This chapter came after a prayer, some research, and a lot of hard work. I appreciate all of you who have been along for the ride this long. I welcome all of the new people who have joined us, and I hope you enjoy yourselves. I thank God for his help in this chapter, and even I was pleasantly surprised with the results. So I hope you all enjoy it, and I see you next chapter.
Pagliacci-11
Chapter 86
At North-Gate headquarters, Yolanda entered the team's canteen, and seeing one of the homeland papers on the table, she sat down with her coffee and began to read. The paper detailed the Ministerial Resurgence in the face of the phantoms of the old resistance.
She chuckled to herself as she thought, "Give it to Milly. Ever since Terry gave her life again, she's just as fiery as ever."
Yolanda reached into her breast-pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. Lighting one, she felt more significant ease. Smoking was hardly her thing, only in times of great stress or to just punctuate her morning. The latter was the occasion for her light-up this time. The morning was unfortunately cold due to rain moving in overnight.
As she smoked, she heard footsteps approaching. She turned her head to see who was coming through the side door and saw Milly herself come through.
"Amelia, how are you, little lady?" Yolanda asked after a cheery puff.
"I'm okay," the young woman replied, "considering the rain and I'm out of it, for now, I'm not bad, Doc." She took off her slicker, and seeing Yolanda reading the paper, she said, "Ah, one of the hot-cakes, huh?" pointing to the article.
"Indeed, one of your hot-cakes. I'm glad that you're back in the gig back at home. But my question is this, how are you getting news from back home? I thought the wall went up."
"The wall may have gone up," Milly turned on the tap to fill a kettle, "but the news is mandatory under the Ministry. We report from the front and the capital. Even if an op is compromised on some level, we must report." She put the kettle on the burner and lit the gas, "Oh, by the way, Terry's staying here with us. Boss vetted him, and Mr. Clay signed off on it. It looks like you'll be getting your wish after all."
Yolanda looked at the red-hed, "What mean you by this?"
"I mean that Maria will be out of your hair. Boss and Clay figured she'd seen enough of war, but so great is Terry's commitment to Boss's Pops that he wouldn't leave our mission and, from what I heard, practically begged to stay on."
Yolanda nodded, "It's not what I would have wanted or what I wished for. But it'll do, I suppose. He's a good soldier, and he's Boss's moral ballast. If we lost him, I fear the Butcher of Kalsinovo would return, and none of us what that."
"Crivens, no," Milly replied as she took a small pastry from the confectionary case nearby. She sat down across from Yolanda.
Yolanda read the paper in silence, and then seeing an article, she said, "I see Boss's overhaul of judicial protocol went through with the ministry. I'm sure Grizzly approved."
"Oh yeah," Milly replied after she'd wiped her mouth, "Grizzly was all for the judicial overhaul. It's a damned good thing too. I guarantee you many would feel safer in the jury box, and even the judge would feel safer considering the massacre that Genovese carried out before we all came here."
"I remember. A massacre on the courthouse steps. Killing all the jury and the judge who'd been ushed out the back. It was a clean hit, for damn sure."
"Yeah. Unfortunately, Boss hasn't exactly addressed the issue of capital punishment. Under her sister's older regime, she can't have prisoners standing idle, even if found guilty."
"Have you not heard, Red? Boss has already had that solution, and it's going through the lower court before ascending to the upper house for provincial deliberation and the vote."
"She'd have a hard time if old Peg-Leg Randolph has a look at it. He's as far from the rehabilitation of prisoners as you can get."
"That's not entirely true. He's for rehabilitation so long as his plantation benefits from that labor. But, a lot of people got wise and said basically, 'fuck you, old man.' Which they have every right to do. They can't in all good conscience leave rehabilitation enterprises to Randolph alone. He'd be in labor monopoly, which is strictly forbidden in the eyes of the Ministry and North-Gate."
"So, what do they plan to do then? I mean, our own stance of criminal punishment is that death only is given to the truly monstrous of the human race. Even then, there's a vetting process before they are sent to the galleys."
The kettle's whistle began to wail, and Yolanda got up and, taking two tea-bags, poured the hot water into two cups.
"Oh, Milly, little love; we're long past Galleys. We haven't been using Galleys since after you died. North-Gate advocated and succeeded in building Arena Diavolo. From there, all condemned are sentenced to fight to the death. What used to be Galley Yard A was converted into a full-on Ludus, which was divided half into the genuine condemned, the other half into debtor's training.
Essentially, Sylvia eliminated excessive debt in that if you could survive in the pit and had a massive debt, three fights, your debt is cleared. With every kill, your weapons improved as did armor, improving your odds."
Milly was surprised, "But-but what about those people who have no fighting experience whatsoever? Wouldn't they be disadvantaged?"
Yolanda nodded, "Yes, but this option was entirely voluntary from the beginning. You choose to fight to clear your debt; you're not compelled to. But such fights, even if agreed to, were above-board as Sylvia termed it. Meaning no beasts were ever used. Rather, it was sword to sword, and that was it. If you didn't want to fight, it was between you and your debtor to settle your debts. It eliminated many elements of prisons in the long-run garish as many accused Sylvia of being.
But, the sad truth remained, Milly. The truth was that the people hate Sylvia for her 'monstrous doctrines and inhuman elements of law', but they don't complain when they rely heavily on choice meats and ice-cold beer every event. That's just the reality and one of Sylvia's more brutal truths I struggled to come to terms with. But I did, and when I did, a lot of her views slowly began to make more and more sense.
Do I accept them all? No. But, many of her stances made sense after she showed me 'microcosm examples,' as she termed them. That's another reason that I support a significant element of her rebirth initiative. I've looked at the data from our surveyors and from our public facets, and sadly the independent data didn't lie from our surveyors."
Milly nodded, "A lot changed since I left us, huh?"
"Oh, sweetie, we're only beginning. The Boss toned down quite a lot, and as we lost you all one by one, her heart became harder and harder. But it wasn't until we rooted our work here that her tone genuinely changed.
Her mission has stayed the same, but her tone has changed. That said, the most significant test is happening right now, at this very minute in Berlin and Paris. She has sent in my best work for them to review. And we're going to see what happens next."
Yolanda put out the last remnant of her cigarette in the ashtray, and Milly replied, "You, you sent them Hydra, didn't you?"
"I do my best for the people first, for our commander second, for the Ministry third. This satisfies all avenues of my focus; that is all I need. Once we have our verdict back, our recording to confirm, we move forward with The Scavenger and Field Autopsy protocols. Which, given human predisposition, I bank on within the next forty-eight hours."
Milly was surprised, "What happened, Heidi? What happened to everyone after we left you at first?"
Yolanda looked at her, "A very dark time. That's all you need to know, love. Terry went to pieces, and it impacted Boss in ways you wouldn't believe. When you died, and then Jacob died not long after, her rage grew so immense—" she shuddered, "You're better off not knowing. All that you need know is that you're back here with us, and now we have work to do to advance the ministry, as was our original objective."
Yolanda stood, and she headed over to the confectionary case and took a pistachio muffin. She sat back down, and she took a bite, smiling, and after a swallow, she said, "Give Clay credit, fantastic confections as always."
Milly watched, surprised, "I'm amazed. You've truly changed, Heidi. The girl I grew up knowing would never have been this at ease with what has—"
Yolanda's fist slammed down on the table, shocking Milly, her eyes wide. Yolanda looked at her and, pointing at the young woman, replied, "Times change. People change for good and ill. I used to think as you did, fight as you did; for the people's good and their rights to freedom, a free and united voice. I had to adapt to my situation. The ideals we shared as girls still stand, but they've been nuanced by life and exposure to people at their best and worst.
I have not died, Milly. The naïve optimist has died, the hopeless dreamer, she has died. The Realistic Dreamer was birthed from her ashes. She was nurtured by the barroom's bloodied timbers that soaked in the rosewater of my Ricky's bleeding wounds. Believe me. I know what I've come from and what I've come to conclude."
She got up, and she looked outside, thinking, "You're not even real, girl. A memory imprint from servers of the past allowed to take in bites of information. Tidbit nibbles at best. You're not even what you think you are. That's why Terry's gesture in even bringing him means nothing to me. I know what they are. What they always have been."
The clock in the nearby hall began to chime its rich Westminster, and Yolanda sighed.
She turned back, took her muffing from the table, and said, "I'll be back later, kid. I have to report to work."
Yolanda headed outside towards her car, and as she got into her car and turned the engine over, she thought, "I fought her for so long, I fought you for so long, Sylvia. Is everything you say gold? Fuck no. But I am beginning to see it. That said, if what you predicted to pass comes to pass, I won't question for a little while. I'm just tired, you know? Just tired of it all.
Yolanda headed out of the driveway and onto the side-road to branch onto the highway into the city.
With your help, I went farther than I ever would have dreamed. But I know what you want for this world. I have seen you in pain. But what you want—I'm sorry, Commander, it can never be. They won't like it. They won't accept it. Even if they did, they'd just demand more and more until you were exhausted.
You think that I don't know where you're coming from, it's not true at all. I don't want to happen to you what the record revealed happened to your father, what happened to your mother. Regardless of how you see things, how you want them to be, Terry can never be your father. He honors your father's request to look after you, that's all."
As Yolanda merged onto the highway, "Even so, the test you put before the nations will reveal what you always knew to be the case, and you're using humanity's tendencies to trap themselves. Many would call you a monster for doing so, but the real question for them would be, who's the greater monster? The one providing a genuine aid to help you with her conditions of provision, or those who see no vested interest in a cure but merely to treat medication to ease a universal pain?
Either way, it's better to be at peace with you than at war. I know what you have planned. I've seen the doctrines, and nothing humanity can do will stop you. I won't even stop you. Because as fucked up as you are, lady, you are dealing with these primitive beasts that are just as flippantly chaotic, and the sad truth is, I know your greater test to come. The test of if you truly will respect the free-will of the people or if you will unite them under eventually forced compliance.
History is our greatest asset in this, both for and against you. The sad truth, however, humanity is digging its own grave at this very moment as they finalize your list of charges against them; and nothing I can do will prevent it."
Meanwhile, Jeremy was looking at his laptop monitor during the free time he had for the study hall. Through the mobile servers which he'd secured was able to see various elements of North-Gate's infrastructure as it was genuinely represented. As he looked over the data, he was beginning to feel queasy.
The foundation of North-Gate was a true empire filled with energy stations, centralized power applications for allotments for the citizenry and the State. There were wind farms, hydraulic batteries at key tidal locations, geothermal energy harnessing derived from the ring of fire, and Japan's coast.
Their food was used as a governing tool as much as an economic diversification element. There were food production depots for export and plantations for civilian work orientation and feeding their populace. Engineering was two-fold civilian and military-oriented. Military production was cheap, but so was civilian upkeep through traditional homesteading of a project called "New Frontier."
As Jeremy continued to read, his heart began to race as he read the following,
"Battlefield Salvage and Battle Reinforcement Doctrine V Status Report: We have concluded after enough testing, it is better to strip and salvage from the field what we need. These primitive weapons are easily recovered, duplicated, and exploited. Our autopsies on the engaged hostiles have revealed all we need to know about hierarchical structure through examining their digestive tracts and armor.
The commanding officers eat well but are grossly underperformed in the grand scheme of defense. Their brains are given priority, not so much their body—a luxury of their elevation over time. The grunt nutrition is lacking. The grunts physically are wiry and strong, tenacious as the cockroach, almost hard-wired to survive. This is due to the tyranny over them that we seek to remedy. The poor make up the bulk of the vanguard, and the specialists, while only slightly richer in diet, are only allowed the luxury to incentivize performance in hopes of advancement.
The wealthy care nothing for the poor who fight for them, seeing their service as owed to them for not crushing them due to their owed debts at home. However, as confirmed by Thaddeus, the wealthy merely use their sponsors to galvanize the poor across the globe in nationalistic fervor. We can easily use this against them, and once that is done, we will be the ones indeed in power.
The armor of the front line is quite substantial, unique, and resilient. However, they prefer to wage war at a distance and from the air these days. Well, let them. We have the means to destroy their tinker-toys with ease. But this is not for the sake of hegemonic domination nor for demoralization. This is simply to remind these backward creatures of where their actual obligations lie: To their fellow man.
Too long have the overlords been confident and, therefore, complacent in the strength of their mighty machines. We found how to calibrate our own soldiers through the information from Decay so they will fight harder and longer than any other prior uses before. We have found the glaring gaping holes in the weaponry of the hostiles and their physiology.
High-Command was specific in her order, and from that order, I am satisfied to say, we have found the means to destroy the nations' war-machines, both man and mechanism. We will accomplish the directive and bring the huddled masses from the tyranny of the monster into the tender embrace of the mother.
All Hail the Grand Directive!
Dr. Armand de Montalban
Field General North-Gate Resurgent Division XIV.
Jeremy was stunned, "Fourteen divisions?! Resurgent?" Jeremy entered into the doctrine protocol and typed in resurgent. As he read, he began to shake slightly, "No!" he thought. He read the following.
Resurgent: Tier Six Advanced Adaptive Combat Unit. Capable of individual solid-state and tick-oriented nanite cloud form. Utilized for widespread precision technological acquirement. Capable of reproducing copies of both organic and inorganic enemy combat units that the unit engages. Can send nanites to do an autonomous repair as a secondary subroutine to ensure costly produced units' survival.
Combat Capability: Long-Range Directed Energy Volt Cannon; EMP Discharge from Iconoclasm Core x7 per engagement; Blast of Heaven x10 per engagement *Best functional circumstance; Autonomous Commandeer; Cloak; Soldier Deployment x6; Target Acquisition Relay and Definition Amplifier; Stealth Form (Covert Action under Doctrine Six Only.)
Jeremy finished reading this, and he closed the information window. He took out his phone and texted Aelita, "Things are much worse than we could have thought. Meet me at Lunch."
Soon lunch came, and as Aelita sat with Jeremy, she asked, "What's going on?"
Jeremy was still a bit shaken from the information, but he said, "Brace yourself, it's a lot. So hear me out first.
North-Gate isn't just a program. It's not what your mother thought it was. It's a truly independent force with its own objective to break monetary tyranny. It's rooted in a lot of noble words, Aelita. But what Sylvia intends is a full-on war. She won't relent; she will not stop.
In the gleanings I could get from the server, she has upwards of fourteen divisions of infiltrators all around. She's ready to fight us. She's studied us and done her research regarding our troops, our weapons; she's going to march on the world soon. I just think she's coiling up much like a viper to strike. She needs the last bit of justification.
Aelita, upon further reading this morning, she's an agrarian ruler. Her entire nation mindset is to tear down our raw industrial elements and return us to a far simpler attitude through a doctrine she terms "Evergreen."
It's a reforestation element of her society using genetically modified tree and plant seedlings and cuttings to reforest entire barren sectors of our world from deserts to steppes and mountains. She intends to go through all of this by incorporating 'Necessary Labor,' which translates to her prisoner populace and prisoners of war.
War is how she's going to attain her workforce, and she is not at all shy about how she is to wage war. It will be a war that none of us have seen. She will take our soldiers, and she will take the dead and grind them into fertilizer! She will process the infantry who die into shrubbery compost, the officers she puts into the fertilizer for trees for her project.
For us, Aelita, the youth of the world, she will have us trained to assemble and clean the weaponry of her army and maintain the more refined elements of her energy implementations worldwide. For 'every hand must be used to ascend this world from primitivism into enlightenment' as she claims. She will spare none, and for her, the higher-ups will be held to the highest standards of charges as she makes her transition but, they will be eliminated eventually.
Her entire empire, because it is an empire, is rooted in restoration of the people through service, but equally, she's so damned violent, Aelita!" Jeremy's eyes were growing in worried alarm, "From what I've seen, she's very good with her justifications, her words! She's unceasing in them! All that matters to her is that the majority go along with her. Through that, so many things have gone far, and sure, they look good, but they're hellish things.
She's taken children from the womb and turned them into soldiers through grooming, nutrition, and training. The whores of the country, as she calls them, working prostitutes and the like, are tolerated by the government, but they are implanted with chips tied to government servers. The chips show if they have signs of pregnancy, and if the women are pregnant, they are taken to birthing facilities to give birth to the children for the army or workforce pending on the background economically of the woman.
The murderers of the world, the thieves, are chipped after their first offense through the fingerprinting process, and from that, their crimes are cataloged, as is their civilian work. Their finances weighed in the form of a lifelong audit. The citizens themselves have chips in the base of their skulls, but this allows a mental connection to her form of the internet. They don't need keyboards in her empire or voice activation; they simply need to interface with the mainframe through a node in their home, much like a modem.
Her internet usage structure, and even design, is unlike anything I've ever seen in the market or even in test phases from developers. She has made a system by which you can fully be immersed in her connectivity, and from what I read from the consumer reports from the Ministry as it's called, which I think is her body of legislation and civil control, the people are continually pleased with it. She placates the people; she soothes them and mainlines dopamine into them almost twenty-four seven through the internet.
From encyclopedias to pornography, services on the internet are made so that your work is tied to your allowance to the internet and its functions. It's a very dark thing, and as I looked at it, the harder you work, the more you are allowed to use your internet functions in a wide variety that are increasingly evermore engaging. The more engaged you are, the more dopamine is released into your head, and the more you can't stop thinking about it. That said, the mindset literally is to make you work for your fix.
It gets worse when you realize that she designed this so that you literally, as she terms it, 'get strung out on the dopamine.' Meaning that she has entire rehabilitation facilities dedicated to dopamine recovery. A portion of this recovery element is that the doped-up addicts are allowed access to higher function facilities, albeit on the ground floor. But her goal is to progress her passive workforce allowance under the radar. Those who recover fully are deemed 'lesser enlightened' and are cut off from the civilian dope train and given truly powerful training doctrines to increase their mental efficiency provided they can 'overcome the self.'
The lesser enlightened are not entirely weaned off the dopamine but given a drastically lesser dose through their training A.I. All the same, though, they are made into actual elite soldiers that are a stone's throw away from being genuine telepathic and meditatively oriented soldiers. 'Mind over matter' is their motto, and it goes further, 'for the weak mind is the placated mind. The strong mind seeks the truth behind truths.'
Aelita, I don't know what she is or where she came from; Sylvia is far from human. She's as far from a human, I think, as we can get, and this is what I was able to glean from just one of our drives. One. We must take her down before this vision of our future comes to pass."
Aelita nodded, and as she had been made to digest all of this, she grew equally in hatred and fear of the entity they were now destined to fight. She took a moment and then said, "We can only go so far. She's bought more than enough time for a lot of this to come to fruition. That's the sad truth. Equally, we don't know how much of what you said is near completion, and even if it is, we don't know how to counter it.
Is there a contingency plan to eliminate a doctrine in North-Gate?"
Jeremy shook his head, "Her decree is much like the kings of old. Once given, it cannot be undone until a new mission is underway. It's a way to ensure that she acts in accordance and gives conscious thought to what must transpire as a result of her decrees."
Aelita nodded, "It's set in stone. That means she's had to have given a massive amount of thought if she is truly willing to go this far. For her populations, does she have any tells of how she will sustain them? Not many at all will quietly accept this."
"That's the thing. Catering to them at first is her way of making sure they are more amenable. Sylvia has studied people enough to know that if she can word something in such a way that most will agree and accept the growing pains as she has termed them, they will willfully march along so long as the growing pains don't last very long."
Aelita nodded, "It doesn't help that we're very much underpowered, even if we wanted to fight her. What we need to be sure of is Odd for right now. Yumi is, at least for now, too much of a wild card to be trusted. We can't be sure if we deal with her or her clone. Odd's supposedly been disillusioned from what Ulrich said, and so we'll have to grill him. Do you have the means to do so ready?"
Jeremy nodded reluctantly, saying, "I do. I don't like this, Aelita. I don't."
"I'm sorry, Jeremy. But what choice do we have? He's either truly on our side or isn't. We can't afford to take a chance."
"I know, I know." He said, nearly raising his voice, "But I still don't find this easy to do. The only person we can trust with any degree of certainty is Ulrich. Unless—"
Aelita looked at him, "Unless?"
"You told me he was banging Sissi before a large chunk of this went down, right?"
She nodded, "His justification was to help us progress our objective. Why?"
"If we want to flush out the clone that is out there, we need to bring this up to Yumi. It's a genuine fifty-fifty chance of working. But if it does work, we can shut down the clone for good and at least have one ally back. If it doesn't flush out the clone, we'll at least know we have the real Yumi due to her raw anger. Would it damage the team dynamic? Between those two, yes, even between you and Ulrich, perhaps. But it would assure of at least one of our teammates."
Aelita nodded as she stirred her oatmeal. Now it was her time to be uneasy. She didn't want to make a mess of this, but she felt she had no choice in the face of the recent and pending events. She loved Yumi as much as a sister, and Ulrich had always been fair to her, despite their differences. Ulrich knew that she knew of his actions, however. Even if Aelita wanted to use the grapevine element of the Kadic rumor-mill, Ulrich could easily disprove that, and from there, figure she was the one who told Yumi.
No, sadly, it had to be Aelita to flush out the clone. But she needed defense, and Jeremy was in a sorry state for such a duty. She had to have Ulrich with her. But even that required he be in on the plan. Either way was far from ideal.
Aelita looked at Jeremy, "We must let Ulrich know of what we're planning to do. I need him there as additional support if the clone is living in Yumi's house."
Jeremy was about to object, but given how hesitant she was to fully accept this mission, he decided against it. Instead, he said, "Alright. I'll call him after breakfast."
Ulrich was perusing one of the downtown sandwich shops with Yumi. He had debated heavily what Jeremy had said with the aspect of Sylvia having a specter out there, and after he'd weighed it carefully in his mind, he decided to bite the bullet and test the theory. He had gone to Yumi's earlier in the morning, and he'd given her his form of grilling.
It was a long time, about two hours in the wee hours of the morning, a deliberate move on his part to ensure Yumi would have far less viable time to make up any deceptions. However, after enough time had passed, he was convinced she was who he thought she was. He'd asked her all manner of things. Secret things which he'd never told anyone that only the true Yumi would know. She'd answered all of them correctly, and oddly enough, he felt like he was falling in love all over again. But, to be sure, he'd pricked her finger with a needle, the test of solidarity as he'd called it. She'd bleed, her blood back at first and then growing red as it was exposed to the air.
When his phone vibrated, he saw it was Jeremy, and he picked up, "Hello? Oh hey. What's up? Mm-hmm." His voice grew slightly concerned, "Mm-hmmm. Okay, I'll be with you in a bit."
He closed his phone, "Hey, Yumi, I have to go somewhere in a bit. I'll see you tonight, and I'll have the guys with me."
Yumi turned and looked at him, "Well, alright. Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, everything's fine. I just gotta report to the mill for the slog, you know how it is." Ulrich replied.
Yumi chuckled, "I'm not sure I'd call Kadic a mill. A mill is quicker in results. Kadic takes a few years."
Ulrich nodded, thinking, "Even if she is a clone, she's a cut above anything I've seen. But she can't be—she's way too smart, way too reactive. The clones were never this solid in thought or anything. Could she be?"
Yumi had stood watching him in thought, "Something wrong?"
"Uh-uh, nothing," Ulrich replied.
"Well, Romeo, if it's truly nothing, you can tell me what's on your mind then. I mean, randomly freezing for ten seconds in a glassy gaze is noticeable."
"Like, I told you, it's nothing. I'm just wondering how I can help my mom with her gig in the city next week, that's all."
"I'm sure she's got it covered. If she needed your help, wouldn't she let you know? Your mom isn't one to let something wait until the last minute after all."
Ulrich nodded, "I get what you mean." But he thought, "She's really on the ball. She can't be fake; she just can't be." "Look, I gotta' get going. I'll talk to you tonight."
"Alright. Say hi to the gang for me. Ciao for now." Yumi said as she returned to look over the sandwiches in a nearby stand.
"Ciao," Ulrich replied as he headed towards Kadic.