Chapter 2a: Concerned Citizens
In which ancient conspiracies and bar hoppers alike have to argue over the bill.
Good Evening Gentlepersons, tonight on MONITOR we will be discussing the upcoming Plurality vote of the Citizens Stipend Amendment and Infrastructure Investment Bill 2240, as well as the larger underlying controversy of the Reputation modified tax-system.
We are honored to have with us today Susilo Bambang Suparmanputra, Eidolon of the Gestalt mind Corning-Hypercube, Professor Torsten Bergmann, chair of emergent and complex system forecasting at Titan Autonomous University, Professor of Macroeconomics Chunjua Hujiang at Profunda University, Niels Sörensön, Psychohistorian at the parliamentarian A.I. Oracle service of the Three Wise Men and Andrej Vassilovitch Economic Spokesperson of the Automist Alliance Party.
Before we get started, please be aware of the public exo-memory link in the program description …
(…)
M. Hujiang: And I have to ask again, if the current economic output of the Commonwealth is insufficient to tackle all the projects we want to undertake, as it plainly is, why are we not trying harder to unlock the enormous, unused, economic potential in our midst?
32% of the population is living of the citizens stipend, some with a hobby as side income, another 30 % or so do additional part time work .Our Oracles and Gestalt minds allow us better simulations and planning, our continued AI research better automatization. Still our GDP per capita is 7% lower than Mars because nearly 2/3 of our population is entirely unproductive.
M. Bergmann: There is a reason that most people rely on the citizens stipend and hobby work. Gene upgrades and Skillsofts none withstanding there is only so much you can do. The human brain is a hopelessly messy piece of soft-and hardware, entangled like a wool ball at a kitten party. You can yank on it to pull it in a certain direction, but never entirely without side-effects. Yank too hard and the whole mess is liable to unravel in your hands. Not everyone is cut out to be a psycho-surgeon.
M. Hujiang: This argument further removed from reality than a FTL drive. Mars' school system is largely privatized and profit driven. Exactly the lower educational levels experience far lower amounts of investment. They still manage to turn a profit.
M. Sörensön: On Mars they let you asphyxiate if you can't pay the oxygen subscription fees. Mars has shareholders and human resources, we have citizens. Little bit of a difference there.
M. Hujiang: Oh please. Spare me theatrics.
M. Bergmann: This is not theatrics. This is a fact. Mars uses far less A.I. than we do. Low skill work has been priced out of the market by LAIs entirely, here. Mars is in a better position, because they have a nascent biosphere, making the upkeep costs per capita lower and because they maximize for profit, not quality of life.
M. Hujiang: Leaving your social democratic prejudices aside, there is a certain amount of truth to this. I'm not suggesting that we imitate the Martian System, but we certainly could recover part of our losses by using citizens without jobs for standard maintenance and manufacturing oversight purposes. I'm well aware that they would not be able to compete with AI on costs. Luckily we won't have to, the resources for the upkeep of the, ahhh, less productive members are a sunk cost anyway. The resources necessary for the creation of that many AI are not negligible and I would like to direct the attention of our viewers to the study of my institute on this very topic, which is available in the Exo-memory of this stream. If we implement the Somnambulistic rewrites to the central nervous system on a larger scale, this doesn't even need to impact quality of life negatively. The work will be done literally in their sleep.
M. Suparmanputra: Our colleague overstates the amount of savings considerably; after all we would still need to produce all the cyber-shells and manufacturing facilities. More importantly the modifications M. Hujiang speaks of will require extensive psycho-surgery, which is expert labor. The proposed brain modifications will only allow the execution of a fixed program, while the host-brain sleeps. The maximal complexity of the algorithm will in turn be limited by the computational platform on which it is running. No offence intended, but if the people in question were our best and brightest, they wouldn't live of the citizens stipend in the first place. It is entirely unclear if the return on the proposed investment is actually worth the opportunity cost.
(…)
M. Vasssilovitch: And let me be clear on this point. The Voidrock Coalition joined the Commonwealth under the assumption that as long as we participated in the Economic Reputation and Tax system as arbitrated by the Three Wise Men, we would be free to improve on the half-hearted solidarity of the State inside our own Habitats as we saw fit. If this bargain no longer applies, other agreements will also have to be reexamined.
M. Hujiang: The Inner Habitats can run on pure Reputation Systems as long as they want. Go full on anarcho-communist, see if I care. If only you wouldn't need the tax money of the golden Axis.
(…)
Discussion Panel by the Economic Faculty of the Titan Autonomous University and the Circum-Saturnian Broadcasting Services, held on the CSBS Politics Virtuality Channel.
The man known to some as Seven, is diving through darkness between worlds, drawing corkscrewing waves of probability around him like the fiery plasma tail of a shooting star.
Where 'might' collapses into 'is', the quantum foam of the probability wave front blooms a jungle of fractal possibility flowers, some fragile growths of alabaster and white jade, evaporating into showers of diamond dust and prismatic sprays of fairy lights as quickly as they condensed into these plane, others towering coral riffs of gold and mother of pearl, sprouting ever-changing ecologies of was/is/maybe.
Seven knows his garden well. He is a careful caretaker and his pruning shears are sharp, although he loves all his flowers. Today, though, he has eyes for only one blossom, a small chrome orchid with petals like razors.
Long ago/now/soon, it was/is/will be growing, a tree of thorns, a Yggdrasil of pain, it's roots extruding along the space and time-like dimensions, curling into the hidden places of the fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions, where the emergent properties of complex systems lead their own strange, shadow-lives.
Savage laughter reverberates unheard in the dark halls of dead and uncaring gods.
His Lady Entropy, she-who-waits-at-the-end-of-all-paths, the only Mistress this mindless universe acknowledges, smiles well pleased.
Nothings remains but the faint hiss of the sand in the hourglass.
The man is old, very old, one of the oldest surviving members of his species. Few things surprise him anymore, so he is very familiar with the general set-up, even if the props have changed.
In his youth, officially unofficial meetings such as these would have involved an anonymous conference room with locked doors, grey wall-to-wall carpeting and very bad coffee. Possibly and most frighteningly a PowerPoint(™) presentation.
These days, it's an encrypted vir, running on a heavily firewalled server. About 2/3 of the attendants are uploads, the rest mostly like him: cyborgs in survival tanks, their consciousness slowly spilling out of their oversized heads in a metallic halo of brain implants.
The Saturnian Commonwealth is a mixed direct/parliamentarian cyber-democracy with heavy use of psycho-historic forecasting, simulations and Oracle engines. All its deliberations are recorded and with very few exceptions, usually security relevant, immediately made available to the general public.
Nonetheless under the weather vane of vox populi and its elected representatives, the engine rooms are manned by public servants, who have to keep the ship of state on course, even in stormy weather.
This gathering has no name, even if it is sometimes referred to as the "Special Circumstance Committee" by its members, no official function and, is in fact, no different than any get together of private citizens, although those usually tend to contain fewer high ranking spooks and civil servants.
Nobody can accuse them of extravagance. The Vir is as simple as they come; a featureless white plane stretches into infinity under an equally featureless black sky. 17 black, numbered monoliths, one by three by nine, represent the attendants. The communication channels are relatively low bandwidth, limited to audio-equivalent sensory input, severely curtailing the possibility of mind-to-mind data transfer. The old man is torn between approval for the functional simplicity and annoyance at the underlying melodramatics. At least they have skipped the black robes this time, he thinks sourly.
Eleven speaks: "We confidently expect the Metallic Hydrogen, Water and Hydrocarbon exports to remain on the current growth trajectory. Venus is nearing the end of its terra forming process, but Mars is entering the critical phase and there a simply no price competitive sources, that can provide in the required mass numbers.
Helium III rates are stagnating. The Inner Planets are very conscious of our monopol and are taking pains to reduce it, so far with limited success. It is my understanding though that beamed power from inside Mercury's orbit is about to make real dent there.
On the other hand the market penetration on our skillsofts, dream-virs, narco-algorithms and psychosurgeries is less than we hoped for, but …"
"Eleven. We didn't come here for a lecture. The TLDR please?"
Eleven sighs, annoyed. "This is the TLDR, gentlemen. If you want the full version have a look at the files in your exo-memory. The trade links with the inner system are unravelling.
On the upside IP piracy will continue, of course, and we can cut down on paying the Planetary Consortium protection money. If there is less trade, we are less exposed to their commerce raiders. We hope that our expanding colonial holdings and new investment plan, which my department has prepared, will make up for the shortfall, so the economic losses are manageable.
Bottom line: New Shanghai and we have been polite to each other for the last 80 years because it was a symbiotic relationship. A bad marriage, maybe, resentful and co-dependent but a working relationship. Now the glue has started to crack. It's only a matter of time until the knives come out. "
Seven speaks up: "I think I can be of some assistance on this question. The new deep-dives from SYBIL are in. It is as we feared."
A file of considerable size is loaded in the communal exo-memory; the data set crystallizes in his short term memory with a barely perceptible moment of lag, as his personal security suit gives the data package the electronic equivalent of a cavity search.
"We have 25 years, 30, if we are lucky." Thirteen says.
That is a broadly accurate, if strongly simplified, summary, the old man's muse finds, when it flings a score of analyzing daemons at the data package, while he flicks through probability density matrixes and decision trees.
Seven clacks with his teeth. "Only, if we can keep the other stake-holders in the dark. These things tend to get messy and … unpredictable, if more than one Oracle-engine is in the mix. Interference."
Four speaks "We are still 10 to 15 years beyond the forecasting horizon of the best competition, civilian or foreign."
"So you hope." Six remarks acidly. "Meanwhile I'm sitting here, guarding our borders with a bunch of gun boats, good for nothing but pirate hunting."
The 3-dimensional surface plots, indicating the simulated emotional response matrix of his colleagues, stab angry carmine spikes into the aggression spectrum as tempers fray. The old man turns to his meta-cortex, to prune his aggression response.
"We will come to the funding questions in a moment, Six. For now we must all do what we can to keep this out of public consciousness for now. That will be your job Seventeen."
Seventeen is unimpressed. "How is that supposed to work? If we want the funding for the fleet expansion, we need the people to vote that into the budget, do we not? If there is not threat, who will do that? Mathematically optimized orgasms, a fancy new nervous system for the best designer narco-algorithms, a full immersion VR riddle quests … all just more fun than expensive and useless death machines."
Four agrees, "We will need a propaganda campaign. In time. If this graduates from fringe speculation to public debate item, before our pieces are in place, we are in trouble. Public opinion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop."
"Like a nuke." Six volunteers cheerfully.
"Yes, exactly, thank you. Gentlemen, may I remind you: No warships without funds, no funds without compromises. Eleven, if you would continue?"
"Thank you. My colleagues and I have prepared a new budget, which we think, is politically viable and allows us to push forward our agenda.
"First of all, we can safely abandon investment in further Löfstrom Loops on Saturn, although the running projects on Uranus should be completed, if only to keep the local communities happy. The demographics out there tend towards the anarcho-communist with Vietnamese and Slavic language groups dominating. These guys have a chip on their shoulder, so we will need to massage plenty of egos."
"Secondly we would like to increase the production of public computational resources until an upload on the citizens' stipend will be able to afford to run his virs at both beyond-human-perception-resolution and real time speed. This will make the server cities on Saturn and Titan happy and it will save costs on the long-term. Compared to embodied citizens on basic, we confidently expect savings of 9% per year and head."
Ten is skeptical: "More money for the golden axis? Neither the Twelve Commons nor the Inner Moons will like that."
Seventeen waves his objections away. "There is no sense in keeping the periphery happy and losing the center. The secessionists are getting traction in Nyhavn and Quebec. New Shanghai is doing all it can to fan the flames. People are tired of pouring and endless stream of resources into the poorer stations and getting nothing back but complaints. If we lose the goodwill of Titan, Lapis-Lazuli or Saturn the bottom falls out of the Commonwealth."
"The poorer habitats will be able to push more of their hard cases on the server cities and the prosperous cities will be able to limit their expenses, but the bioform heavy clades on Titan will want a bone, too. First and foremost, more domes. Public housing is getting too expensive. Also more funding for childcare and more gen-upgrade packages to be included in the public healthcare program."
Six is not happy. "If you want to push all that through, that will call into question not only the financing for the fleet expansion program, but also the traffic laser-grid for the inner Moons and the terra-forming timeline for Lapis-Lazuli."
Five chimes in: "I would like to remind my esteemed colleagues, that Force: Atmosphere is still owed a replacement for the Mantis attack plane. In the eighth year running, now. "
"The traffic-grid is a write-off. It will never recover its cost. Instead, expand the network mass-drivers and give every relevant station enough lasers for ablative breaking. Those can also double as asteroid and military defensive networks in a pinch."
"Oh please, the seeking software sucks, we both know it will …"
"So one software patch and we are good to go, making it still vastly superior to your alternative …"
"You damn well know that the inner moon habitats need the investment…"
Even Meta-cortexes will not work, if you do not use them. Juggling so many oversized egos colliding, even on a good day, is more art than science.
The old man is running out of patience. "Enough. We can either learn to like this package and the political capital it preserves or Weissman and the Better-Lives-Coalition will press forward with their reform bill. SYBIL gives her a 62 % chance of success with a two sigma confidence interval of +/- 7 %. That's all there is to it. The laser-grid will have to go. Fourteen, the Terraforming effort is your forte."
Fourteen shrugs: "Lapis-Lazuli will stabilize on an asymptotic trajectory to 4.2 % oxygen content, well beneath the limiting oxygen concentration for hydrogen. It might take a few thousand years but we will get there. Meanwhile we can put up atmosphere converters in the sky cities. Leave the rest to the seeded air-plankton and the biosphere specialized Gestalt-minds."
"Lovely. That's the Greens pissed at us. Just racking up the friends, today, aren't we."
"Conserving resources, while maintaining a majority in the Althing will be a balancing act, we knew that." Four throws an exo-memory link into the vir, which sprouts an enormous oak-tree of golden light as a thicket of possibility paths explodes outward.
The seventeen monoliths hover in the darkness, while the tree grows around them, shedding fractal possibility flowers, fragile soap bubbles of Mandelbrot and Julia sets, shifting from indigo and aquamarine to carmine and purple.
The old men watches as branches wither and die, plunging down into darkness. World lines like bony, twisting fingers, scratching at oblivion. A few hundred threads of spun gold, woven into a tenuous tightrope, spanning the chasm into the future.
The Seventeen rotate around the bridge, as the old man drags his hand through the condensed waveforms, spilling maybe-worlds like fairy dust. All of them smell of blood and iron.
"The successful scenarios demand we keep Mars busy, until we can shift public opinion to something friendlier to our agenda."
"That's fine. We have friends there."
Ten is not impressed, "Barsoomist don't have the numbers or the infrastructure to be more than an annoyance. We need more."
Eight speaks up, "The Consortium Hypercorps do not trust each other further than a cling-film condom. Fa Jing and Solaris in particular are more paranoid than a dock-side whore on bad crack. It might be time for a bit of shit stirring. A few unfortunate car accidents … leave the details to me. We have specialists for that kind of thing."
"While we are getting to the dirty parts, we will need to do something about public opinion and that would be easier without certain members of the diet."
"Can't we just go with the good old bogeymen? Killer robots under you bed. Titans in your exo-memory cache?"
Thirteen snorts, wearily amused. "Tried that. Won't work. We have run a few simulations. The response matrix is downright lethargic. The public LAI counseling and psychosurgery program fucked us royally."
Ten is displeased with the implied criticism. "It also gave us happier, healthier citizens. Not to mention fewer guys inclined to hose down the Chinese chicken joint with a submachine gun after a bad day at work."
"Exactly my point. Stomping on mental illness and PTSD is fine and dandy until you need people with easy psychological triggers."
"If we can't rely on old atrocities, we will have to produce our own. Every lie needs a bit of truth in it to give it substance. We need a shift in public opinion and that means blood on blades. Something with children if you please. Nothing gets the public outrage juice flowing more freely than the tragic tale of little Timmy and the murder hobos. "
"Leave the little dears to me. My boys will set it right, snippity snap. I have ideas."
The old man feels his lips curl at the undisguised eagerness in Nine's voice, before his meta cortex response function locks it down.
This is the greater good. The smaller evil.
No time for clean hands or second thoughts.
"We will, of course, tailor our intervention for maximum effect and minimal aggregate bloodshed, Nine please coordinate with Four, we will need some reliable black bag research teams to run the simulations."
The meeting is winding down and the monoliths start winking out of existence as the members of Special Circumstance start to leave until only Seven and Nine linger.
That is rarely a good sign.
"Well?"
"There is activity around the Children."
The old man tenses.
"What kind of activity?"
"The seventh child has gotten himself nominated for the federal diet."
For the first time in nearly a quarter of a millennium the old man is lost for words.
"He … what? How was this allowed to happen?"
"Joke candidate. Some ridiculous live cast of a bar patron went viral and got him a minor following. Enough brainwave signatures to get him on the election roll. The public forecasting engines give him better than even odds, though."
"This is ... less than ideal."
The old man thinks this might be the understatement of the century and he should bloody well know.
He feels the oncoming throb of a headache and is sorely tempted to just switch-off the corresponding brain regions, but he needs his full-wits about him.
"No need for panic. Joke candidates come and go. Even assuming he wins, any important votes come up, on average 70% of their supporters will simply temporarily reassign their votes, if their voting preferences do not match." Nine says.
The self-discipline of two hundred years allows the Old Man to keep a lid on his irritation.
"I'm the animal tamer of this fly circus, I know how liquid democracy works, thank you. I don't expect him to suddenly win a diet vote to declare war on Venus.
He is the seventh Child. He has drawn the attention of the things that go bump into the night. Not to mention the infection vector he represents."
Seven clacks his teeth, a wet sound like a mousetrap snapping a fragile little neck.
"A federal diet member has immunities and protections, that normal citizen do not. Uncomfortable questions would be raised if he were to suddenly disappear."
"Best to not let it get that far then." Nine says. "We will fling enough mud at him to keep him out of the Althing. We will crawl so far up the asses of everyone anywhere near this clusterfuck, we will be able to peck out through their tonsils.
If this was more than a freak accident of bad luck and worse taste, we will know."
Seven clacks his teeth again. "Once is an accident. Two is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
"A patrol of Force: Space stumbled over a cold sleep casket on a ballistic trajectory, way out in deep black, in the middle of the Norse group. The thing was running cold and dark, finding it was a one in a trillion chance. They nearly nuked it, but someone got control of their itchy trigger finger at the last moment."
"I'm not sure if Six just doesn't know yet, what fish his boys reeled in, or if he is playing his cards close to his chest, but do guess who was on board, Lorenz."
The old man has not much fear left in him after a quarter millennium of the worst of what humanity has to offer. Still, the cold chill of long forgotten ghosts runs down his back, when a photograph materializes in his exo-memory.
The meta-cortex allows it. Fear is what kept him alive for so long.
A cold-sleep sarcophagus with a sigil printed on top. A blood red fig leave, pockmarked by a century of interplanetary dust, a line of text printed beneath it.
God is in Heaven. All is right with the world.
For the first time in nearly a century, Lorenz Kiel smiles. It's not a pretty sight.
"Shinji Ikari. Monument to all my sins. Welcome home."
In the darkness of the outer system, where the sun grows faint and dim and cold, the Echo Cathedral swings in slow, sedate Lissajous orbits around the Sun-Saturn Lagrangian point L-5. Matryoshka spheres of Hyperdiamond, 1 kilometer in diameter, glimmer gently in the faint starlight. Slender flute-like columns plunge into the darkness, piercing the inner spheres, towards the center, where they conjoin in an alabaster egg, lit a faint orange by the eternal fire in the heart of the cathedral.
Whispers fill the dim caverns, as the prayer chants of the monk in the inner sanctum echo through the enormous halls, reflected and amplified, distorted and delayed, fleeting ghosts chasing fading shades. Every second a single name crystallizes from the echo song, eerily clear, as if the speaker stood right next to her.
She hovers along the diamond cliffs of the outer shell, softly brushing her hand over the columns of names carved into the walls, disappearing into the twilight high above and below her, before she kicks off from the wall, gently free falling towards the center.
Like clouds of fireflies, swarms of gently glowing zero-g candles, in transparent safety paper bubbles, drift through the soft air currents, as she slowly falls towards the inner sanctum.
Today it is a wizened Buddhist monk, leathery brown skin taut over brittle bones, floating in a lotus position in the dead center of the sphere, chanting the never-ending list of names, scrolling over the entoptic screens hovering in front of him. A holographic mandala of dead gods surrounds him, crosses and crescent moons and stars and dharma wheels and torii and aums.
She closes her eyes, breathes in tune with the Totentanz, adds her own names to the endless river of unquiet ghosts.
There is no record of her command in the Mustering Scrolls of Titan. There are no records of her assignments. There is no record even of her birth.
The knife in the dark. No whiff of gunpowder; no trail of blood.
But the dead, the ones she loved and the ones she hated, know her name.
This is the Echo Cathedral, where the keepers recite the ten billion names of god. All the sons of Adam, all the daughters of Eve, who lie unburied in the ruins of the halls of their fathers. Their whispers are caught by the microphones spread around the echo court, lasered outward to the memory beacons high above and below the elliptic, where they sing their mourning dirge outwards into the dark.
A flashing icon appears at the edge of her field of vision. The Flying Carpet is ready for launch, her fuel tanks full, and her missile racks ready for war. There is work to be done.
Behind her the song of the lost continues, uninterrupted, as it has for a hundred years before and shall for a hundred years thereafter.
After all they say, as long as a man's name is still spoken, he is not truly dead.