Bush drove back to Red Lake the following day and was welcomed by Proudfoot. They drank beer and recounted the previous day’s events. Sam was surprised to see Professor Mary Smith there but delighted in her telling how she had been able to hack the drone controls. She used them to fire warning shots over the soldier’s heads and then landed them in the parking lot of the casino’s hotel. The government’s mission had turned to chaos. In the end, nobody had been seriously hurt. Proudfoot smiled and raised his glass: “to Mary the queen of the skies and Sam the teller of lies” and they chuckled as they took a drink. Proudfoot’s face then became serious. “We sincerely thank you for your help. You may not know this, but Red Lake has historically been a ‘closed’ reservation. That means we have not let outsiders live here. The world outside is descending into chaos. It is not a peaceful place for the time being. I want to take this opportunity to invite you, Mary and Sam, to move into the Sovereign Community of Red Lake and live in peace with us here”. Sam and Mary said nothing but raised their glasses once more in gratitude.
THOUGHTWIRE
BY
MARK JOHNSON
[Begin Cerebral/Audio Transmission]
12/17/2048 23:18:06
Alright, things have been getting pretty strange around here, so I thought I’d keep this thought journal. I've never used this device before. It's supposed to record my thoughts along with audio of whatever's going on around me. All I do is wear a tiny electrode behind my ear. It knows what to record based on my brain waves, my location, context, and a bunch of other factors. My partner Blake calls it a ‘Thoughtwire’ because he designed it for espionage—thought theft. I don't know what algorithms he used to decide what, exactly, to record, but I know he used it to [indecipherable], [unknown language]. Is that an autocensor? F***. I'll have to do something about that.
[End Transmission]
12/17/2048 23:18:32
###
[Resume Transmission]
12/18/2048 09:02:12
Alright, so Blake's in the lab now. He's staring gleefully through a tiny window at his ‘project,’ mumbling something to himself like he often does.
"Ooooh, she’s smokin’ now."
You can probably barely hear him over that low, earth-shaking rumble. He's drawing attention to himself, which means it's probably something stupefyingly frivolous.
“YEEHAW! Now thar’s a faar!”
If I don’t offer to help, he usually won’t ask. Ignorance is more than bliss here. It is necessity.
Officially, I’m the “Quality Control Technician,” which means I write up test cases, oversee testing, and validate scientific results. I’m paid, officially, to tell the Feds that Blake’s stuff is legit. On the record, we research experimental zero-gravity tethers or something for the military. I forget. It doesn’t matter. What the government pays me for is high-tech busy work—mountains of data analyzed and reported. I'm qualified for the position and have all the certifications, but I don’t actually do any of it. I don’t have to. Blake had it automated long ago. My first day he just handed me the passwords and said “there, welcome to the DRDO, partner,” and gave me an unnecessarily sturdy slap on the back. He had basically consolidated the work I was hired to do into several hundred lines of code. I walked to my desk, checked it over, and verified it was everything required to fulfill my responsibilities, just translated to algorithms, scripts, routines, all made possible by Blake’s horrifyingly systematic approach to everything. It made me sick to look at—my professional life deduced like that. I suddenly recognized the years earning my PhD for what it was: a colossal waste of time. And I was just getting started.
What the lab really needed was compliance reporting, so I found myself scrambling to update code whenever Congress passed legislation. Everything we do is highly regulated, of course. In the real world they would call me a “Compliance Officer,” but that title doesn’t sit well here for political reasons—makes the regulations seem costly and wasteful. Nonetheless, we must be prepared to pass any audit with flying colors. So, I slum through endless pages of standards, changing a line of code here or there where necessary. My fictional (but more official) "Quality Control" work hours are reported using some script Blake cooked up.
Hear that? The volume has intensified. It’s like a growl now—a clean, jet-like hum. That hyena-like laughter is Blake.
Ug. It’s starting to sound really dangerous. It probably is.
One time I ‘failed to ignore’ one of his projects. It was a ridiculous mining operation. He broke ground a few feet from my workstation. "Sorry about the noise, Norris," he shouted over the roar of machinery, "the sweet stuff is about 400 meters straight down from this spot! Don’t want to miss it!" With a natural gas deposit beneath our lab, he naturally decided he must drill for it. Before I knew it, I was operating a cryogenic separation unit, extracting helium so Blake could fill party balloons and talk like a chipmunk. He always had a gift for keeping taxpayer money hard at work. I fell weeks behind with the regulation work and almost lost my job. This time he’s got some sort of ‘reactor’ project going. It’s unnerving.
“RRRRRRRRRR.”
“Ah, you hear that mate? Delightful music, innit.”
He puts on that awful English accent when he tries to understate things. Super annoying. I think he must be high because now he's raising his arms over his head and yelling “YES!” while punching the sky and dancing around in some sort of Rocky Balboa victory bounce.
I can see through the porthole that his current project is especially elaborate. He seems to have really amused himself this time.
We are heavily subsidized here. Blake gets his hands on all sorts of toys. The DRDO is the federal government’s Defense Research and Development Organization, and we are a tiny, classified unit somewhere in the depths of that organization. It’s just the two of us here. We call our lab "The Bunker." It’s basically an old, underground, hangar-sized fallout shelter in the middle of nowheresville Kansas. Anyway, where was I going...oh yeah, toys. No equipment request, no matter how extravagant, has ever been denied. I know. I submit them. Drills, lasers, CNCs, rocket fuel, human organs, rats, decompression chambers, you name it. Once I asked him how he gets approved for all this garbage. Apparently he stumbled upon some Senator’s hard drive loaded with videos of animal relations at some state junket. I don't know the whole story, but I know Blake pretty much has carte blanche with Congress, and the American people. God Bless America.
He’s rummaging through his toy box now.
“Yipyipyipyip.”
Yep. He's definitely on some sort of drug now. I think he just window paned some acid.
It might sound unethical, what I am doing here. It’s true. I am an accomplice to a massive, massive fraud. But I’m a prisoner in a way, too. I can’t resign—Blake would need to do a memory reset procedure and I'm uncomfortable with that. So, I try to make the most of it. I even have one or two 'off-the-book' hobbies of my own. Anyone would in this crazy playground. But, essentially, and primarily, I always complete my 'work,' and try to contribute to Blake’s unmitigated malfeasance as little as possible.
Actually, I know that none of Blake's activities have anything to do with tethers. In fact, the billions invested in our lab have produced exactly zero returns for the US government. I still don't know exactly how he gets away with it.
“RRRRrrrrr r r r r”
The sound seems to be dying down now.
“Norris!” He’s always called me that. I have no idea why.
“Yes Chief.” He prefers I call him Chief.
“Let’s talk.”
This is unexpected. He usually isolates me from projects that are obviously illegal.
He ushers us to our “conference room,” a man-made cave with dim red lighting. It’s a cozy little nook with a small table and bench seats. You start to ignore the strange Aztec-like faces carved into the stone after a while.
Blake pulls out a bottle and pours two decent-sized slugs of somet
hing brown.
“Norris, have you ever been in love?”
Very strange. He hands me the drink.
“Yes.”
We both take a long sip. It goes down hot. Moonshine. A still was one of Blake’s initial additions to the lab. He reclines against the stone wall with both legs resting on the bench, then takes another sip. He looks like he wants to actually have a conversation.
“Was she pretty?”
“Yes. She was.”
“Mine too.” He snaps back. “Very pretty.”
We’ve fraternized before a few times, but he seems exceedingly vacant, or blitzed, or something. He continues...
“Yes, mine was too,” he repeats. “I was 20, so was she. We met in an interracial room. Her name was Kiki. I marveled at those beautiful black bazongas. Eyes like diamonds. She was stripping down for a bunch of degenerates, so I sprung for a private room, and thus it began...”
Long silence...
“So...she was a, um...professional, then?”
He seems to require clarification.
“A whore?” I prefer to be straightforward with him.
His gaze pierces with contempt, but quickly mellows.
He's never looked at me that way.
“Yes. I suppose she was, in a sense. But then, aren't we all.”
This is getting stranger. We both take another drink. I wonder what he’s getting at.
“We conceived a child.”
“I didn’t know you were a father.”
“I'm not. Listen. After we fell in love, I brought her away for a month in paradise. The beaches of Tobago. Those are memories. The sunsets, the mojitos, the way I’d awaken to her adorable nuzzle against my shoulder, her soft hand ascending my thigh, both basking in each other with the morning sun gleaming through the airy drapes. God, she could give a handjob. I proposed to her like that. She accepted, and we were married in an Erisian temple in Scarborough.”
“That sounds beautiful.”
“You really had to be there, of course. We flew back to the States and moved into an apartment. I had just started stealing from the government. Small tax scams. The little money worked out well.”
“Romantic.”
“It was.”
“What happened?”
“I was attracted to her, in part, because of her passion. It was significant. She was a radical feminist pacifist anarcho-capitalist and soon after we got back to the States she joined a cult. It was called “Life! Not Government!” and founded when the Catholics, who had almost taken control of Congress, decided to acquiesce to a massive defense/entitlement spending bill in exchange for their pet legislation that permanently outlawed all contraception and abortion procedures. Part of the defense spending bill included a provision that authorized the military to hunt down and destroy underground abortion clinics and incarcerate their clients and doctors, not to mention the underground purveyors of prophylactics.”
I had read about that years ago. Back then most people could still afford ‘legal’ rubbers. Hell, they sold them in drug stores.
"Anyway, Kiki participated in a march on Washington with several hundred-thousand women’s rights activists. She was pregnant at the time, first trimester, and was arrested for being belligerent, a suspected terrorist. She had been chanting, which was still tolerated somewhat. While bound by handcuffs on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she managed to produce a coat hanger, fully equipped with a crucifix handle, and quietly ‘evicted’ our child from her womb in a demonstration of protest against the new authoritarian state measures. It never made the news, of course, but I saw the shaky video taken from someone’s phone. Blood all over the place. Her last words were “birthing a slave to the state is a crime worse than murder!” She was dragged to jail where she fasted in silence, then died of her wounds.”
“I don’t know what to say. That’s...incredibly sad.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Did that really happen?”
“No. Not really. She found a surviving underground abortion clinic and then left me to audition for Kodo.”
“Kodo?”
“It’s a traveling taiko drum troupe. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Oh.”
“I still love her, Norris. She is the love of my life. ”
“I’m sorry.” Christ this is getting uncomfortable.
“Anywhoo, I want to let you know what all the racket’s been about.”
“Um. Okay.”
He finishes his drink and pours another, fills my glass, then sits up straight.
“Norris, today I finished the reactor. I’m calling her Stardust. She is my new mistress.”
“Excuse me?”
“I built a sun. A little one. It’s a fusion reactor.”
He invites me across the lab to review the readings.
“Go ahead. Take her for a romp.”
Not sure what Kiki had to do with this. Anyway, I know he’d been exploring fusion. I have secretly been monitoring his progress. Didn’t know he was nearly this far along.
The reactor starts up easily. I elevate the output control to less than one trillionth full power. The level rises to about 621 GWh, about enough to power Manhattan.
[paraphrase]
[Subject standing over control panel discussing reactor.] Confinement method restrains hydrogen plasma using [classified], a synthetic [classified][classified]. In hell not 1 snowball’s chance the [classified] will interrupt the [classified]. Coil operating temperature maintained by molten salt coolant, liquid helium, and [classified]. Coils manufactured using the [classified] method. [yada yada][classified] reciprocal [classified] effect.[yada yada][security assessment triggered][content omitted].
[/paraphrase]
Hm. Must have missed the paraphrase code in my autocensor fix.
[End Transmission]
12/18/2048 11:31:43
###
[Resume Transmission]
12/18/2048 19:37:57
Damnit. I forgot to turn this thing back on after fixing the paraphraser. I spent all afternoon with Blake learning how he did it...how decades of work had been devoted to it...how he had chosen The Bunker for his workplace specifically because it happened to reside directly over a natural helium deposit, which he needed to mine in order to conduct his fusion research. He explained how he hacked into the computers of every government official in Washington searching for behavior heinous enough to exploit. Affairs, fraud, book-cooking, even pagan animal sacrifices and ceremonial orgies were not sufficient. He needed more...something genuinely awful. Intuition prodded him to look even closer, so he developed the Thoughtwire and had it planted on every member of Congress. That was how he unearthed the animal relations...pig fucking, actually. Turns out the whole ordeal is a type of hazing ritual endured by every male U.S. Congressman, apparently, to 'remind them who they work for.' The entire body gathers at a remote Masonic temple, they change into animal costumes, then hike several miles into a dense forest. Blake’s micro-surveillance exposed all. Hours of unimaginably graphic human-animal intercourse. The horrified freshman observed veterans partake of the rituals with exuberance, before reluctantly participating themselves. No one left until every last member had engaged in the activity. This. This was his key. His genie in a bottle.
For some reason, theft, warrantless searches, indefinite detainment, and murder are among the unsavory but tolerable procedures expected of government officials. But pig fucking...people really have a problem with that.
In any case, the results speak for themselves. After double-checking my test results, I confirmed the reactor is not one of his hoaxes. It's real. Was it worth robbing a continent of billions? Free energy for all? I guess it depends on what you make of it.
Anyway, we’ve just finished dinner and the implications of this technology are beginning to sink in.
“You know what this means, Chief? The end of pollution. It means farming on Antarctica and desalination of water and food for starving children. R
eally, this means nothing less than the next epoch for human civilization.”
Blake seems dismissive and looks at me inquisitively.
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Stardust is mine, Norris. I built her. I built her despite all odds...despite 12.4 percent of my property confiscated, my entire youth, by the government at behest of the mythical 'Social Security Act,' a relic of statist aggression passed long before any of us were born."
"Oh, come on."
"I built her despite being imprisoned and blacklisted for nonviolent, victimless crimes...despite years of bending over to to the imperialist global cabal of plunder and death. Yes, I will use her how I please.”
“Um Chief, the government funded your work.”
"Ha! 'Funded!' You think the IRS needs consent? There is no 'funding' involved. And let's not forget the hard-won victory of controlling congress by blackmailing politicians who happened to be caught fucking pigs.”
“Ah, is that what it is? You just don’t want to give fusion to a bunch of pig fuckers?”
“I have no qualm with that. But, they will not be getting Stardust. I would never subject her to that...to them”
"If a voluntary society is what you've always wanted, why didn't you just have Congress lower taxes? Abolish the IRS? Eliminate the welfare state?"
"I am an entrepreneur, not some busy body."
“So, start a private company. That's still legal, right? You'd make a bajillion dollars.”
“They’ll take half of it.”
“So you’ll make half a bajillion dollars.”
“I’m not giving those pig fuckers half a bajillion!”
“So it is the pig fucking!”
Anarchy Rising: The Clarion Call, Vol 1 (Volume 1) Page 4
