Frontiersman, May 2025

Excerpts from Another genesis
Fiction by Sam Aurelius Milam III
First completed on Friday, November 3, 1989.

For some very good reasons, I had to protect my little hideaway in Friendly Valley. As always, the reasons were things that I’d probably do differently if I had them to do again. Some of them went back over 20 years. For most of those years, I’d filled positions in the United Americas Department of Demography and Security. For the last 10 of those years, I’d been an Administrative Specialist counting on a pension after retirement. Things hadn’t worked out that way.

It happened because I have a tendency to read too much and because I began to read the wrong things. I started out with pretty much the same education as everybody else but, while I was at the Security Enforcement Facility in Veracruz, I had a lot of time for reading. In a Veracruz bar one evening I met an Administrative Service worker named Peggy Miranda. It turned out that her billet was in the Mexico State Liberty Library where she was a Comptroller of Information for the United Americas Department of Education. One of her responsibilities was something the DepEd called uncorrected records. They were kept, apparently, for historical purposes. My curiosity got the best of me. Peg’s pass card and an Access Control Specialist with an addiction got me into those records.

You can learn a lot by reading records that haven’t been corrected. There was a wealth of uncorrected historical information in the records but one of the more useful books that I discovered was an uncorrected dictionary. One of the more useful things that I learned was what it means for records to be corrected. After that, the uncorrected historical information began to make a lot more sense. I learned a lot. I learned that people in my job used to be called bureaucrats, not Administrative Specialists. Administrations used to be called governments. Access Control Specialists used to be called several things: security guards, border patrol, military police. Today, they’re all ACS. There are lots of other words that don’t mean what they used to mean. I learned that language is a tool of manipulation. In retrospect, I suppose that it always has been.

I also learned that when the old United States of America had liberated the American hemisphere, from Pole to Shining Pole as they sing in the song, the previous Administrations (governments, if you want to be historically accurate) hadn’t viewed it as the Great Liberation, like we’ve all been taught. They called it imperialist aggression. Of course, they didn’t get to correct the records. Our side got to do that.

A career change hadn’t been in my plans but one day the addicted Access Control Specialist was unexpectedly replaced while I was in the uncorrected records, which of course was a rstricted area. When I tried to walk out, the face on Peg’s pass card didn’t match the one between my ears. The new Specialist turned to the phone, I suppose to call for backup. I beaned him with his visitor’s log. Unfortunately, his buddy, who I’d neglected to notice coming through the door behind me, interrupted my grab for Peg’s card. I almost didn’t get away and I had to leave the card.

I went straight to Peg’s complex, but the street was already full of Access Control Specialists by the time that I got there. I didn’t hang around. I knew that Peg would end up in Retraining but, since they had her card and not mine, they wouldn’t immediately know who’d been in their uncorrected records. I had to get away before they could teach her to identify me so I went to the nearest personnel booth and translated myself to the Boston Complex. There I did a little bit of liberating of my own. That’s how I got The Yacht. I took the best one that I could get to in the time available. Since I didn’t have time to correct the base records I was sure that they’d notice that it was missing....

I could have gone just about anywhere but for one reason or another I wanted to stay on Earth. At first, of course, I wanted to rescue Peg. As soon as I could manage it, I touched down in the Sovereign Republic of California and tried to locate her from there. I was too late. When I finally tracked her down, I found that she’d died a few months earlier at the Alamos Retraining Facility, in the Texican Administrative Region. According to the official obit list, she was a victim of one of the second generation Vaccine Viruses. I suppose that’s possible. More likely it was an allergic reaction to retraining. Language being what it is today, I probably wouldn’t be able to argue with you about it if you wanted to paraphrase that as death under torture. An invitation had been issued for me to volunteer for retraining so I suppose that she must have learned how to identify me before she died....

—Adam, the protagonist in the story

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The entire story is available at the address shown below.

http://sam-aurelius-milam-iii.org.uk/Stories/Stories.html#Another_genesis