Chapter Text
Dozens of people have written volumes about their lives in the immediate aftermath of the Overturn, many far more eventful than my experience. The first night there were blackouts and roving cars telling people to stay indoors. May 19 is generally hot enough in Austin that, even with my windows open, I spent a relatively sleepless night. It certainly did not help that I used a CPAP back then which I could not run. At the time of the overturn, I was morbidly obese with sleep apnea to match. With my windows open I heard commotion down the street, and was not in a place to think about it. Power came back around 2 PM the following day, and I took a rather lengthy nap.
I woke up around 6:30, to discover that the internet was out, with a message telling people to stay indoors. Cell service was also out, and I decided that the United States was in the midst of an old-fashioned coup d’etat. “It can't happen here” until it does, and I figured there was little I could do until the situation was clearer. I read until about midnight and slept extremely soundly that night. On the 21st I made the decision to journal my observations, although I did so with pencil and paper and much of my own writing is illegible. I do recall that I worried about whether I was supposed to boil water, but since that was a lot of effort and no one was telling me to, I did not.
Checking my phone on the morning of the 22nd, I saw that I had missed an ominous text around 4:30 the previous day. telling me to be ready for an interview between 8 and 11 AM the following day. “Please confirm ‘Y’ to acknowledge.” It was already 8:30 AM. I took a quick shower, dressed, and confirmed Y, then waited until 11:37 (by eleven I was checking my phone by the minute), for a knock at the door. The interviewer was a woman of the sort we used to describe as the “Fox News anchor look”: bottle blonde hair, hawkish face, and so much plastic surgery she could’ve been just about anywhere from 30 to 80. I knew what was coming when she asked to come in and my heart sank a little, but she only scowled at the mess in my house as I cleared off space on the couch for her to sit on. She took my IKEA chair, forcing me to sit on the couch.
She spent about 90 minutes administering what I now recognize as the provo interview and citizen assessment. The provo interview went first and I remember thinking that if they were rounding people up to camps as useless, I would surely be first in line. I remember that I offered her a glass of water, that she took one look at my kitchen and demurred with a look of disgust on her face. What I now know to be the citizen assessment seemed to be a mixture of standardized test questions, brain teasers, and open-ended problem-solving questions. She left without further comment, although the implicit criticism led to me making an effort over the next several days to finally clean my apartment.
I spent the next four days reading and cleaning, my mind sometimes going to dark places as I thought of the Japanese internment camps, gulags, and—of course—worse. And it was worse, just not for me. I was very much expecting that any sort of camps would be targeting a minority of some sort, and soft-handed, unemployed intellectuals who can do no useful work are usually the first people authoritarian regimes target for a such treatment. I had tried to play up in the Provo interview that I knew some basic stuff about plumbing and farming, but I had no idea how convincing that would be.
Mid morning on the fourth day, I got a text telling me (I wrote it down):
Congratulations, you have been found to qualify for citizenship in the New Order (EAL>= 2). You indicated on your occupational interview that you are currently looking for work. We invite you to attend a debriefing on the 29th, and a job fair on the 30-31. Please respond ‘Y’ if you can make it, and ‘H’ if you require help with transportation.
I observed that an option to decline was conspicuously missing and after testing my car to make sure that it would start, responded ‘Y.’
I received a “Great! We look forward to meeting you!” in response, and spent the next couple days in nervous uncertainty. My paranoid mind said that ‘EAL’ stood for ‘Economics Appraisal Level,’ and assuming that the levels started from “1,” level “2” did not have me feeling optimistic about my future. My motivation to further clean had vanished, although I was able to read a fair bit. I also fished out a jigsaw puzzle from my aunt and cleared off my dining room table enough to work on that as I tried to distract myself with music.
That evening, I got a follow up text saying that I had indicated I could drive in and asking if I could pick up some carpools. I responded ‘yes’ again, and the following morning I was woken at 7:20 by a man trying to organize carpools for the orientation and job fair. That was when I realized that I would have to be up by six to pick these people up. It's possible that my lack of enthusiasm showed, because I never heard anything else up about a carpool. It also meant that I made the drive downtown entirely alone.
***
The city was eerily empty, especially for quarter-to-eight in the morning. I watched another car park on the street in front of the conference center and decided to do the same. A man and a woman exited the car, and when I asked them if it was OK to park here, they indicated that they had no idea either.
Inside, however it felt much more like a normal conference. There were tables organized by last name and the girl at the slot for my last name was young and cute. I asked her if she knew what was going on and she said that she only knew what her father had told her but I would find out soon enough. In addition to a lanyard with my nametag, she handed me a tote bag with a water bottle and some other conveniences and a folder with a lot of papers. She had told me that my orientation was in room 311, and so I made my way to the third-floor, visited the restroom, and then opened the packet to look at the papers.
Most of the papers were part of essentially a manifesto, an early version of the now-familiar program of the New World Order. In various ways they complained about what I mostly took to be the problems of short-termism and Game Theory (there was a lot in the early drafts about Game Theory), and there was nothing I particularly disagreed with, although I found myself wondering how this justified would seem to be quite obviously a coup and the imposition of martial law.
At this point, however I find myself driven towards circumspection. I initially wondered whether my descriptions of the orientation would be considered state secrets. Running them by several of my friends in high places, I was told that it was quite the opposite and the main issue is just that everyone today has heard what I heard so many times that it has been rendered boring. The critical point is that I spent the morning's orientation asking pointed but non-hostile questions. That evidently was enough for one of the presenters to refer me to their supervisor.
Evidently I impressed the supervisor as well, and he recommended me for “advanced testing.” For the casual reader it is likely that the most interesting part of this is that they had me put an elastic ring around my penis and read me various sadomasochistic sexual scenarios they asked me questions about, sometimes accompanied with illustrations of videos. I suppose I should have objected to this as invasive, but instead I found it exciting. Now, of course, I know that they select for high degrees of sexual sadism in processing.
At the time, I asked what the point of it was and I was told that my results indicated that I might be suitable for a job in processing. I interpreted that to mean that A. “processing” necessarily referred to killing, and that B. I was myself to be processed, and while I remember feeling a bit of fear, I was surprised by how much curiosity and even excitement I felt. I asked somewhat circumspectly what that meant. At this point, I was familiar with the idea of “social parasites,” and when they told me that I would be helping to process them to make them useful for humanity, I inferred that they were thinking of having me serve as a concentration camp guard. As an inference it was not entirely incorrect, but it was nowhere near complete.
Before I was released back into the general population for closing remarks, Jesse, my “advanced interviewer” asked me to meet him afterwards because there were people he wanted me to meet. He would first introduced me to two individuals I would later learn were the highest-ranking members of the New World Order in the city at the time. After this, Jesse, several other members of the Order, and about two dozen attendees were invited to an exclusive dinner. And I suppose it is fair to say that it is at that dinner where my new life began.