Whiskey Romeo Read online

  WHISKEY ROMEO

  By James Welsh

  Copyright 2014 James Welsh

  Smashwords Edition

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  For Epstein

  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.

  Walt Whitman

  The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Whisky Romeo and Juliet

  In fair Verona, there were two families at war with one another: the Montagues and the Capulets. One of the Montagues, a young man named Romeo, was depressed because the girl he loved, a Capulet named Rosaline, didn’t love him back. His cousins tried to wake him up from his nightmare by saying the Capulets were holding a ball, and his girl might be there. And so Romeo went to the ball in disguise, in the hope of finding Rosaline and telling her how much he loved her.

  Instead of finding Rosaline, though, Romeo saw his Juliet and the moment they had met was poetry. The two fated lovers were so desperate for each other, Romeo even climbed up to Juliet’s window at the Capulet home to see her. It was not long before the two married in secret, with the good Friar Laurence overseeing the wedding. They hoped that if the House of God recognized their love, that their families would recognize it too.

  But something even as strong as their love was not made to last. A Capulet named Tybalt – having found out that Romeo had been at the ball – challenged the young Montague to a duel. Romeo refused to fight someone who was now family. And so Romeo’s cousin, Mercutio, took his place instead, and Tybalt harvested Mercutio with his sword. In revenge, Romeo murdered Tybalt and was exiled from Verona as a result. If he had returned to home with his Juliet, Romeo would be executed.

  And Juliet was facing her own crisis as well. Her family was threatening to marry her off to the royal and loathsome Count Paris. Seeing no other choice, Juliet drew up a plan with Friar Laurence: she would take a drug that would induce a temporary coma, leading her family to believe that she was dead. Meanwhile, the friar would send word to Romeo about the deception. Then, the young Montague would break into the Capulet crypt and awaken his wife, all before they ran off to a new life, resurrected.

  And so Juliet took the drug and fell into a sleep so deep her family thought she was dead. In their grief, they buried her in the family crypt. Juliet’s plan was so mad it worked – almost. That’s because, due to the twisted neck of fate, the message from Friar Laurence was delayed. And so, when Romeo found out that Juliet had died, he rushed to the apothecary, slipping on his tears as he ran. When he got to the shop, he ordered a bottle of the strongest whisky from the apothecary – because that’s the only way some people know how to grieve. As he stumbled down the road, passersby thought they heard the clinking of chains between Romeo and his bottle. When Juliet woke up a few days later, she found herself in a world that had forgotten Romeo, the way that any slave is forgotten.

  A Brief History,

  From the Fall of Man to the Founding of Colony Volans

  Thousands of years ago, when the mapmakers were still learning the techniques to fold their atlases into origami globes, the King of Syracuse commissioned a solid gold crown for a new temple. When the goldsmith delivered the necklace, the nobles in court marveled over how the metal shined in the afternoon sun, and how the jewelry continued to shine even when the sun bowed down at the heels of night. The ornaments that crested the crown were impossibly round, the hours spent polishing them more intricate than a clock’s gears. But, as the King held the crown in his hands, something felt wrong, almost spiritually so, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

  But this fear festered just beneath the skin, and so the King met his chief mathematician in his library and purged. The King feared that the crown was a plot against him, a beauty hiding ugliness, but he could not fathom who would want him embarrassed. His mathematician, Archimedes, swore that he would solve the riddle that was a coup against the kingdom. Archimedes took the crown to his chambers, fitted the jewel to his head, and looked into one of the rare mirrors in the city. He noticed too that trickery had been hammered into the crown. But the truth was deep, and how could he unearth it? The crown weighed as much as its brother jewelry, and he could not mine the crown for its secrets without crushing the gold.

  It would not be long before the god’s festival would sing, and the King would have to wear the crown at the temple. And that would be the night the King would be shamed. With just a day left, a sweating Archimedes sank into the choppy seas of his bathtub. As he sat down, he noticed that the water rose all around him, matching the soft volume of his thin and ragged body. Some of the water even spilled over the edge, the drops bouncing against the marble floor like seed. Startled, Archimedes understood and shot out of the bathtub and darted through the streets of the city, towards the palace. He was so caught up in the moment, the only thing he bothered to wear were the drips of bathwater, now wilting off the bark of his limbs. But Archimedes did not care – he was blinded in his moment of discovery, chanting the word Eureka over and over, as if summoning the goddess of invention.

  Archimedes found his King and told him of his discovery. When the King did not understand, the mathematician grabbed a bucket of water and dropped the crown into the water. He told the King that solid gold is dense and should sink deeper than the crown he just sank. The only explanation was the light vein of silver that pulsed beneath the crown’s skin. Enlightened, the King waited until the night of the festivities. Then, in front of the entire court, he had the fake crown heated and fitted to the screaming goldsmith’s head, the searing metal fusing to the man’s scalp. A day later, one of the King’s rivals was found guilty and executed, the noble’s only crime being he wanted a reason to laugh at his King.

  Centuries passed before the rivals could forget their humiliation. But then they realized that they could win by picking the fruit of their own battlefield. Their ancestors once stood out in the fields and beat their shields with pendulums to keep the time. Now, they laid brick in the same fields and wound up the metal gears in the punch clocks to keep the time. And the workers spilled blood just as senselessly as their ancestors did. But where the warriors spilled gallons of blood in their deaths, the workers spilled drops in their lives, pricking their fingers on needles, getting papercuts, smashing their hands in the machinery. But what blood they dripped, the factories drank, until they were casting blankets of smoke over the world to keep the people warm, although people still froze to death in the forgotten alleyways. The dark broth grew until the world’s poor trudged with hunched banks, either from the weight of the pollution or its sickness. A century later, the pollution had grown too thick and rich to fly, and it landed in the unrolled parchment of the ocean like blotches of ink.

  As the world churned jet and the illness birthed, the skyscrapers of iceberg began to melt under the fever. Ice sheets that could suffocate a country broke apart and shrank and drowned alone in the oceans in just a matter of days. Until that page in history, no one had ever measured the volume of greed and gluttony. And it was a shame that Archimedes could have not been there to witness it. Because, as the five million cubic miles of ice began to dive into the sea, and the sea rose in kind to match the sinking body of freshly melted water, the mathematician would have finally found a very real answer as to the average density of his species’ skull.

  As the sea raised her hand and slapped the shores, the lighthouse
s were the first to fall, their masonry crumbling and the towers gliding into the spiky sea below. Unsatisfied, the water then churned up the beaches, devouring every grain of sand but still hungry. The cities collapsed soon after, as the subway stations became flooded and the power grids tumbled. The people were scared and ran inland, towards the hearts of their nations, but they were little fish between the baleen of the whale. Those who survived the floods were the unlucky ones, as the deep land became scorched and waves of forests crashed, chopped down by the axes of heat. The only things that could grow in a world like that were the deserts, which blossomed and stretched in their spring. And so the forests became prairies and the prairies became deserts, and the desert sands melted into the glass lands. The people faced certain death, and their only choices were death by fire or death by water. This happened from 2042 to 2048 AD, the Decade of the Tides.

  Throughout the nightmare, the governments tried their best to stand, not understanding that doing so would only make them fall harder. Nations of migrants were shot at the borders, and the police rinsed away the riots in the soul of their countries. It was not long before there were kings without kingdoms, and so the rulers fell too, without any of the ruled to remember them. It may have been nature that hit them, but it was humanity’s choice to fall. The last of the governments fell in 2048, the Year of the Tragedy.

  But even as society – mankind’s great invention – died, her inventors survived. They clung to the dirt of their lives until their brittle fingernails broke, but still they lived. Whole colonies of these hard creatures took refuge in the caves of apartment complexes and parking garages, scavenging for food like packs of strays. They survived like this, barely, for what felt like decades. Then, quite suddenly and without reason, Earth woke up and kicked off the blanket of her tyrant’s heat. The skies somehow found their balance, and it was only then that the fever broke. As the people slowly stepped out of their caves and looked at the glass lands through crackled eyes, they wondered if it was not too late to live in the past. But the Old World was an impossible dream by then – yesterday and today both were separated by a tide that was growing even longer by the day. If there were any calendars left, they would have marked this as being 2071, the Year of the Wake.

  But while they could not dive into the abyss of time, they could reach across the width of their world again. In just a few years, mechanics salvaged the ruined fleets of aircraft, and the spider of aviation began to spin its webs again through the skies. The oilfields were still in ruins and would be so for another decade, and that was if the people were lucky. By the time the few surviving oil fields were exhausted, though, the mechanics had rediscovered their creativity. Propellers were converted into wind turbines, wings were coated with solar cells, and a particularly clever scientist designed a miniature watermill that harnessed water vapor in the atmosphere, because why not? But the inventors became unconventional not because they wanted to, but because they had to. If a pilot could have flown on a barrel of oil, they would have.

  As the planes painted the sky white with strokes of exhaust, and people began trading scraps of food and souvenirs from their past, they realized they needed to coordinate their imports. The historians once said that governments sprang up in the ancient world as a way to stockpile and protect the food supplies. Now, as the nations gasped from their revival and went to work on remembering their trade routes, they were now safeguarding their money. This was more abstract yet more nourishing to the people than food, after all.

  And while the people were the seed of these new governments, it was not long before government and people were again divided. In just a few years, the new nations were no longer governed but corporatized. Precious food was stockpiled, not out of preservation but profit, as the members of the board knew they could triple the prices during the famines and demand would be as high as always. And there was nothing the people could do about it, because they were already weak from hunger. The only tool they had to fight back with was a government that could regulate, but that had been long abolished. And so the corporations were left free to oppress.

  By the twist of the centuries – the first day of the year 2100 to be more precise – the anarchy from decades past had birthed a new order. But where revolutions before were spontaneous, this change was calculated, as corporations banded together either through mergers or hostile takeovers, which left hundreds of thousands dead in the streets soaked with clay colors. By the first day of a new century, there were only three corporations left, and they divided the world together. There was the Phoenix Charter, which had consumed all of the Americas. They chained the winds on their shores and the sunlight in their deserts and exported electricity to the world, claiming their current was stronger than any ocean’s. There was the Gibraltar Charter, which colonized Europe and Africa and prided itself on mining, digging for rocks that shined until what beauty was left in the land was now just cratered leprosy. And finally, there was the Malay Charter, which held all of Asia and Oceania and fed the world with rice in its fields and fish in its oceans. These specialties were also planned: the charters agreed that each of them should have an export that no other charter had. If one charter were to act out-of-line, the other two could easily embargo them to death. But it was peace by extortion, and it fueled resentment where it could have sparked friendship.

  The only thing that the feudal charters shared was an obsession for tomorrow, and they raced circles around the clock to get there quicker. They dusted off the graveyards of laboratories and factories, and they began to mass produce meat by the vat – it was cheap and generic and clean of nutrition, but it was a start. Printers were built that could print out any object, whether it was a door or a chair or a cup, using plastic grains as the ink. And virtual reality, which was once a toy and a novelty, was resurrected. It was a jigsaw puzzle with gaping holes – the graphics were rushed and primitive and the world it created was narrow – but it was lush and gorgeous when compared to the ruined glass lands the people lived in. And so the corporations stormed into the future, headfirst and headstrong. They burned to create something out of the nothing they had spent decades living in. The people were yesterday, the corporations will be tomorrow, and today is the no man’s land and growing.

  And so it came as no surprise that the charters looked up to the heavens rather than down at the poor on the streets. For the first time in decades, astronauts strapped themselves to shuttles and rocketed into outer space. Gibraltar claimed their space program was in honor of exploration – the cynical pointed out, though, that their first mission was to capture an asteroid and bring it back to Earth for mining. But, like all good gold rushes, the mission was a disappointment at first. The going theory was that the asteroid was brimming with platinum. But, as they towed the asteroid into orbit around the planet and began mining the rock, they found that theory held as much water as a leaky faucet.

  But all was not lost – the clever among the people realized that you could string together the Earth and the asteroid with a miles-long, carbon cable. Then, you would have the tallest elevator in the world, one capable of effortlessly launching spacecraft into the vacuum. And so the charters came together and braided a cable long enough to touch space. The first attempt to connect with the asteroid failed, as the cable snapped in half, the end tied to the ground falling and wrapping thousands of miles around the Earth. The charters argued over who was to blame for the malfunction, but it was not long before a second attempt was made. That attempt succeeded, and soon there was a steady stream of spacecraft being harnessed to the elevator and lifted into space without a single drop of rocket fuel.

  It was 2114, the crack of the starter’s pistol to the Silk Age. In just a few short years, dozens of spacecraft darted across the Solar System, powered by hydrogen. The first of what would be many colonies sprung up on the Moon and Mars, followed by a number of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons. An attempted colony on Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, died in 2125 – along with all of its three hun
dred colonists – after the oxygen recycling software suddenly failed due to a single bug in its code. In spite of the Europa Catastrophe, the colonization of space continued, until humanity stretched from Earth to Pluto.

  And the charters wrote themselves into their colonies, like scribbling your biography on a mirror. The colonies that grew up in the cool of Phoenix’s shadow specialized in gathering hydrogen and other precious fuel for the new civilization. Gibraltar’s colonies mined for gemstones and ore that was rare back on Earth but cheap and sprawling elsewhere in the Solar System. And Malay was tackling the most impossible feat in humanity’s history yet by terraforming an entire planet. Gardening Mars was still in its earliest stages, but the members of the board were confident that it would be successful in just a few decades’ time. Then, they would have the universe’s longest field in their hands, where they could plant thousands of miles of crops and feed Earth until it burst.

  By then, though, the charters had grown tired of the Solar System and outgrew her novelty. They wanted to explore the space beyond their celestial neighborhood, the first time that thought lived outside of a novel. But with a trip to Pluto’s edge taking months alone, it was lunacy to talk stars that were light years away. But that insanity brought out the genius in the people, and in just a few years, Phoenix laid the keel for something that was more dream than ship. The chief engineer of the project named the new breed of ship after a bird he had read about. And so the starling class was born, in honor of the birds that loved the world so much that they invited other birds into their flocks. And when the flocks are split in the winds, the lonely starlings cry out to their neighbors, squawking in the same tongue that those birds used. The starlings had died years before, along with all of the other birds except the seagulls, but they still flapped their wings behind the engineer’s eyes.