E-mail Matt Jarpe at m.jarpe@comcast.net
Web design & programming by David Louis Edelman.
Chapter 3
Tomorrow is light shining from the sky,
The past is the ground on which you stand.
The sunshine is your own, don’t buy it,
With your language, your people, and your land.
Sex Lethal, “179 to 1”
Micronational, Cubist Records, 2030.
A model for world takeover:
In order to take over the world, the world itself first had to be transformed into one whole entity that could be held and controlled. So that was step one. Unification. A big part of it was convincing people in various positions, various walks of life, that Unification was a good thing. Big business was no problem. Where trade was free, money could be more easily made. The big transnational corporations had bitten and scratched to be the first on that hay truck. And with them came their uncanny ability to change the minds of the people, the ones they called the “consumers.” Hell, if they could make a barely palatable beverage like cola the world’s second most popular beverage (and closing in on water by the day) they could cram Unification down the throat of the world.
The workers of the world, the Joe six-packs and their global equivalents, were a little tougher. Of course it was true that what was good for business was good for the workers, but that was a difficult concept for people who lived in a zero-sum world. If the fat cats are doing better, it must mean I’m doing worse. So you had to demonstrate the concept to them a little bit at a time. NAFTA, GATT, and the Pacific Rim Tariff Exclusion (PRTE, pronounced “party.”) You hammer those agreements though, then let everybody make money.
The politicians were the tough ones. Unification meant that everybody who had some power would automatically have less. More power equaled more to lose, and hence a reluctance to play the Unification game. So government had to become an instrument of business. A little soft money here, a little stiff arming there, you get the picture.
Finally there were the leaders. Not politicians, but the few individuals who actually ruled others. Dictators, strong men, absolute despots. No way you could convince such as these to give over to this idea of a new world order. What was that phrase? The dictators were eggs to Unification's omelet.
The world fell into place one piece at a time. The Soviet Union had to be dismantled so the components would fit into the bigger picture. Hong Kong took over mainland China, Europe was lured into homogeneity by the promise of a powerful currency. A common enemy polarized the mid-east, while the political maelstrom of Africa crystallized around the new HIV vaccine. And who could have predicted that the secession of Quebec from Canada would lead to the annexation of western Canada by the US, the subsequent annexation of Mexico and Central America, and finally the entire western hemisphere?
Walter Cheeseman, that was who. When he was sixteen, Walter had written his first, rudimentary flowchart that would start with him graduating high school and starting his own software company, and would end with his ruling the entire world. Anyone who had seen that original flowchart, which would have to be printed on a sheet of paper the size of a basketball court to be legible, would have guessed that young Cheeseman was suffering from delusions of grandeur. Of course, fast forward twenty years, and you would find that they were not delusions at all.
“Working late Walter?”
Maggie Mandrasekran had just happened to be passing by her boss’s office on her way somewhere and had found the door open. That was the story, anyway. She didn’t have anywhere to go, really, and she knew that Walter’s door was usually open. You wouldn’t think that the most powerful executive at the most powerful international bureaucracy in the world would have his door open, or that his office would look out onto a common hallway, or that he would have such a spare little office, but then, you would have to spend a little more time getting to know Walter. He really didn’t give a shit about the trappings of power. All he cared about was the power itself.
Walter glanced in her general direction. She couldn’t tell if he was looking at her. He had a one way monitor on his desk, and you couldn’t tell from this angle if it was opaque or not.
“Yes, Maggie, I’m working late. A fact that would be fairly obvious to the casual observer, and hardly worth commenting on since I always work late.”
“Well,” Maggie invited herself into his office, sat down across the desk from him. She went through a little bit of a show of crossing her legs. “What are you working on?”
Which was, Maggie knew, the only way to get Walter talking. She was the head of the Profiling Department, which made psychological sketches of employees, politicians, and those criminals that had so far escaped the net WebCense threw. She had never been asked to make a profile of the boss himself, but she had done it anyway, for her own reasons. Without an interview she didn’t know the motive force behind his ambition, what had caused him to transform a mildly successful software/hardware company into a globe spanning information gatekeeper. It was enough, for her purposes, to know that the ambition was there. It was enough for her to know that he didn’t care one bit about the individuals who might get in his way.
“I’m trying to recruit some more people to fill in the Uplinking group. We’ve had more burnouts than usual this month.”
“The one-percenters,” Maggie said. “We should come up with a faster way of screening for people who can handle the sensory overload.” Uplinking was the primary mandate of WebCense, the reason it existed. Well, that and to act as a vehicle for Walter’s scheme of world domination. Uplinkers were trained in web meta-architecture from a pool of less than one percent of people who could simultaneously keep track of seven modes of sensory input. They needed the reflexes of a fighter jock, the analytical powers of a theoretical physicist, and the attention span of a junior high student who’d traded his Ritalin for a can of Jolt and pack of Camels.
“You just never know until you do the operation and get the dataspray online,” Walter said. “Most of them flame out in a week.”
“I thought the dataspray was safe.” Maggie was on the waiting list for a dataspray herself. Almost everyone at WebCense was supposed to have one by the end of the year. The device was becoming more common by the day. Even so, she sometimes shuddered at the thought of having a little advanced inkjet printer thing filled with neurotransmitters surgically implanted in the central fissure of her brain. Now Walter was telling her this.
“Actually, it isn’t the device itself that causes the problem. It’s the constant sensory overload of having it connected through a multiband helmet. Try riding a roller coaster for twelve hours straight. Imagine how much fun that would be.”
Maggie was pretty proud of herself for getting him talking. It was a major achievement. She had been trying to get his interest for the last three months, without success. It would help if she actually liked him, but she found him rather boring, and sometimes vaguely distasteful. This would be much easier if she hadn’t been a trained psychologist, so she’d be able to pretend she didn’t know why she was behaving the way she was. But she had a great deal of self insight. She knew that, even though she’d achieved the highest of positions in the most powerful of organizations, to date or perhaps even to marry this man would be most creditable to her family. Her mother, father, and brothers were mid-level bureaucrats in the national government of India, and they lived their lives vicariously through her. Sad though it sounded, she wanted to marry Walter Cheeseman, the man who would soon control the new government that would control the world, to live out the ideal of the subcontinental superwoman that she had been pushed toward from the day she could walk.
But first she had to attract his interest. No easy task. His only interest was work.
“So we need to figure out what makes the one-percenters hold on for longer than a week,” Maggie said. This was something that might fall under her department, a project that might raise her visibility. “We should test the really exceptional cases.”
“Well, you sure as hell won’t be able to test the guy who lasted the longest so far.”
“Who’s that?”
“Quin Taber.”
“Oh.” Taber was famous, or infamous, at WebCense. He was the young superstar, brilliant computer architect, web theorist, and uplinker. He claimed to have discovered that the Digital Carnivore, the bogeyman of the web, was actually an artificial intelligence. He tried to take some technology with him when he quit WebCense, and had been thwarted. He had sued. And lost. And appealed. He had publicly stated that he wanted to bring WebCense before the light, to subject them to the same laws as the rest of the world. Nothing doing. No government wanted to take on WebCense. They existed outside governments and laws. They were information. If it wasn’t for the Digital Carnivore, they would control all the information.
“But he was just a fluke,” Walter said. “Half the time he was uplinking he wasn’t even doing his job. He was screwing around with the Digital Carnivore.”
“What ever happened to him? Is he still trying to sue us?”
Walter chuckled. “Quin’s irrelevant. He’s just wasting our time with these suits. My lawyers call it vexatious litigation. I like that. He’s just trying to vex me.”
“Listen, Walter, I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner?” She crossed her legs the other way, watching his eyes. They didn’t track. She placed her hands on the arms of the chair and pushed her shoulders back a bit. No luck with the breasts, either.
“What is it with you women, always asking me about dinner? Do you think I don’t eat enough? I eat just fine.”
“So, you’re saying no thanks?”
“Well, yes. I’m going home.” He pushed past her into the hallway.
She sat in his office for a few minutes, thinking. She was pretty sure he wasn’t gay. He seemed healthy enough, no sign of a gross testosterone deficiency. She could think of two possibilities. Either he found her unattractive, which would be a first for her, or he was able to funnel all of his energies into world domination. That, then, was the way to his heart.
The problem with the rest of the world, everybody but Walter Cheeseman, was that they didn’t have any vision. Since he was twelve years old and had begun exploring the world of science and technology, Walter had known that humans would visit the other planets in his own lifetime. Now, with access to all manner of classified material, he knew that it was possible that humans would achieve interstellar travel within his own lifetime. The technology was moving fast, but socially, mankind was wallowing. Petty wars and political squabbles were holding his species back from greatness. He felt that it was his duty to put that right.
The master plan for world takeover was no longer stored in a CAD program, because it had became clear early on that writing things down was pointless. Things changed too quickly. So the whole plan was in Walter’s head.
He didn’t have anyone he could talk to about this responsibility he had given himself. He had toyed with the idea of finding some kind of confidante or protégé, had even groomed Quin Taber for that position, but Quin was just another short term thinker. That was the trouble with most of the human race: they could not think past their basic needs. They needed Walter like a dog needed a master. And while you could derive a certain measure of comfort from your pets, they didn’t understand you, and could not ease your burden by much.
Walter occasionally caught himself wishing he was crazy so that he could unload some of this weight on a psychiatrist. Or that he was religious and could see a priest about it. He had considered making a tethered artificial intelligence that was designed to be his confidante, but he had a fear, perhaps an irrational one, that he would become dependent on the machine for emotional support. And besides, tethering an AI to a human was illegal by Walter’s own order, and how would that look if the truth should ever be known?
Walter’s apartment switched itself on as soon as he walked in. The holovision was showing some sort of a rally. The Nationalists were marching on Washington to protest the Unification. He watched them for a few minutes with the sound off. He read the placards they were carrying. ONE WORLD, MANY PEOPLES. A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS IS A WORLD WITHOUT CHOICES. CELEBRATE DIVERSITY. He tried to read their faces, tried to fathom what the hell was wrong with these people. Just what didn’t they understand? He told the holovision to bump the sound.
“Assembled here today are three hundred thousand Nationalist protesters, reacting to the recent news of a merger between Europe and America. With Russia and Japan actively discussing relaxing trade barriers, it seems only a matter of time before the dream of Unification becomes a reality. Not since last month’s concert in Central Park by Sex Lethal have so many blatantly Nationalist sentiments been voiced in public. Police are trying to clear the mall, but the march leaders have vowed that every last protester will have to be jailed to silence this outcry.”
Idiots.