Outside the wall - Part 2

Boyer leaves the safety of Corridor West

She hadn’t been outside the wall in months. Recently, it wasn’t worth the risk. Or the hassle. First she’d been summoned. Now she was being sent.

One still had to marvel at the speed they built it. All those decades fighting about the wall on the southern border before Paris. When there were 50 States and a sovereign border between them and Mexico.

Is it humane? Who can come in and out?

As Boyer drove toward the eastern edge of Corridor West, the loud but almost forgotten voices of the recent past played in her mind. The Bishop mocked the bi-polar nature of the pundits, when there was still a thing called broadcast news. He told her how everyone who bickered and argued against enforcing borders, especially the ones who advocated for unlimited hospitality, didn’t raise a single objection when they erected this wall.

Maybe they all were dead. Maybe they had a change of heart.

The border crisis. The housing crisis. The inflation crisis. Problems that seem almost luxurious. Wiped away, almost instantly, because of Paris.

The hand-wringing over who comes in, who stays out stopped. The gaslighting stopped. People shut their doors. Reached for guns. Welcomed the walls.

If you time traveled back to the turn of the century, the Bishop had said, and asked someone where they expected the biggest wall to be built, surely they would have said between the US and Mexico along the natural barrier of the Rio Grande. But they wouldn't have imagined Corridor West.

Developments in concrete 3D printing accelerated the ability to build big structures quickly, and that one wall so long the focus and crucible of political power, was now a corridor that shut out the rest of the world. A marvel to rival—perhaps even exceed—the wonders of the world ancient and the pre-Paris world which once had the Great Wall of China.

The size of it was staggering.

Boyer had only seen pictures online of the progress made from what used to be southern California up to the north of Canada. The dramatic line that shot straight up from San Diego and curved, an extended parenthesis carved as though by the finger of God in the stony tablet of the new world. With it an entire new law and set of rules for humanity.

That parentheses, half of a whole, reflected but also dwarfed a similar line in the East, if you zoomed out on the map of New North. The unfinished line of Corridor East that cut up from the eastern port of New York through Toronto and shot up north. The Great Lakes formed the natural, west-most barrier of the energy sector.

From that satellite view it all looked so simple, factual. The walls grew longer every day as concrete sections replaced the hovering drones which didn’t move, just floated higher above the new structures, their multiple lenses pointed in every direction.

From space, it all looked so neat. As though the map were a casual afterthought, completing a long sentence in history. Between order, darkness. Before progress, chaos. An explanation to the passengers who launched off world. What was the message? This is where it all ends up.

Boyer checked the gauge on her dashboard. She would reach Maskwacis by dusk. There was enough charge. The road was carefully protected from the air, but she couldn’t help but double check every few miles.

Soon she’d be outside the wall. And a stone's throw from the Phos.