they had perhaps looked around like one large beast with some hundred million searching eyes, recognizing finally (urged from their slumbering loneliness by some few joyful voices who’d shouted “Eureka! I’ve found him!”) that a huge number of their sweetest fellows were walled up in tiny cages for infractions that increasingly seemed to serve the needs of an insatiable prison system, and not the rightful work of social self-correction – good men, ready for touch and understanding – and these women began to wonder aloud why they were working so hard and so long, and paying so much to keep these gentle men so very far away.

Nothing stands well against passionate women whose hearts are denied, and it didn't take a terabyte to calculate the improbable continuance of so many thousands of women isolated into an individuated solitude that they'd been told was their own creation. A simple inventory of the free unmated women and the imprisoned unmated men begged the questions that were eventually answered in the work that brought their release and subsequent union, and no reasonable gambler would have laid odds on the jailers when the women finally decided that the jails were too full.

It wasn’t even so much their fight , or the work of the politicians that chose to ride their issue that brought the changes round (loosing the peaceful and political, while freeing his unabashedly criminal father and the Midas Pirates in the process) as it was their sheer emotional and feminine numbers swarming into every niche and bureaucratic mis-step, each one finding that unique circumstantial key that would unlock and free the one they’d chosen to love.

For they never really had to join the Amnesty Coalition as a political force, per se. And there was no need for a Civil War, much to the dismay of that branch of the Ionocracy that gained its power through building and then repairing the pillage of the war machine.

Rather, the collected heart of the unit – be it state or nation, race or species – drew itself together in a concert of practical motion and instead, one by one, its singular respective parts sought out the man they wished to love and free, reaching deeply into whatever prison held him, and pushed on the administrivia that tied him down until it broke under the weight of a constant refrain that condensed into one primal statement: “I need him here, and he needs me.”

His mother’s work through Ion Trust opened the doors, planning only to re-engineer legislation to free their imprisoned few and count some political coup along the way. But a world in growing crisis had to triage expensive imprisonment for technical infractions dictated by a code whose rulers could no longer rule, and Ion’s mission for its wayward sons was shared by unexpected, almost forgotten, thousands who wanted nothing more than simple life and their kindred’s love.

A surge of unprecendented communication rode the Internet Waves, rousing dormant minds into that swarming of reorganization that often leads to changes in both colony and queen. Coupled with the value-shift that made individuals responsible for their own mental state through the self-guided use of chemically induced neuro-adjustment , Ion’s freedom call soon became the rallying cry of a competitive and depleted nation struggling to free itself of the most useless burdens and debts of a society suffocating within its own outmoded shell.

Prisons faded almost overnight. Like the spectre of the Asylums of another era, within less than a generation they'd passed from necessary to horrific, and the rise of personal territory - inviolate and guaranteed - would, in the long run, be traced back to an even more fundamental desire for territory that could be equitably and lovingly shared.

But the solutions of the many don't always translate into the salvation of the individual, and his own father's fate never could escape the fabric that wove them all together in its mesh of quick-sand consequence. Love was only part of the story - the fire and the wood of it - and fear was the oxygen that fed its flame. Fear of losing. Fear of slipping. Fear of failing - Fear of so much that only fed the thing that each of them feared.

Ion had always feared transparency. The lovers who won had not. His mother may have begun the crusade, but it was not until she’d found Ellyn’s father and reached over the Wall to lift him up as well, beginning with that act the transparent child that changed them all - the one whose willing visibility showed nothing more clearly than those vulnerable rifts of self-ending fear - that their war was truly engaged."

-- Anonymous, December 05, 2002