Chapter One Thousand Seven Hundred Seventy-Six
6th January 1967
Moscow, Russia
The television series that had aired over the previous weeks hit a nerve, that much was clear.
Set in the years following the end of the Soviet War, it followed the lives of a half-dozen boys left orphaned by the conflict and the murderous rampage that the dying State had engaged in during the last months of Stalin’s reign. The show’s protagonist, Vitaly, was the oldest and the leader of the group. At thirteen was being forced to make choices that no one should have to make and his wandering through the countryside is in search of a family that he is certain he still has. Aside from a brief happy interlude where they can pretend that everything is normal while living for a few weeks during the summertime in an abandoned village on the Belorussian frontier, the rest of the series was pretty bleak. It showed the dangers of starvation, disease, and even other groups of orphans as the bounds of civilization had broken down even as the hazards that existed in the Russian countryside were still very present. When Vitaly finds one of the members of his family, an older sister, he gets rejected because he is no longer a part of the society that he had come from. The group dwindled one by one until it was just him walking further down a road for lack of a better idea. Eventually finding the burnt-out ruins of his former home, the show depicted Vitaly trying to sift through the ashes to find some evidence of his existence.
The story concluded there, sort of fading out. Gia understood that it wasn’t really an ending. The symbolism was obvious, the boy had become a ghost though he was still very much alive. It was the story of what had been dubbed the Lost Generation and one didn’t get much more lost than to be rejected and forgotten. For those like Anya, it was her story. She had been robbed of her identity by the very events depicted in the series. Gia knew that she might have been older, but she could relate having been hidden in the family of a distant relative’s friend after her death had been faked. Her very name had been something that she had not dared to say aloud for years because of the danger she had been in.
Turning off the television, Gia thought about what was expected of her. Tomorrow would be Christmas and she would be expected to make a public appearance. Fyodor had gone off at the direction of Georgy, it didn’t take a genius to know where considering that the Greeks and Turks were killing each other again. Many here in Russia felt that conflict was righting a historical wrong. Gia was of a different opinion, but she kept it to herself which was something that she was used to doing. How could premeditated murder on a mass scale make anything right?
Fort Drum, New York
It was the middle of winter in Upstate New York and the weather reports were saying that it wasn’t supposed to snow. Instead, it was just mind numbingly cold which meant that anyone who didn’t have to go outside stayed in. There was absolutely nothing on TV in the Barracks Recreation Room, just an absurd “Wholesome” Western that Kravitz and Huck were watching. Ritchie was trying to read a science fiction novel that was purported to be pretty blue, instead his was getting a nose full of the author’s opinions about American consumerism dressed up as parody and put on a spaceship. Sure, there was some sex going on, but hardly enough to give the book its reputation and it was about as hot as reading radio instructions. The blurb about the author on the book’s dust jacket said that the author; Jerome Garcia, was a San Francisco native. For Ritchie, that was enough said.
He was trying to concentrate on reading as the others were making lewd suggestions about the actress who was this week’s co-star and laughing about it. Ritchie might have pointed out that a television show set in an Old Western town that was supposedly in Arizona, it was too clean for starters. Anyone with an inkling of history knew that prior to the invention of air conditioning many of the people who lived in a place like that would have been Mexican. None were seen on the TV show, considering how they depicted Indians that was probably a good thing. There was also a joke that flew around about the question; Could you imagine being Black in a place like that? It was the sort of dark comedy that someone was going to delve into sooner or later. Wouldn’t it be a bitch if that killed the entire Western Television Genre.
Watching Huck and Kravitz, Ritchie knew how likely he was to see a version of that play out over the coming months. Their Team had an open slot in it because Ritchie was going to be moved out of the Specialist track. Not only was he going to be a Sergeant, but he was getting the rocker as well. That would probably piss off Mullins and Kravitz because he will have leapfrogged them, something that would make them inclined to use whoever came in to fill that slot as a chew toy.