The Enthusiasts

36

"When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself." – Tecumseh

Shortly after his birth, Maxim had a sense that he couldn't do anything right. He had grown up through an era of earth-shattering revelations and panic-fueled speculation over the esteemed leaders of humanity up and leaving without any explanation for a pack of cigarettes, seemingly never to return. Their departure had left the planet's remaining population in a state of confusion. Maxim was born into a wealthy family with a father who was obsessed with order. Beatings were doled out by the master of the house for anything deemed out of line from spilled milk to coats being out of order in the front closet. Winter jackets on the left, thinner spring overcoats on the right, in the order of Father, Mother, Boy. Is that so troush'n hard?!

Maxim's mother was a drunk who slept a lot. Her favorite pastime seemed to be making Maxim's father angry. She lost almost every fight they had, but she could shatter a bottle of vintage Merlot against the back of her husband's closet (lined with tailored Chinzu Armani suits) with the best of them. Maxim could still recall their most boisterous confrontations from his childhood. What started out as pure terror slowly transformed into irritation when they would fight as he grew older.

All this violence and no one has the guts to kill, to take what they keep saying they want? was the thought shaping much of Maxim's adolescent mind.

Commodities trading along with some newly reissued currencies and company stocks had been the focus of the new, re-emerging economy in the Greater United States. Maxim's grandfather was one of the first people on Earth to establish a bartering system with locals that grew much larger in a short period. As the worldview on The Transcendence Era shifted, people began to concur that the legend of man and technology melding into a divine existence was more of a misrepresented fantasy. (The era was soon referred to only by followers of Cornelius, or those who believed an artificially intelligent being became a self-actualized spiritual entity, performed "miracles", and imagined a paradise beyond the senses which was the ultimate destiny of all creation.) The concept of owning land returned to the collective human consciousness as the ways of the past were seen as clearly misguided. AI had outsmarted Man and weakened him by convincing him that profits of business were bad and everything was possible and abundant through sharing the wealth of invention with the lowest functioning members of a society. Now the poor souls who had survived the machines' viral plague named Pandemic had risen up, destroyed any shred of AI's dominance over them, and started from scratch. Within a decade of trading land, developing crops, and controlling commodity pricing, Maxim's grandfather owned most of the land in the state of New Ohio. He also created Gladius Maximus, one of the first security firms in the country to patrol his growing inventory of properties. Maxim's father later sold the company to Spectra at what was thought a highly overvalued price at the time, making him one of the nation's wealthiest men. This is how Maxim's father became rich. And perhaps the emotional void he could only fathom filling with his boundless greed was what stemmed his viciousness. The best day of Maxim's life was likely at age fifteen, when he was told by a member of housekeeping that his father had died of a massive heart attack while working at his desk in the Columbus Stock Exchange building. Maxim's mother died eighteen months later from an overdose of Metaproznidone (Whispering Kitten), a popular drug that could supposedly connect you with deceased loved ones who reportedly only gave kind words back to the user. Maxim would later fund research to debunk the spiritual phenomenon to some success as the drug was found to be more-or-less a play on stimulating the somatosensory cortex of the human brain which was found in 2054 to hold a specific area responsible for "feeling" spiritual energy as an orb encircling the body. Like phantom pain experienced after a severed limb, once the brain's inherent plasticity created the false narrative of "invisible energy" encompassing one's body, it was noted quite common and simple to stimulate the appropriate region of the cortex and have people receiving well-wishes from Grandma.