Welcome to the Future

There’s a knock at your door. A pounding, really. You already know who it is, so you send your wife into the other room with your kids and steel yourself. Nothing to be worried about. This is routine.

“Hello, officers. Agent.”

The health official on your doorstep is about as nondescript as they come. Last year it was a woman, but this time they sent someone whose pronouns you can’t immediately identify. He or she, or they, is flanked by two disinterested looking cops with automatic weapons.

“Hello,” the health official cheerily forces out. The vocal fry betrays the baritone that he’s trying to cover up.“We’re here as part of our regularly scheduled neighborhood sweep. You got the notices in the mail, I’m sure. I’m Cindy, you can just call me Cindy or Miss C. This shouldn’t take long at all.” His bright red lipstick seems to be the wrong color for his dark skin. He adjusts his clipboard and scrolls through a few documents on his tablet. The blue light illuminates his face from below. “We just need you to confirm a few things.”

You step onto the front step and close the door gently behind you. These interrogations usually only take a couple of minutes, you think to yourself, justifying a reason not to go back inside and grab your coat. It’s not so bad outside, but your breath still comes out in light clouds.

“We’ll go through your census info first. Can you confirm that this is your address and name here?” Cindy shows you the tablet and you tap a few boxes on the screen confirming a variety of information. Names of your family, your address, birth information for yourself and your kids: it all flips by with a couple swipes of fingers. As you hand back the tablet, the interview really begins. The two police officers behind Cindy relax; one sits down on your front step, the other leans on a railing and lets the barrel of his weapon rest on the ground.

Cindy looks over the tablet again and nods. “So you work downtown at the shipyards,” he says.

“It’s honest work,” you offer simply.

“Oh yes it is!” Cindy happily responds. He wrinkles his nose at you and grins. “My brother works there as a senior manager. It’s the only place that still hires the non-vaxxed. Oh, but he’s vaxxed. You can’t get anywhere in the world without that little vac-cin-a-tion.” He enunciates the last part of his sentence like it’s some sort of pop song.

“Speak of,” he proclaims, “I see you still haven’t gotten your shots.” He says your name with a grumpiness you’d use to mock children with. “When are we going to fix that, huh? We don’t want little Tom or Sally inside to get sick would we?”

“They’ve been doing pretty well so far,” you say.

“Well, that’s good.” Cindy looks back at his tablet. “But that’s still just ‘so far’. We don’t want that changing, do we? But you know, I don’t judge nobody,” he wrinkles his nose at you again and chuckles. “Me? I’m afraid of needles. Every year I shudder when I have to get it done. But it’s quick, you know, you just drive on up to a kiosk and they come out and do it for you.”

“Like the emissions tests,” you supply, well aware of how the vaccination treatments are administered today. They really do it now, and just as Cindy says. You don’t even have to get out of the car, but there is a $14 administration fee, and they remind you by mail about six months before you’re due for it.

“Exactly!” he replies. His teeth are abnormally white. “Looks like you’re following all the recommendations, though. No trips, no vacations—no vacations? Oh your poor wife!—no visitors from overseas… everything here looks okay.”

“Well, as-you-know, it’s not man-da-to-ry, but you should really think about getting it done.” He looks you dead in the eye. It’s not comfortable so you nod your head backwards and smile, trying to disarm whatever is going on here. “You know that pandemic can always come back.” He huffs and returns his gaze to the tablet. “We’re safe for right now but you know they talk about lock downs every year.”

“Yep.” Cindy quietly sighs and moves on.

“Now it says here that your internet is still frozen out for another couple of weeks?” The lights on the porch flicker to life, cued by an infrared censor. Cindy looks back at you. The sun’s distant orb is now completely out of sight; the sky is lit up bright red in the western sky. Your white breath is even more visible in the dark as the florescent bulb warms up.

He looks back at his tablet and scrolls through another page. “Comments made on an image board!” Cindy exclaims. “Well, someone’s been bad, haven’t they? What was that about, huh? You know some of those sites are off limits now.” Ever since the FCC used anti-trust investigations to lean on ISPs, internet throttling led to outright site-banning, at least in cases where disreputable websites couldn’t just be taken down completely. Ban-evasion wasn’t too difficult, but without some relative knowledge of computers, it wasn’t difficult to get caught, either. More often than not, your operating system sold you out to the ISPs, which then sold you out to the government. Most of the time, the guilty just walked away with a fine; you were under the distinct impression it was more a means of generating revenue and manufacturing complicity among the population than out of any legitimate fear of what these websites offered.

“I understand what it’s like, though,” Cindy smiles, red lipstick parting across too-white teeth, and he returns his attention to his tablet. “You got your kids, your wife, you seem like a good guy. It was probably just one of them playing a prank, huh? You can say all sorts of things in the privacy of your own home, you know, but they get so sensitive online, don’t they?”

The cop sitting on your step might have fallen asleep. The other keeps staring down your street, feigning interest in the utter inactivity at this time of night. There used to be kids that played outside until seven or eight in the evening, but the nights have gotten colder now that winter’s moved in.

“It’s a shame you don’t have the internet,” Cindy continues, resuming the interview. “We’ve got all this stuff set up through your social media now. We don’t do many of these door-to-door verifications anymore. The sites manage most of it for us.” He pauses as he gets to another screen.

“Ah, but it says here you don’t have a Facebook profile?” He looks up and says your name again. “You are one peculiar guy, aren’t you?” Another nose-wrinkling grin. “There’s four of you old-timey kinds still on your street. It’s why we have to keep doing these in-person sweeps—oh, excuse me,” he puts a hand on his chest, feigning correction, “the department wants me to call them interviews,” Cindy enunciates. He winks, as if you’re in on the joke. You don’t want to be.

He redirects his attention back to the tablet. “I don’t know how you function without a Facebook account, it keeps all of us connected. I wouldn’t even know what my nephew would be up to without it. Here he is, see?” He shows you a picture of a child. You pretend to look at it.

The door opens behind you. It’s your youngest. “Papa? You’re still out here?” His head pokes out the side of the screen door. “When’s dinner?” You tell him to go back inside but get interrupted.

“Why hello, there,” Cindy’s vocal fry attracts the boy’s attention. “Don’t be scared, come on out. Me and your daddy here are almost done.”

“Go back inside,” you tell him. “I’ll be finished soon.”

“He can join us for the last segment.”

“It’s better that he doesn’t.” You turn around to herd the boy back inside and shut the door again. The cop leaning on porch has turned around, still leaning on the railing. He watches you carefully but his gun still rests barrel-down beside him.

“He could have played out here for a few minutes,” Cindy pouts. He sighs and returns his attention to the tablet. “Next here is, let’s see, reparations! Rep-ar-a-tions! You’ve been filing like a good citizen, right?” He hasn’t looked up from his tablet. The glow illuminates his face even in the light of the white fluorescents on the porch.

“It’s all there,” you say. “If the electronic record is mistaken, I have hard copies inside. It’s all filed.”

“That’s quite alright,” Cindy grins. He still won’t look at you. It’s probably the subject matter. “And you know what,” now he does, “I don’t even doubt you. All of this, it’s all taken from your paycheck, anyway.” He wrinkles his nose again. “Those reparations, I tell you what!” he laughs, lipstick stretching across an imitation of a humorless joke. It had no punchline.

“That’s your truck in the driveway, right?” Cindy motions to the pickup. You confirm and tell him the year. “That’s a twenty-year-old vehicle, you do your own maintenance?”

“Have to, nowadays.”

Cindy wrinkles his nose yet again. “Oh I know it. The car I drive? Old clunker, myself. I need my brother to fix it up for me on the regular.” He flicks around on his tablet for a few moments. “Your emissions are all up to date, but what about your carbon tax? Do you have another vehicle?”

“We had to sell it last year.”

“I see, I see.” After a moment, he seems to feign shock, staring at his tablet, but it might have been genuine. “The carbon tax is no joke anymore, huh?”

“It gets higher the older the vehicle.”

“Have you considered buying a newer one? Some of the electric ones are exempt from the ruling.” You respond that you can’t afford it. The truck’s repairs are already costly enough. Cindy taps the tablet on his chin and looks at the siding of your house and around the neighborhood. “Really?” he asks.

He shrugs and returns to his tablet. “Last item on the agenda,” he smiles, “we did a controlled substance sweep of your house last time, so that doesn’t seem necessary today. And honestly,” he puts his hand on your forearm confidentially, “it’s a waste of time, anyway. Nobody ever has anything.” He winks. This is harassment. “You wouldn’t have anything you’re hiding from us, would you?”

Cindy is referring, of course, to firearms and ammunition. Hard drugs are no longer considered controlled substances, not since every state jurisdiction decriminalized and then, a year later, began enacting blanket legalizations. Federal laws are still on the books, but they simply aren’t enforced.

But ever since the court ruling a few years ago, The Health Department has reserved the right to search properties if their officials suspect individuals happen to own any weapons. Gun ownership was restricted to an as-needed basis, so the federal government leaned on the states until permitting merely for ownership was the standard practice nationwide. Obtaining a permit became restricted to certain members of the government and protected sectors, and that’s assuming your state had any gun models still legally purchasable. “May issue” is, as has always been the case, euphemism for “not on your life.”

Confiscations only occurred in certain metro areas and various suburbs. City and suburban neighborhoods will periodically be targeted at random as local police resources permit, but it’s somewhat of a rare occurrence now.

“Well, it looks like we’re finished here.” A small receipt printer plots out a certificate from the underside of the tablet. “This goes on your door, as you know,” Cindy says as he hands it off. You try not to touch it because the paper is loaded with hormones, but there’s no way to avoid it.

The cop on the step yawns and stands up. The other picks up his rifle and saunters off the porch. They stand in the yard and wait for Cindy. “Thank you for your compliance to the regulations,” Cindy smiles, “and I hope you do something about that vaccine, you know, for your own sake. I hate seeing you wonderful guys stuck with limited options, what with work and all that. You can change it anytime! Purely optional, of course.” Cindy tucks his tablet back under his arm gives an odd little wave with his hand before stepping off the porch. “Bye now, maybe we’ll see you again next year!”

“Let me ask you something,” you suddenly say. Cindy turns around. He’s halfway to the gate, and the light from the porch only reaches his shoes. You notice for the first time that they are low heels. “You work for the Health Department, right?”

“Yes sir,” he replies.

“Do you think any of this stuff will be mandatory?”

“Oh goodness, we can’t do that!” Cindy laughs. It’s hard to see his expression in the dark. “Who do you think we are, China?”