O-Town: Chapter 1
Prologue
Ottawa, 2035. A January evening.
In the fluorescent glare that constitutes night in Canada’s capital, ten unmarked truck roll ponderously through the city, stopping every ten minutes at bars, clubs, gas stations and grocery stores to deposit five cases each of O-town seltzer.
It takes the trucks two nights to finish their deliveries—from Avalon to Fitzroy Harbour, New Edinburgh to Osgoode.
Despite their distributive fecundity, no one can say where the trucks came from, nor who the drivers were, because no one had asked for the deliveries. Yet a mere two weeks later the whole city wants more O-town, and so it appears, like money from the tooth fairy.
The cans are silver with City of Ottawa turquoise lettering. Behind it is a stylized imprint of the Arms of Canada, escutcheon and all.
Though outsiders might roll their eyes at a local non-alcoholic seltzer taking up a national symbol in its logo, real Ottawa nerds will tell you that the Arms of Canada is in fact one of the corporate symbols of the Government of Canada and therefore highly relevant to the 30 per cent of Ottawans who work for the good ol’ GoC.
Nerdy and pedantic locals will wonder aloud between sips how O-town was allowed to use the Arms of Canada, given it is a trademarked symbol.
Nerdy, pedantic and particularly inquisitive locals, upon squinting at the ribbon that encircles the central shield, and is hugged by unicorn and lion, will note that the ribbon’s Latin motto desiderantes meliorem patriam, (“desiring a better country”) has been altered to read: desiderantes placatus patriam.
They may wonder what that means.
However, if they are looking that closely at a can of O-town seltzer, it probably means they are partaking, in which case any desire to Google the Latin phrase tends to abandon their minds after a few more sips.
It just goes to show that anyone with a truly nefarious idea is incapable of keeping it to themselves.
Chapter 1: Meet Renata
It is a scorching April day in the nation’s capital. See the heat-haze glistening off the highway’s stand-still cars; see the sun, an orange formidable orb in smoky skies. The west is on fire once again, and Ottawa is in a drought year. We notice this in the dead grass and scraggly tomato plants in our neighbours’ gardens. We hear from friends who have decamped to Merrickville that those on private wells are once again resorting to dew traps and bottled water for baby formula. There are whispers that the town may finally get a drought response plan in response to this year’s drought.
At seven a.m., a young man named Ibrahim walks to the 417 East on-ramp at Richmond Road, joining half a dozen others on the sidewalk, and sticks out his thumb.
“If I wanted 40-degree weather in April I would have visited you in Kaduna,” he says to the phone he holds in his other hand.
We may come back to him.
However, what interests us right now is the figure barreling towards Ibrahim and his phone along the shoulder of Richmond Road. As it approaches, the figure solidifies into a small, frowning woman on a rusting bike. She hops onto the sidewalk and rings her bell impatiently at the cluster of hitchhikers.
“Fuck off,” says a fellow sweating profusely in his too-small navy-blue suit as he shuffles out of her way. A few others move and make a semblance of a path for the bike.
Ibrahim does not hear the bell, does not see the woman, and therefore is caught completely off guard when she rides over his foot and whacks his phone out of his hand with her handlebar. The phone clatters to the ground as Ibrahim howls in equal parts pain and alarm at the prospect of his phone, his only connection to life beyond the tangible—he cannot afford a computer—might be broken beyond repair.
Meet Renata.
If she feels a twinge of guilt in hitting Ibrahim, she does not let it show. Instead she mutters something indeterminate under her breath and carries on. She is running late, and she must concentrate, so as not to get killed by the passing mega trucks, their silver and jet-black truck beds carrying upwards of a dozen people downtown for a substantial fee.
Down Richmond Road she goes. Already, there is a sheen of sweat on her arms and legs, reddening despite a generous slathering of sunscreen. She is wearing grey cotton shorts and a white sports t-shirt that claims to wick away sweat but is in fact doing nothing at all. Her black hair is in a pixie cut currently mashed under a bright yellow bike helmet. The outfit is completed by a pair of large black sunglasses, better suited to a celebrity hiding from the paparazzi than a morning bike commuter. To top the whole scene off, she is sporting a surprisingly fresh crème black nail polish, out of place in contrast to her decidedly indifferent outfit. Taken together, the twenty-eight-year-old Renata Tsing appears at first sight like a belligerent teenager who stole her mother’s sunglasses and is late for gym class.
If only that were the case! Instead, our poor protagonist is cycling furiously to work. She’d promised Sandra she would take a look at the accounts this morning before open, and she is running late.
Unfortunately, the effects of her morning O-town are already starting to dissipate. Renata can feel her anxiety rising at the thought of letting her boss and friend down yet again. She can see the crumbling concrete of Bayshore Shopping Centre but not the cherry-red donut that signals the Lincoln Fields O-train station.
To stay calm, she starts intoning slogans for Ottawa, her hometown and archnemesis, between deep breaths.
Ottawa: For People Who Don’t Like Surprises.
Ottawa: Always Aspiring To Be The Same.
Ottawa: Perversely Change Averse.
Ottawa: Calcified In The Name Of Heritage.
Ottawa: Too Big And Too Small At The Same Time.
Ah yes. Like any good mantra, this one does the trick of dulling the buzz of thoughts in Renata’s mind, at least for enough time to see the station and breathe a sigh of relief. She may make it yet.
When she arrives at the station however, the place is dead. A young woman in a red vest trudges back and forth in front of the entrance.
“They said it would be open today,” says Renata by way of greeting.
“Yeah. Technical issue changed that though,” says the woman.
“I just checked the news this morning! What happened?”
“Do I look like an engineer?”
Renata groans. There was no point yelling at this woman, who would surely be yelled at all day. Turning away from the entrance, she checks her phone for the latest news. Nothing indicating the line is down. But there is a new story.
MAYOR ANNOUNCES CITY TO CUT ALL BUSSES, BURNS ONE IN EFFIGY: “THIS WAS ALWAYS THE PLAN PEOPLE”
No mantra was going to help her with this one. In one swift movement, she whips her phone at the Lincoln Fields station door, smashing the phone to bits and causing a network of fractures throughout the door’s glass window.
“Hey what the hell!” says the red-vested woman.
“Move,” says Renata, who proceeds inside the station. There is no more direct way downtown than along the LRT. She’ll have to manage. She really, really wishes she had some O-town right now.
Ottawa: The Nation’s Punchline.
An Interlude: Dokein’s Disease
Let’s leave our leading lady for the moment as she negotiates the terrain alongside the LRT tracks and spend some time with that phone-destroying headline.
You might assume that there would be a great deal of anger over this decision, but you would be woefully wrong.
It was already rare for the majority of Ottawans to ride the bus, accepting instead the four to five-hour commute along thoroughfares wide and narrow, replete with cars, private mini-busses, ride-shares and aforementioned truck beds full of hitchers.
Maybe one or two angry activists would write an op-ed under a pseudonym. There would be no point in attending a City Council meeting to express one’s dismay or anger—no one listened anyway!
In short, the people of Ottawa were a censor’s best friend, stopping themselves from doing anything that might feel uncomfortable or scary, or allow someone to interrogate their position on any topic. No more buses? Fine. We’ll carry on.
There did seem to be something inherently docile about the people of Ottawa.
This wasn’t always the case.
During a hot and smoky summer in 2031, by strange coincidence, individuals throughout seventy-seven different federal government departments, agencies, crown corporations and special operating agencies started behaving rather strangely. They would disagree with their superiors, write angry emails to their Assistant Deputy Ministers, Deputy Ministers, even Ministers! A few even walked to their respective Ministers’ offices and confronted them in person, yelling incoherently about “political corruption,” “not taking expert advice,” “ignoring evidence,” using the threat of partisanship to “muzzle objective facts,” and making a mockery of “an independent bureaucracy meant to serve Canadians.”
Of course, no one could understand what they were going on about. But it was concerning enough that the Prime Minister, affectionately known as “Big Uncle,” by his party, ordered a quarantine of fifty-one federal public servants in order to study what was clearly a serious medical condition.
At first a team of leading medical professionals speculated the cause might be the inhalation of lead and mercury particles in wildfire smoke that had been blanketing the city for months.
That team was quickly dismissed and replaced with doctors that some lobbyists knew very well, they were excellent really, and these doctors concluded that the public servants were suffering from a new form of hormonal encephalopathy. They named it Dokeîn’s disease.
Symptoms included a remarkable and seemingly un-prompted change in a person’s propensity to disagree, be critical or take any other aggressive action to express disappointment or frustration with regards to ethical or moral disputes.
People with Dokeîn’s furthermore tended to have a shocking disregard for maintaining their employment.
It took twenty-six months, during which time all those deemed affected by the disease were under strict quarantine in pop-up tents on the Ottawa Hospital grounds, but eventually the scientists devised a cure of sorts. The public servants had to take a pill every day for the rest of their lives, lest Dokeîn’s lead them to further erratic criticisms of their superiors, or government decisions like buying pipelines the private sector didn’t even want.
Since the initial outbreak, Dokeîn’s popped up every once in a while in the rank and file of government workers, but never at the same scale.
This did not account for the increased frequency in illegal protests, sabotage, vandalism and hostility exhibited by Ottawa’s non-government employees. The following year there was a general strike across the city, the first in its history.
This got those scientists thinking: everyone knew Ottawans were rule-abiding. They didn’t like change. You moved to Ottawa for a quiet life and politics that were predictable in their mediocrity.
Could it be, the scientists wondered, that the whole city had developed Dokeîn’s? Was it perhaps communicable or spread through the air?
The pills that had been developed for the original fifty-one patients were expensive, their ingredients hard to come by. That would need to change.
Ideally the format of the dosage would change too, making it easier to provide to the maximum number of patients.
The scientists got to work.