Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  ‘Ah Boris,’ Sonja sighed, ‘violent compared with who? Other humans? Do you think violence is because of a culture or religion? There’re none more violence than the Atominii. And who cares what the Atominii say? They also believe we, so called precariats are not post-human enough to have the right to access fresh water.’ And Sonja gently eased the baby back inside his pod. ‘Anyone unable to survive in the Atominii’s luxurious vanity and fame are reduced to being human at best, which is bad enough. As though it’s some sort of sin or punishment. They say what they want and why should we care? We owe the Titans nothing and we’re doing fine here without them.’

  ‘Well I propose we at least let our community know,’ said Boris. ‘I mean, finding a baby is a great thing. But finding an Olympian puts a different spin on it. People might feel threatened.’

  ‘And why should it put a different spin on it?’ she challenged further. ‘Would Cerise Timbers abandon me for having Japanese and Anglican blood ties? Would they abandon Dak for being black? Would they abandon you for being an ex-Atominii plutocrat?’ Sonja then smiled warmly. ‘Taking in an Olympian is a middle finger to the Atominii and its laws and to hell with them I say. I’m with Dak. There’s only one race on this planet. Whether it’s wired with neurophases or nanome upgrades or not. Call them what you want. In the end we’re all people.’

  ‘But you’re giving them a reason to destroy us,’ Boris pressed further. ‘Sonja…this is a big issue. It affects everyone regardless of what we believe to be right as a whole. Ordinarily I’d say of course keep the kid, but this is not an ordinary situation. We have to inform our local federation and let people know.’

  ‘We will,’ she prudently assured, ‘right now. And I’ll remind people that we are one race. The Atominii have us on their damn hit list anyway. Who is the coordinator this season, is it Enaya?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dak nodded. ‘Enaya Chahuán.’

  ‘Let’s talk with Enaya about informing East B’ One locals and register an appeal to keep the Olympian baby. We’ve got a good argument Dak. We don’t agree with the Atominii. They’re willing to condemn us for our humanity, let’s remind them how they lost their own.’

  ‘What if it comes to abandoning the child?’ Dak confidently opined, leaning closer to her. ‘What if people don’t want to risk that?’

  ‘We might say no Sonja.’ Boris added.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ Sonja asked, regarding Boris with a mild disappointment. ‘Would you make a vote on abandoning this baby?’

  Boris looked at the baby, a melancholy indecisiveness causing his neck to stiffen and he quickly shook his head.

  ‘Course not.’

  Sonja frowned, for the first time realising he was a bad liar and she said it too.

  ‘Alright so maybe I’m a little nervous. But you’re right about one thing. We’ve never bowed to the Atominii yet,’ Boris dithered. ‘Why should we start now?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Dak simpered. ‘I hope people will go for this. Olympian or not…this is a baby. Nobody here would throw him to the wolves.’

  ‘It’s just we err…I’ve heard some horror stories about these things and…’ Boris stared at the baby’s pod, ‘…I’ve never seen an Olympian Genetic before.’

  -5-

  ‘Fifteen years?’ Enaya Chahuán sighed, sitting back into her chair with dismay.

  ‘That’s our estimation, yes,’ said Daryl Sanders, a tall and mutually experienced delegate in sociocratic matters. His black vest was damp from the green-house humidity of the dome, his torn jeans soaked at the hems. He’d just informed the local federal coordinator about how much longer the city’s mining program is expected to last, and the news wasn’t pleasant. Like Enaya he too had served as one of the city’s civil coordinators, positioned in several duties of administration and organisation. He was an older man, very thin with white hair he liked to shave into a military crop at the sides and fix into waxy spikes. Enaya was aware of his militant past, something he’d left behind in the name of peace many years ago. Daryl had always been a peace keeper, always willing to fight for the good. Often, however, he’d fought on misinformation and been led astray. It was something that had divorced him from combat into diplomacy.

  ‘The miners,’ Daryl loquaciously went on ‘are particularly concerned about the graphite yield the robots have been digging up. Y’know, the Atominii clients are demanding more from the digs at a rate that reduces our product supply, and the crypto they’re dealing are usually from volatile networks that decrease in value later. Assholes are good at scams.’

  Enaya knew that the crypto-coin yield was savings for a rainy day. If the Atominii were able to pull the city apart somehow, they’d have some fiscal back-up to get the population to other safer societies in the hardlands. But this news was disturbing and meant that they were giving away their product to the Atominii with no assurances for protection anymore.

  ‘So our savings will be useless?’ she asked.

  ‘Basically, yes. If the Atominii destroy us then all that crypto-coin they’ve invested in us will be worthless. But hey, at least it shows this was a sincere investment. They don’t want us ripping each other apart over this. They must be aware of our values, right?’

  ‘So what,’ Enaya smiled. ‘We don’t rely on it. We don’t need it. We have other guarantees to safeguard our survival.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Daryl continued. ‘We think the Atominii states are demanding more of our mining yield not because they need it, but to reduce our usefulness to them so they can send in their extermination forces.’ He hesitated to ask. ‘Do you think they know how much we’re actually sitting on?’

  Enaya didn’t answer. The city was busy caring for itself as much as it was its supplies. The security agencies worked very closely with the city’s military, she was sure no spy drones had made it into the area. Sure, but not certain.

  ‘Has this information circulated?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘The miners publicised their reports earlier today.’

  ‘Good,’ she sighed, ‘we should keep people updated about this situation. That product is the only thing keeping the Atominii off our backs. When the Atominii believe it’s gone there’s nothing to stop them from coming down heavy on us. We need to address this in the week’s communal assembly. The last thing we want is a war, even if we can leverage help from Talon’s Bay’s military.’

  ‘We’ll blow up the mines before those bastard Titans get hold of it,’ Daryl promised.

  Enaya stood from her seat and sauntered across the stone floors of the building to a panorama of paper thin computer screens stood supported on tripods or parts of the structure’s walls, all displaying protocols and glowing modules for each administrative decision made by the city’s consensus.

  The Federal building was a tall structure, like a giant white stone parabola designed to be overgrown with verdures, each floor modelled on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Like most of Cerise Timbers coordination buildings, East B’ One’s local Federation had no glass windows and much of it was hollow with large openings and meeting spaces suitable for assemblies of up to fifty or sixty people. Verandas ledged out on the external sides and bridges and walkways networked throughout, exhibiting multiple levels of marble floors with balustrades from which to view the surrounding city or to water patches of plants they had grown there. During winter periods, this would all close up to insulate warmth. From this building anybody could discuss and broadcast real-time engagement into conversations to have their say, pitch ideas and provide research results for public review. Assemblies were conducted both in live audience and digitally and the building was open to public use for whichever local organisation or administration or individuals who needed it. Any local decisions were discussed democratically, allowing for votes and updates to pass freely from the attendees and committee members and everything was practiced on a small scale.

  The day was a particularly hot one today, not unusual for the Siberian Summer, and
Enaya was wearing a long green dress that hemmed around her ankles, the material temporarily changed to display the coordinator’s insignia while she was in the building. She’d tied up her short black hair to keep her shoulders cool; nothing felt more irritating for her than having sticky skin and dry hair in the prickly heat. Enaya had been a precariat for many years, but during her time in the Megalo-Britai Atominii, she had been an academic. Her parents emigrated from a war torn Palestine and she had never forgotten the horror stories that came from her home. It was what drove her into politics, a visceral need for justice, for fairness, for equality. She, like many people in Cerise Timbers, saw that humanity was a victim of hierarchical and unjustified authority and bureaucracy, the process she aimed now to be a part of stopping, but first she had to free minds.

  She paced along the stone walkways out onto the veranda and Daryl followed her to the sound of running water, which pattered from the leaves and hanging vegetation, collecting in the aquaponic drainage points of the building for recirculation. Enaya looked out at the city and thought about where they were going, this young, vibrant and growing world of peace.

  The dome and surrounding villages were regionally segregated for logistical purposes. Like East B’ One, every other local region in Cerise Timbers operated using the same federated structural philosophy. It was not autocratic communism at the driving wheel, nor was it some authoritarian or liberalist capital force, but a people’s sociocracy, coordinated, holacratically organised, directed freely and engaged. Taking federal tenure was not a full time vocation here, nor did it take much of Enaya’s day while she was in office since the duties were not time consuming and ultimately up to her. Enaya often felt the role of coordinator was a philosophical practice of facilitating the will of the people, while getting to know the various affiliated groups in her local area. She had started a personal study about their consensus operation for Q-net publications so that anybody could read the success and failures and how failures, if possible, were resolved. Like all coordinators it was her goal to resolve complex situations and arguments when conflicts occurred. Collaborative processes were sometimes slow and it was her job to get things moving faster, taking leadership when justified or expected.

  Their paradigm was based on anarchist principles, traditional libertarianism which meant absolute authority was impossible in Cerise Timbers, the population would not allow for individual authority unless it was testably justified by a strong burden of proof. Authority, however, was proportionally distributed between teams and roles such as hers, meaning decisions were made locally and not for the entire city while always accountable to the super majority.

  When she wasn’t chairing meetings and facilitating discussions in the various syndicates, Enaya was organising workshops and inviting new comers to learn about their way of life, training them and getting them to realise their full potential or involving them in educational workshops and how to use the Quantic Syn-Dex to seek out duties and city contributions when they wanted to get involved. She sometimes found new comers from the Atominii were used to authority, and took a little longer to liberate into their new roles of self-development and responsibility, so they needed more attention, however most successfully found their feet.

  Unusually for an anarchist paradigm, Cerise Timbers had a constitution. She had been told that the original idea of the city was about trust and solidarity, but for new comers the message was confusing and vague since they had not been part of the original uprising and had been spoiled in their life time by Atominii services. The constitution was based on three principles of freedom, thought and pleasure, written up to motivate people and to lay out the rules of their sociocracy clearly; to contribute to bettering Cerise Timbers for all, and to have an impact on decisions to the proportion and degree they are affected by them. These were some of the rules to ensure everything done is in the interest of the community and for enrichment of all. Education was not compulsory, nor was it a privilege, but a free, ludic and experientially based practice. People were taught about their rights, mainly, and about how their system works so new ideas could evolve. Society was informed! Crime was very low in Cerise Timbers because it was understood here that crimes often occurred when freedoms were restricted and poverty and shame was normalised, none of which happened here. Although it wasn’t perfect, there were still individuals prone to old habits. The city, however, had not yet failed in rehabilitation, each found their place and purpose. For those who did not fit well, communities worked together to exclude such individuals, who could either find a new community to join or leave the city altogether.

  Work and labour in the traditional sense was made obsolete here, in Cerise Timbers new ideas were welcomed, and problem solving was cultural and altruistic. This agile approach had made the once dirty jobs a thing of the past since jobs were not held as a single vocation, and descriptions could be redefined loosely by the syndicates, depending on who was working with who and to what end. This allowed for new skills and individual development to be deployed. Duties appearing on the Syn-Dex database were algorithmically tailored according to the skill set of an individual. Each had their role in developing the place, including engineers and mechanics, which quickly put an end to many unpleasant tasks for all. Many coming from the hardlands came to learn that work was invested in helping others here, not a value in-itself and for-itself, but an exercise in cooperation with others and learning. Their ideology was all about enjoyment, play, a ludic society. This, she thought, was the true incentive, for each to leave the world a better place than where they found it.

  There were no police forces since people by and large were not immediately recognised as untrustworthy and irresponsible unless given power to be so. And since nobody was prohibited to their fruits no theft was necessary. There was only a trained group of defence forces referred to loosely as the militia. Their military, she knew, was based on a tribal and clan type logic and specified limited hierarchy structures led by Mercenaries. Each section of the city had clan names based on totems such as Otters, Eagles and Bruin. She was told by the Mercenaries it would sway groups from vying for power. Since affiliated Eagles in one district would have something to say about badly behaving Eagle clans in another, the clan paradigm was used to maintain a social conscience. In East B’ One, the most common defence clan was the Otter.

  There were no bosses, no managers, all people were equal and recognised so in their humanity and freedom. Often they had what was called the shadow boss, a joke that was spread by one of the resident poets as an ironic homage to their once autocratic rulers.

  Enaya was usually surprised by the many dark tales about Cerise Timbres, as a world born from the pits of hell, a place spawned from ruin, murder and torture, a place of great beauty rising from pure filth and disgrace. Some stories told of a bloated swamp monster that had devoured humans for centuries until its stomach burst and spewed forth an egg that hatched and spawned the forest and the city dome itself. Enaya knew its history, she understood its legacy and although frightening those stories made sense to her. She thought back to the mines and the new trouble they now faced. A clash with the Atominii would be a disaster for them all. Although by no means a poor city, Cerise Timbers didn’t have the military might to stand up to such cybernetic power as the Atominii. For the moment, they held all the cards, the Atominii was the hegemonic power centre of the world and exo-planets.

  ‘It’s a frightening situation,’ she admitted as she thought about the new information coming out of the mines. ‘There’s little stopping the Atominii from destroying us. They’ve flattened hundreds of precariat cities like ours; the only thing keeping us alive is our deal with Moscowai.’

  Enaya looked up as a commotion started overhead and some birds flocked from their nests and showered a spray of water as they soared through the wet leaves and out of sight.

  ‘What about our new investor?’ Daryl asked. ‘We’ve got him at least.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed with an uncertain
tone, turning back. ‘What’s his name again? Agent Twain, was it?’

  ‘He goes by a pseudonym,’ said Daryl, ‘but yeah, Agent Twain. You know he invested over six million Atomons into a portion of our graphite yield, almost one quarter of it? It’s just sitting there. He’s made no demands for its extraction, made no attempts to meet with us, it’s a hell of a lot of crypto-coin to pump into stocks and not make a demand.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s hoping the resource will go up in value.’ Enaya speculated.

  Daryl stood to her right and stared into the seamless blue sky. ‘Maybe.’ He said. ‘Whoever this guy is he’d made his name known to us as Agent Twain, why do you think he gave us a name at all? He could have remained completely anonymous…’

  ‘Something to bear in mind,’ she chuckled. ‘Maybe Agent Twain is a code in case he wants to send people to collect the yield personally.’ And Daryl began to wonder. ‘What are we using that crypto-coin for, anyway? We don’t have currency in Cerise Timbers.’

  ‘No, but the Atominii do.’ She said. ‘If our enemies decide to flatten us, then we’ve at least got monetary coffer to fall back on and everyone here is a stakeholder. A portion of it has already gone to weapons for our militia. I read the majority of it will be to secure boarder passports and give city survivors a decent start-up in the hardlands should worse come to worse.’

  ‘Really?’ he said with an inflection of surprise. ‘I never read the reports.’

  ‘I’ll mail them to you,’ Enaya offered, ‘everyone should see it. Uncertainty is the way of life these days, good to have a plan, right?’