by Erik Tabain
That was the first part of her work. Casually, she went to the restroom of the community hub, scanned the hair strands and sent the genetic code through to Weller, via her personal private network. Although she was invisible to genetic capture and light recording, she couldn’t talk and sent her message to Weller through text recognition, for fear of being overheard by someone else, or scanned through other personal private networks.
Weller’s team was fast and dedicated and they matched up Katcher’s DNA from the hair strands to the decoder, activated the app, and then relayed the data through to Katcher’s cell device in the next room. Their revolutionary leader was now in their system, and they could now exclude him from lightcapture and genetic recording. All they had to do now was convince him to come back to the Movement, that the Movement was coming, and that they now had the technology to support his return.
When Banda returned to the room, Katcher was alone and started packing up his small datacard system and digitally disconnected it from the lightboard. While the ninety-minute presentation wasn’t overly onerous, today he was tired, he hadn’t had lunch and he wanted to get away in a hurry. When he saw Banda appear in the corner of his eye, he was disgruntled—not too much, in case she wanted to mark him down for poor customer relationship service—but enough to let her know he was on the move.
“Jonathan? I’m DynaMiteMax.”
“Oh, hi—I noticed you in the presentation, but DynaMiteMax came up as a ‘no-show’. That’s odd.”
“Might be a glitch in the system, it does sometimes happen. I just wanted to chat about—”
“—look, I’m actually in a hurry—and hungry, so maybe next time?”
“Well, it’s three-fifty now—what about a quick bite? A few nice places around the corner—Gloria Jean’s?”
Katcher sometimes had the hardline groupies come to his lectures; the ones that had read all of his essays; the ones that had his posters on their wall, next to the silkscreened posters of Che Guavara, even though they had no idea of his role as a revolutionary in the twentieth century; the ones who were part of sub-culture ‘Jonathan Katcher’ reading groups, able to recite all of his works—even his new material—word for word. But they were usually much younger, and Katcher estimated ‘DynaMiteMax’ was mid-to-late thirties, so perhaps there was something else going on.
Katcher agreed to a visit to Gloria Jean’s, but only because he was hungry—and could probably do with a different type of company.
“What’s your real name then, DynaMiteMax?”
“I’ll tell you when we get to Gloria’s.”
Gloria Jean’s was only a five-minute walk from the community hub, in the middle of a bustling food area and shopping precinct. Katcher wanted a spot closer to where other people were seated—he didn’t wanted this to be seen as a romantic interlude—but Banda wanted seats in a quiet zone, away from other people.
They summoned for a burger and fries for Katcher, and a synth latte each—and Banda indicated she would have a sweet cake treat afterwards. Banda had already activated Katcher’s decoder app when they were at the community hub—whatever either of them did or said wouldn’t be collated by the world memory bank—but Banda didn’t want to arouse any suspicion by being overheard by some alert Technocrat or, even worse, a do-gooder human who couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong.
“So, what’s your real name then?” asked Katcher.
“Greta. Greta Banda. I’ve been reading your work and really fascinated with it.”
Katcher had heard all of this small talk before. ‘Love your work…’; ‘…been reading your stuff for a long time…’, ‘…really fascinated with it…’, but Banda was striking up the friendship and relationship first, building up the trust. Katcher had the feeling that this meeting was something different—listening to Banda talk about the ideas from his presentations sounded like she was in a lot deeper than she was letting on.
But Katcher was on guard—after all, he knew Biocrime was in the practice of framing people like him through entrapment—it had security officers like Banda, claiming they’d developed some type of device that bypassed the continuum and the world memory bank. Entrapment was one of their key strategies for sending high-profile people off to the universal penal zone, under the banner of ‘crimes against the citizenry’, and he had to be careful.
“Why DynaMiteMax?” asked Katcher, seemingly disinterested in talking about his work.
“Just a Lifebook alias. Nothing special, nothing significant. I wanted to change it from the number I was given at birth, just like everyone else does, and DynaMiteMax just seemed like the right name at the time.”
“When was that?”
“When I was eight—it’s okay. The privacy settings aren’t that high, so people can easily dig a little bit deeper and find out who I really am.”
‘DynaMiteMax’ thought Katcher. He was a serious man, demur and liked to go straight to the point—his Lifebook profile was ‘Jonathan.Katcher.3290’. Bland, straightforward, and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. He’d had other groupies in the past—assuming Banda was a groupie—with far more ludicrous names: PixelPunkPink, Juice_Lucy_Dime, Snapper_Dampering. So DynaMiteMax was tolerable.
They exchanged mental notes about the future of the capital class, the labor class and universal income, and what it meant for the future direction of the citizenry. Katcher was engaged: ‘She knows her material’, he thought. They continued for another thirty-minutes or so, exchanged pleasantries and automatically picked up their respective tabs.
“See you next week…”
“Sure. Next week’s talk is an old one—The Decline of Organised Governments: 2200. Should be a good one.”
“OK, I’ll see you then.”
After he departed from her vision, Banda deactivated Katcher’s decoder app and, without his knowledge, he merged through the continuum seamlessly back into the realm of Biocrime. Nothing from their meeting was recorded by the world memory bank, as though the meeting had never occurred.
Back in his apartment, Katcher lazed on his couch and motioned his lightscreen to provide visual entertainment on his YouTube account. He scanned through the list of ‘watched’ visual programs, but saw nothing of note. He preferred ‘old’ entertainment, rather than ‘new’, but he was spoiled for choice. The system comprised billions of different programs and projects—traditional movies, computer-generated and crafted blockbusters, citizen-uploaded programs and snippets of the mundane—real-life activities from the household, or action material where citizens superimposed themselves in famous movies or scenes from history—a fabricated document looking like they were actually there.
Katcher liked to go back through history to see what people thought about the future, and the advanced life they perceived for themselves in a hundred or a thousand years away. Humanity always considered itself to be at the apex of civilization at any given time, but there was always the anticipation the future would be far more sophisticated, and far more advanced. And far better. While there had been many technological advances over millennia, Katcher wondered if human thinking had changed in the years since the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle in the third-century BCE.
He’d always felt all humans today existed from the influence of others throughout history—the good and the bad—the product of millions of years of time and evolution, and the driving force for humanity had been the belief in the virtues of optimism, the idea that the future would always be better.
He continued to scan through the list of visual programs, until he came across one that piqued his interest—The Time Tunnel. He had watched some of these episodes before—an old-fashioned American television series produced in the 1960s, where a team of scientists travelled back and forth in time and found themselves in impossible situations, only to be rescued by their home base at the last possible moment.
He summoned the lightscreen to play the episode ‘One Way to the Moon’. The opening credits appeared on his lights
creen and showed a glimpse into the future—flying saucers, hovercrafts, technological sophistication—all of which Katcher assumed were the clichés of what the future world would look like—and the final graphic in the opening scene faded up on the screen announcing the year of this future world—‘1978’. He scanned through the production credits and noted the program was produced in 1966, only twelve years before. For Katcher, it was a classic case of ‘future optimism’, where the producers of this episode imagined life would be so advanced in a decade or so, humans would be transported in flying saucers and quickly travelling to the moon and planet Mars.
They had no fucking idea, Katcher thought to himself. The future was nothing like the one anticipated by his predecessors. There were no flights to planet Mars, no flying saucers, no telekinesis where unusual boxes could teleport people over long distances. But it was the optimism that provided the future direction for humanity: the ridiculous ideas of Leonardo da Vinci, the imaginations of Jules Verne, the future according to H.G. Wells, or even the predictions of Nostradamus. All ambitious ideas that provided a roadmap for future technologies. The modern world of 3034 was highly advanced, especially in surveillance and small-scale gadgets, but the old ideas of the future were positively retro and humorous to Katcher. The world turned out differently.
The heroes of The Time Tunnel were stuck on the moon, a gunfight between the four scientists ensued, and they were quickly running out of oxygen. The images from the lightscreen played in the background as Katcher faded in and out of the program, thinking about his day, his lecture and what he needed to prepare for his next performance. And he was also thinking about Greta Banda—he had many ‘fans’ come up to him after his lectures, but there was something different about her.
‘One Way to the Moon’ ended with the heroes rescued by the time machine before they ran out of oxygen and the villains hijacking the spacecraft, continuing on their way to planet Mars. Katcher wondered if they would ever make it.
Book 2: Humans Unchained
“Humans are born free yet everywhere they are in chains.”
—Jean–Jacques Rousseau
Thirteen
The borderless world
“L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers” is the opening line of The Social Contract, written in 1762 by a French philosopher, Jean–Jacques Rousseau, a treatise on the best way for communities to organize themselves politically, in the face of a more sophisticated commercial world. It was a collection of words that guided Jonathan Katcher’s thinking throughout his life and directed his revolutionary actions. He was agitated by Rousseau’s commentary that people everywhere were inherently born with freedom, yet everywhere they were shackled by oppression, and a world directed by inequity.
Katcher modeled himself on two great philosophers from the French republic—Rousseau’s philosophies that gave rise to the Enlightenment throughout the Europe Zone and the French Revolution of 1789—and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the original anarchist who lived in the nineteenth century, with the one lasting notion that all ownership of property should be regarded as theft from the working classes by capitalists. These ideas were over twelve-hundred years old, but Katcher found they were more relevant than ever.
For Katcher, the direction of the world was caught between this bind of freedom and justice, where he felt too much freedom resulted in too many inequities and injustices, a world controlled by Technocrats and large corporations such as Biocrime.
For many centuries, it was the neoliberalist dream to put an end to state and national borders and allow for the free global movement of capital through globalization of trade and commodities. But part of this dream of wanting unbridled capital flow, was the conundrum of wanting to restrict the movement of peoples, to the point where during the early parts of the twenty-first century, citizens moving past different borders without identification documents, such as passports and visas and, in most cases, escaping from violent wars or economic hardship, were incarcerated in island jails as deterrents to others.
This was in contrast with the ideals of international socialism, which suggested citizens should be free to geographically move to wherever they wanted to, but confined to localized and restricted areas of finance and capital. The battle between laissez-faire and centrally-controlled communitarian economics was a battle waged over many centuries, and resulted in four main waves of globalization.
The first period was between 1492 and 1800, where the world started to move away from serfdom and subsistence and towards industrialization, through the globalization of countries and economies. This period was initiated by the physical exploration to different parts of the globe and the realization the world wasn’t flat after all. While this was motivated by imperialist grandstanding and the quest for competitive world domination by England, France, Holland and the Iberian Zone, the result was a greater level of trade between the Europe Zone and the Orient.
The second period was between 1800 and 2000, where growing trade and interaction between these countries gave rise to the globalization of companies, and the rise of corporations in England and the North America Zone. This period was marked by a combination of industrialization, religion, nationalism, and a Europe Zone that had sprouted from the Century of Lights during the 1700s, and the development of primitive machinery, such as the steam engine, and developments such as the manufacture of steel through the Bessemer process of blowing oxygen through molten pig iron to burn off the impurities, resulting in solid high quality steel.
Although this second wave of globalization was also coupled with the corporatization of war and the development of the arms industry, especially during the twentieth century, it was a period of high innovation and investment in mechanization and computerized technology. Virtually every sector of the economy was revolutionized during this period, with improvements in farming and food production, health, education, shipping, building and personalized travel such as automobiles and motorbikes.
This period then gave rise to the globalization of the individual from 2000 to 2300 and the extension of the philosophy that capital was created, not just through human labor, but through human thought and intellect and, it followed from this thinking that individuals should have the same level of freedom as capital movement.
This period became known as the era of supraliberalism.
More frequent people movements, especially as a result of wars and politically-motivated famine in the Africa and Middle East Zones during the early parts of the twenty-first century, gave rise to limited fascism in the Europe Zone and hostile receptions to people coming from other zones, and after a fifty-year period of violent reactions to individual people movements, as sociologists had predicted, people movement became more acceptable throughout the world, once the links between free global citizen movement and economic benefit became more obvious.
Many intractable conflicts in the Middle East and Africa zones were resolved in the mid-twenty-second century. The republic of China became the international powerhouse in the early-to-mid 2000s, using its financial power to oust the republic of United States as the key influencer in many political pressure points and hot-zones throughout the world.
Chinese diplomacy resolved the erstwhile Palestine–Israel conflict through increased economic support and development for both regions and through a one-hundred-year moratorium, with an expectation that through further economic development, and technological and political changes over the long term, the conflict would be resolved permanently—which proved to be correct. Known as ‘Road to Renewal Plans’, or fuxing zhi lu, these models were appropriated and applied to other problems zones around the world—the schism between north and south on the Korean Peninsular and the demilitarized zone; Georgia–Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh in the Russia Zone; Kashmir in the Northern Asia Zone; Cyprus; Rwanda–Burundi; Serbia–Croatia–Bosnia.
The rise of China occurred for two reasons: firstly, the United States gradually vacated its involvement in internationa
l conflicts and zones, and Chinese diplomacy advanced the notion that the political and financial relationship between the United States and Israel had poisoned the entire Middle East region, and removing Israel from the political equation could produce a reverse domino effect.
Secondly, China matched its population size with its economic and military might, as it had during the time of subsistence economies before the first phase of globalization in the fifteenth century. Its economic might was based on fast capital movements, and a strong belief in removing the barriers to people movement, and this thinking gave rise to the ideas of supraliberalism in the mid-twenty-first century.
For the supraliberalist, capital flow had to be merged with human flow, and this provided the answers to the questions posed by neoliberalists and international socialists and merged the dichotomy that existed between these two philosophies. There was an economic school of thought that suggested the combined opening up of human and capital flow would create short-term violence between different nations as they moved to different locations around the world, but the removal of national borders would increase international domestic product, create further economic opportunities, and lift millions out of poverty.
The theories combined to pronounce that restricting human flow and traffic was the antithesis of democratic and free economies and, over time, because of the domination of international supraliberalist ideals and technological change, borders were opened up and the world moved towards a universal currency, free of tariffs and subsidies, and free movement of all citizens anywhere in the world.
