Sovereign (Part One)

The Faye Estate was a blur under the torrential downpour. Amy Hartwell was ever so glad she had the sunroof of her Magnus GM fixed. It was wild, wishful thinking - a sunroof in countryside England? Even from the decades of erratic climate change, the UK was always remarkably wet and chilly.

Amy scanned through documents on her Scriblet, an expensive birthday present from her wife. It was a pocket computer capable of being folded into a notebook to write upon. She always heard the words of her mother, scathing and dismissive of any new technological marvel - "Soon, children won't know how to write with a pen! Where does it end?" - and smiled as she made digital notes on a document with her stylus pen.

Was she stalling? Yes. Was she nervous? Also, yes. Marigold Faye had been one of her childhood heroes. She was a woman who lived through the Sovereign-American War, through impossible means. She made a life for herself in the 2030s and somehow made it to the American Liberation of 2042.

Amy frowned. It was the "somehow" historiographers still didn't know in detail. Marigold Faye still refused to tell her story in any capacity, not even through her own means. She accepted interviews, but not about those years in-between. She would talk about how the Sovereign States was established, where she was when the coup happened, but absolutely stonewalled at any event after 2032.

Amy looked at her complexion in the mirror. Her vacation on the blazing hot beaches of Greenland had not been kind to her skin, bringing her freckles out prominently, looking like cinnamon dust sprinkled across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She was a natural redhead, but died her hair brunette. She wanted to distinguish herself from her twin sister, Angela, something their mother hated. She saw their ginger hair as a blessed lineage of some bygone age since it was a trait that was becoming rarer and rarer. Amy wasn't sure she believed the theories that there were less than one million people on Earth with ginger hair or that global warming had a role in it. Yes, Scotland and Ireland had evolved past the perennial cloudy weather and climate wars, but were as stubborn as ever.

Someone was emerging from the house, tussling with an umbrella. It was a young woman with jet-black hair and severely pinched-in frown. She walked down the pavement to Amy's car and motioned her to roll down her window, perching the umbrella on top of the door.

Amy rolled her window down.

"Might I ask as to why you're parked outside my mother's house? Are you lost?" the woman asked curtly.

"Um...no." Amy responded nervously. "I'm...my name is Amy Hartwell. I'm a historiographer wishing to interview Mrs. Faye."

The woman rolled her eyes. "Yes. I received your email. I'm afraid we don't let the press just have unsupervised access to our mother like she's a curio in a museum. She is not interested in anyone looking to make a fortune off her trauma."

"Please...I'm not looking for a fortune. I'm already well-off." Amy explained. "I swear. I just want to learn more about her story."

"Are you unfamiliar with the Internet?" the woman spat sardonically. "She's given countless interviews, maybe you should start with those instead of stalking her at her residence. Excuse me."

She put a hand up to her ear where no doubt a Omnipod receiver was nestled.

"Yes, ma'am. Alright, then." she said in a much calmer voice. "I'll escort her in."

Amy held back a wide grin as she stepped out of her car. The woman held the umbrella over them both as she led Amy toward the house.

"My name is Joan. I shall be your liaison between matters concerning my mother. I am her agent as well as her daughter. If at any time she becomes uncomfortable, you will be promptly escorted out and banned from the premises. You will also have to be searched. She has had far too many attempts on her life to be lax with security."

Goddamn. Amy thought to herself. Just how infamous was she back in the States?

Amy and Joan stepped inside the premises. Immediately, two suited bodyguards appeared before them to take the umbrella from Joan's hand and Amy's purse and jacket. Amy stared at the impeccably dressed bodyguards wearing expensive tailored suits. They reminded her of pictures of Secret Service guards, the ones who protected American presidents...when there were still presidents.

"Yes, the suits are a bit much. But Mum still panics at the sight of men in uniforms. You can understand, with her background." Joan explained. "She associates the uniforms of army personnel with...certain injustices she experienced back then."

Amy pursed her lips, not saying anything.

The guards searched her purse and jacket and then directed her to place her hands on the wall while they frisked her. Amy hated being frisked since she had a particularly sleazy TSA agent cop a feel during a "random" search. But the guards were professional and she was cleared to enter the living parlor.

When Amy set eyes on Marigold Faye, she tried her best not to let the surprise show.

Marigold Faye showed her age and the complications brought with it. She was hooked to a dialysis machine, the whirring of it being the only noise in the room. Marigold was engrossed in a book, her glasses perched at the end of her nose. The lines on her face were like cracks in limestone, liver spots decorating her chin and jaw. Her sparse gray hair was thinning at the crown of her head. She wore an elaborate tie-dye house dress with plush, fluffy slippers.

"Come on then and sit if you're gonna insist on being here." she said without looking up from her book.

The Southern American accent surprised Amy. Most American refugees' accents adapted to the many dialects of the UK, so it was odd to hear.

Amy sat nervously on the beige settee, crossing her legs, and placing her hands in her lap. Marigold viewed this gesture with a lifted eyebrow.

"I remember being told to sit like a lady by my mama." she said dryly. "My legs were too fat. So I told her that I guess God didn't want me to be a lady." She chuckled. "God, did I get a walloping for that."

Amy couldn't hide her reaction. "She beat you for that?"

"It was the Southern way. Lot of things were the Southern way. Don't mean they were right." Marigold commented. "Now...you want to interview me?"

"Yes...my name is Amy Hartwell and I'm a--"

"I know who you are, child. You wouldn't be in my house if I didn't." Marigold cut her off. "I don't know what you're expectin' to get out of this. I done told about a thousand journalists that I don't want to publish no book. Ain't it enough I done lived it?"

"I'm not doing this for a profit, Mrs. Faye. I'm doing this to preserve history. Knowing history is vital because without it, we're doomed to repeat it." Amy explained.

Marigold burst out laughing. It was a joyless, sinister laugh with a taste of exasperation.

"What the hell do you know about history?" she scoffed. "We've repeated it since recorded history was a concept. They recorded the Holocaust, the wars, every massacre and scandal that shook this planet. And the cycle still repeated itself. Like it always has. And it always will."

Amy was losing confidence. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe she should have listened to her wife about meeting her heroes and how heartbreaking it can be.

"America recovered." Amy said in a small voice. "That has to mean something, right?"

"Said like a person who never lived in America." Marigold opined. "You think American life was all burgers and grits and baseball and prosperity? No, child. It was struggling paycheck to paycheck. It was waking up to find out what rights you had lost that week. It was having to choose between a life-saving surgery and paying rent."

"That's what I want to write down. All of the horrible things that happened. Because they happened. Because people need to know that it happened." Amy said, trying not to sound pleading.

"So they can become more books for fascists to burn?" Marigold guessed.

"We have much more secure ways of preserving knowledge. Entire libraries accessed at the click of a mouse. I'm a historiographer of the Panacea Online Library. We collect books and histories from all over the world and scan them digitally into a massive online network, or cloud."

"Which can be accessed with a fee, correct?" Marigold asked skeptically.

"No." Amy smiled. "We do not charge. We don't believe in the gatekeeping of knowledge. We are a nonprofit organization dedicated to continued enlightenment of the world."

"Until the next Hitler destroys it. Or Crestwell, I guess." Marigold mutters, the names like acid on her lips.

"I heard you met Ken Crestwell." Amy stated, knowing she was entering dangerous waters.

"Yes..." Marigold said slowly. "He was a...particularly revolting man."

"Did you spend a lot of time with him?"

Marigold gave her a searching glare. "I was his fifth concubine."