CHESS

In late 1966 the completion of the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center for NORAD heralded a glorious new dawn in the United States of America. When they burrowed their 154,000 sq feet and three stories of missile defense command like a marrow-drinking tick into the petrified side of the great dragon Thirst the army corps of engineers may have tapped directly into the disease concealed beneath the dead dragon's calcified hide But they also built an unparalleled technological marvel- a veritable world wonder of engineering- the likes of which had never been seen before. A triumphant announcement to the world that, more than any other, America was the future. Nature had never before been tamed so thoroughly and completely.

Although the public eye was directed away from its very existence as a matter of course, privileged persons were granted tours of its many metal springs, and as they filtered in and out of the installation their numbers and their excitement grew to a fevered pitch. Visions of a whole nation of safe little sanitized, self-contained biospheres dotting the countryside flitted through the minds of America's elite class, and kicked off a fad in which every branch of the US government participated. With patriotic tears in their eyes and fervor in their hearts slavering hordes of secretaries, functionaries, and bureaucrats clutched crackpot projects in sweaty hands and made a mad dash to win congressional votes so as to have the army corps of engineers plant ever more terrariums in the fertile soil for them. For all their enthusiasm for what was absolutely the pinnacle of human engineering in the wealthiest empire the planet has ever seen with all the resources of the world at its disposal, few proposed projects were considered as important as the headquarters for the North American Air Defense Command. On the more reasonable end the Department of Agriculture wanted a seed vault. The United States Post Office Department put hundreds of actuaries to work crunching the numbers to justify automated mail-sorting centers. More unreasonably the Federal Bureau of Prisons wanted a miles-long network of tunnels somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas or perhaps Appalachia to house the entire nation's growing prison population in a centralized Federal Correctional Complex, in some sort of nightmare mine buried two-hundred feet under timber trees. Most ridiculously the Department of Housing and Urban development planted the seed that would germinate for nearly a hundred years in the rich soil of smoke-filled backrooms and whites-only country clubs to blossom into the Societal Preservation Program and the vaults. Each Agency, Department, Bureau, and Division of the US government courted corporate partners and greased congressional palms to mixed success and dwindling enthusiasm (The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's plan for a massive federal boarding school built in an abandoned goldmine never made it much farther than crude drawings Elliot Richardson left in his desk when he gleefully switched to Secretary of Defense), but the newly-established and freshly-empowered Environment Protection Agency won their bid- after successfully winning a suite of companies like DayGlow, Med-Tek, Lockreed Industries and Dow Chemical to their cause, and also through pork.

Established as part of the Chemical Storage Site Project (or CHESS Project), CHESS B ostensibly served as a holding facility for chemicals too dangerous to dispose of in the normal way, dumping into the Cuyahoga River. Unlike its sister, CHESS B's twelve 50,000 square foot subterranean stories were supposed to be a crypt where harmful and pernicious poisons and runoffs, as decided by ever-evolving science and cultural mores, would be left to molder and break down into inert sludge. This facility only existed on paper, though, in congressional budget bills, reports, and sub-committee records. In practice CHESS B was a chemical weapons plant that churned out war-crime compounds by the ton. The research to develop these international law violating toxins happened elsewhere, but the means to make them made their home at the hilt of a dagger plunged deep into stolen land in the Utah Rockies. CHESS B lay in an unassuming valley, buried on paper as a benign storage shed and in the real world beneath a mountain of garbage.

Ever wary of Soviet spy planes and spy satellites the minds behind CHESS B decided that the blight they scored the Earth with needed to be deliberately disguised and could think of no better way to hide it than underneath the trash. The enclave of CEOs, government insiders, and scientists that joined together and spent a fuckton of money to make this abomination in their many bill-able hours determined that refuse was unsightly and would therefore discourage further scrutiny. Thanks to an ever-expanding consumer society and an ever-shrinking world less and less likely to accept America's #1 export (garbage), the trash pile at CHESS B stood at 14,430 ft above sea level by October 2077, just shy of Mount Elbert (the tallest peak in the Shining Mountains) and a mere 1 foot taller than Mount Massive. CHESS B's landfill was nearly 30 feet taller than Heey-otoyoo', the majestic purple mountain of Katharine Lee Bates's "America the Beautiful" and Cheyenne Mountain's neighbor.

In an ironic twist, CHESS B's camouflage not only failed to protect the bunker from targeted nuclear annihilation, but in fact assured it. By the early 21st century the landfill was so popular and so important that the traffic from garbage trucks and trash pickers (and, occasionally, Enclave trucks with sinister agendas) led Chinese intelligence to peg it as some sort of western-slope NORAD and delegate it a priority-one target anyway. For the privilege it was double-tapped by intercontinental ballistic missiles, instantly turning the mountain into a crater with enough fission to rob CHESS B of its record height and its secret chemical factory. But unlike NORAD and the great dragon Thirst, which finally ascended to heaven one atom at a time courtesy of China's nuclear arsenal, two warheads were not quite enough to destroy storage at CHESS B (to Hecate's good fortune), nor were they enough to successfully scour America's greatest legacy from the Earth either.

For Hecate the junkpile held little interest. She took what she wanted from it to build her compound but otherwise it only stood between her and flourishing fields of watermelon and maize and beans and sweet potatoes and all the wonderful things. The lush green garden of her dreams. Diana's gift. For her Daughters who knew nothing of the great and terrible power beneath it the space-age debitage of the junkpile was a veritable garden unto itself, ripe with untold treasures of the world before the war. In their free time they loved to explore its fetid recesses, frequently finding fabulous fortune carelessly cast off by their unthinking ancestors two or three centuries ago. Among the largess of the old world Daughters discovered; an entire car model production line's worth of good steel; computer after computer after computer from the earliest consumer models to the the most-up-to-date ZAX of 2077; two entire factories worth of fabrication machines, sewing machines, and hardware; titanium, silver, gold, and almost a whole kilogram of platinum; 7.2 million dollars in worthless Commonwealth currency; stuffed animals, microwaves, toasters, bedframes, refrigerators, robots, televisions, guns, clothes, radios, gramophones, wardrobes, chifforobes, trunks, vanities, chairs, and plastics, plastics, plastics, plastics. All the different varieties of plastic from poly-carbonate to polyethylene to polyester. There was absolutely nothing that Americans wouldn't throw out. Just the thought of it made Julia's head swim.

Unlike Hecate or her Daughters, Julia had neither indifference or admiration for the landfill, rather she had nothing but contempt for it and the people who made it. She had more insight into the mind that might build the facility under Ouroboros, as little as she liked it, but the mindset that might lead to the towering monument above it was wholly alien to her. She could understand why America might riddle its countryside with missile silos like oozing open bedsores, that little rat brain made of fear and hate, but she couldn't countenance how much America was willing to throw out. Laziness, sure, was a fair enough motive, but eventually the sheer scale of it broke the limits of Julia's empathy. For everything that was left Julia knew and often thought how there once was ten times more before. There was no limit to fear, she believed, but surely apathy had to reach an endpoint. What else would stop these people from simply lying down and dying? The compulsion to produce more garbage? But then again, she reflected, most of the progenitors of Ouroboros's bounty basically did allow themselves to die, placidly ignoring any and all warning of impending holocaust, up to and including the sirens that heralded their doom moments before they met it. Brahmin chewing cud, she considered them, a comparison that sprung to her mind whenever she watched the docile creatures Ouroboros populated its reclaimed hills with.

Because all the hills in Hecate's valley were reclaimed. The largess of the old world, formerly the second-tallest peak of the Shining Mountains (mostly what Americans threw out between 2002 and 2077) was finally gone, thanks to the tireless efforts of Her Daughters and Hounds. In their magpie obsession with the junkpile and the tantalizing treasures contained therein the bored Harpies, curious Sibyls, and ruthless Maenads of Ouroboros tore the garbage apart. They recycled what they could and, in the tradition of their ancestors, relocated the rest somewhere they didn't care about. They rooted like pigs looking for truffles out of a sense of obligation, of religious fervor, for fun, out of boredom. And when they cleared an area out, Hecate's GECK would remove metal and plastic and salt from the soil and in the now-arable land the Daughters planted crops, just as Hecate dreamed. If she'd been alive to see the fruition of her Daughters' hard work, she would've made a speech.

Julia did not commemorate the cleansing of the valley. She did not give a speech. She let the last bit of purification pass, let the final transition of the crater from landfill to Eden to transpire without comment. As little as she liked the trashpile, it certainly felt fitting. The men who made CHESS B couldn't help but be aware, on some level, what they were. What they did. They did not make beautiful things, couldn't even dream of beautiful things, and the thought never once crossed their rotten minds to hide their monstrous facility with anything any less hideous and horrible. But unlike the war-criminal plutocrats of the old world Hecate was not wary of layering beauty on top of blight in her little valley. Only she had the arrogance, would dare wed death and life like she had in her capital. Knowing what was beneath the splendor of Ouroboros's gardens and greenhouses and pasture made Julia ill. And the valley, free from the old world's trash, truly was beautiful. Lush and verdant, encircled by red Utah stone, Julia couldn't reconcile the beauty of Ouroboros with the rotten, evil tumor that was CHESS B buried beneath. It seemed perverse and wrong to her. Giving life with one hand. Taking it away with the other.

Julia gave herself until the junkpile was cleared to think of a plan. If the goddess didn't have something to say by then it'd be obvious that something was wrong in the temple. She couldn't resurrect the goddess, not even for a little bit, but Julia could distract the Daughters from their Mother's absence by pretending to speak on Her behalf. A few days after the last bit of the junkpile was swept away, right when the reality was sinking in Julia descended down the ziggurat to the council's chambers and briefly spoke.

"The goddess is considering courses of action and is not to be disturbed for the foreseeable future," Julia told the council.

"Courses of action?" asked the council.

"New plans may be forthcoming," Julia answered. Then with a swish of her skirt she returned to Hecate's chambers. She did not leave them again for two months.

Rumors took off almost immediately. Shockingly quickly the news escaped the gravity of the council of priestesses, where its trajectory spun out to the Sibyls, from whence its arc grew ever wider to the Harpies and then, eventually, the Hounds, until rumor saturated the valley so thoroughly it was everywhere at once like an electron in its orbital. Julia's pronouncement was on the tip of every tongue in Ouroboros in a matter of hours and it stayed there for days and weeks after. What could the Goddess possibly be planning? Lots of Daughters had guesses, but nobody could say for sure.

Someone suggested some sort of super growth serum, and then there was a panic about super mutants and Forced Evolutionary Virus, but there was no official response. A rumor was started that they were going to vacate Ouroboros. Perhaps a holy pilgrimage, to a new promised land where they could begin again free of the sin and iniquities of the old world. There was no response from the Goddess. Some speculated a new alliance, perhaps with the New California Republic, or the New Canaanites, or perhaps the New dominant power in the Mojave, a reclusive casino owner known only as House. If that was the plan, though, the temple was silent.

Tension built. While there had always been doubters, as weeks went by without any followup more and more worshipers believed that Julia's pronouncement was a joke, or a hoax. The faithful couldn't help but feel frustrated. But they were scared, too. No one thought about their life in Ouroboros until they realized it could change, and now that they were thinking about it they realized that for all its faults they actually liked their life as it was. Naturally they knew it couldn't last, but the future for so long seemed so far away. Then all of a sudden it was here. Like the Americans that toured the splinter stuck deep in the great dragon Thirst when they first got a glimpse of all the magnificent machinery meant to keep them safe from nuclear annihilation, for the first time the Daughters of Hecate had to grapple with the implications of what they were doing and what their plan was. Although their holy war was still supposed to be a few years away, for the first time since Scipio Venator dared march down Stophades corridor it touched Ouroboros. Even as the reality set in, declaring war on Caesar was conspicuously absent from everyone's guess as to Hecate's next commandment. Unanimously and without a single word of commiseration the Maenads and the Sibyls and the Harpies and the Hounds all disregarded the most obvious assumption out of hand. But the idea dug into their minds like CHESS B dug into their valley. It burrowed and it stayed.

Even as the Daughters' curiosity curdled into anxiety they remained enthralled by Julia's pronouncement, transfixed by the silence she left in her wake. To no Daughter was the silence more deafening than Atia. For other Daughters the horrible quiet that covered the temple was a matter of faith, which they had in Hecate, even still. But for Atia it was a personal matter.

Julia liked to flit in and out of her life, fickle and flirty. From the very moment she met her the high priestess had the disconcerting habit of being there when Atia woke up but not when she'd gone to sleep. For days or weeks or months at a time Julia would be gone like she was never there, a whisper on the wind, and then, as though no time had passed at all she'd be there, smiling that I know something and I'm not telling smile again, back in Atia's life. There was no point in asking her where she'd been. If she was lucky (and only since she'd specifically asked her to), Julia might let her know when she was leaving, but there was no guarantee Atia wouldn't just wake up in the morning and she was gone again.

Their time together was often intense but it was also completely in accordance with Julia's clock. Infuriatingly, that held true even when she didn't, as Atia often told herself, have other obligations. The High Priestess of Hecate was her greatest friend, but Atia had to share her with the cult, their living God, and the wasteland at large. As jealous as it made her, Atia was powerless in the face of such overwhelming forces. But Julia's last escapade into the wasteland with Hecate had thusfar proven to be the very last. Since the month and change she'd traipsed through the wasteland with the goddess she'd not gone one mile from the valley. It was the longest she'd ever stayed in Ouroboros. For some reason, Julia seemed to be free of the responsibilities that the world once demanded of her. And yet, she was as mercurial and unavailable as she'd ever been. Moreso than when she was more frequently occupied with operations and adventures, it sometimes felt like. It was as though, since she no longer had an excuse for her truancy, she felt an excuse was no longer necessary, and therefore, she offered none.

So she'd wake up with Atia one morning and then go three days without so much as a word, then she'd wander into the apartment and ask what was for dinner. Usually she smelled of liquor whenever Atia did see her. Sometimes Julia would leave and Atia would find her again in the discotheque or the baths and she'd greet her like they'd arranged to meet beforehand, like that was the plan all along, as though Julia had told her to meet her there at a pre-established time, like they'd agreed upon it in some prior conversation, when in fact the last thing Julia had said to her was "that cloud looks like rain" and then was gone for six days only for Atia to catch her at a potlatch piling her plate high with green bean casserole!

All of this Atia bore with the patience of a saint. Even as miserable as she oft made her, some perfect combination of Julia's charm and beauty with Atia's love and fear made it possible for Atia to endure the more chaotic and difficult parts of their relationship. She never once brought it up, but simply weathered the hurricane that was Julia. After all, there was no one closer to her in all of Ouroboros (except perhaps the Goddess, but that hardly counted). But this was too much. Even before the days stretched into weeks with no word it was too much.

Atia was always jealous of Julia. Once, Atia had been the nerve center of Caesar's Legion, single handedly coordinating and collating the orders of Mars reborn to His many armies. In her ushering into the Goddess's own nerve center Atia assumed, not unreasonably, that she might once again find herself the beating heart of a glorious empire. She was not. Although she hadn't noticed at first, so distracted as she was by her suddenly and shockingly much higher quality of life (and, to a lesser extent, by new motherhood), it eventually occurred to her that she was not so much the axis upon which the Goddess's wheel turned, but a mere archivist, a librarian whose job it was not to manage an empire but to file and find documents by the system by which documents were filed and found. For a long time she consoled herself with the hope that while, no, she wasn't a major player in Ouroboros like she was in Caesar's entourage, she was at least part of the nerve center, and there was nothing to say that her role in church would not, one day, entail more authority. Not for nothing she was not unqualified to take power. Moreover, she was the confidant of the second-most powerful player in Ouroboros. That had to count for something.

And yet, here was her dear beloved literally the axis upon which Ouroboros turned and for all her love and devotion and quiet suffering for years Atia was given no more of a privileged glimpse than anyone else in Ouroboros. For everyone else, exclusion from the process was a matter of faith. For Atia, it was personal. It was an insult, and for weeks and weeks the insult grew in proportion to the faithful's anxiety.

It was the dissolution of Atia and Julia's relationship. For however special it was to Atia, she finally had to admit that it was not for the high priestess. Without the distraction of trash-picking with the other Daughters Atia could only dwell on it, and although at first she was angry she quickly became sullen and withdrawn. A jagged metal caltrop of hurt burrowed in her chest and every time she sighed it scraped the side of her heart.

She was short with Julius. It became very important for her to modulate his behavior. Suddenly he had a strict curfew. She assigned him chores, cleaning the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, his room, her room. When he informed her there was nothing left to clean in the apartment she blew up at him and after a tongue-lashing he found himself cleaning the hallway and the stairs. He missed curfew one day and when he did make it home Atia sat him down and lectured him for the rest of the evening then sent him to bed without supper. He began to do worse in school, and between being upbraided at school and harangued at home he mostly cried. He did not understand what was going on. He missed his Mama Julia, the only person he knew would make everything better, but she was nowhere to be found, and as young and naive as he was he still knew better than to ask his mother where she was. It was the one bit of wisdom that separated the young child and an out-and-out caning, like the kind his mother was subjected to when she was a child and a slave.

Still Julia remained sequestered. Most of her time was spent reading and smoking. The Goddess was delivered food on demand but she'd stockpiled a good supply of snacks so as to have as little contact as possible. She even gained a bit of weight.

She didn't do much planning. The plan was already in place, all she had to do was carry it out. So far she'd only made her first move. It took a lot of time and the least amount of effort, which was how she'd come up with it, but as time went it became clearer and clearer that she was not making a clever play so much as she was stalling. She could tell just from the regular reports to the Goddess that the Daughters were as invested as they were ever going to be. There was no sense in making them wait any longer. But there was something she had to do before then. Her next move.

She slipped out of the temple in the dead of night and made her way through the courtyard to the apartments. It was good to get out of Hecate's stuffy, smoke-stained chambers and into the fresh night air, and all the doubts about her decision and what she had to do quieted. She was focused, she felt good. She felt better than she had in a long time, not since she'd run roughshod over the Shining Mountains with her wild women. She was imbued with the same clarity of purpose. It had been so long she forgot how wonderful it felt.

She opted not to enter through the door, but slink up the back way like she liked. Her secret little path gouged into the side of the still-new three stories of living space. All the footholds were waiting for her. Even though she was more out of shape than she'd ever been she scrambled up them all the same.

Atia's window was closed but Julius's was open to the night air, in defiance of his mother's orders. He was asleep in bed, but he'd kicked his blankets off. The cold made him shiver. Julia tucked him back in and kissed him on the forehead. He smiled without waking.

She slipped unnoticed into Atia's bedroom, shrugged off her clothes and sidled up next to her in bed, and that was where she stayed until Atia found her there in the morning.