Winning Peace Chapter 12:
I'd tried, but as much effort as I'd put in, we still weren't quite at the point of a classless utopia. Don't get me wrong. Part of that was, frustratingly enough, the people themselves. It turns out the vast majority of humanity liked having something analogous to social classes, they just didn't want them enforced. Similarly, they didn't like being forced to intermingle with people whom they had absolutely no frame of reference to accommodate... which, well, might just be the reason why most kids found public schools mind numbing and soul crushing outside of their own cliques.
I shook the intrusive thought off.
The point was that, in giving everyone the potential to live their best life by handing out stable income, I'd envisioned a pretty egalitarian world resulting. Sadly for me, it turned out that people mostly wanted to live in the same style that they were already accustomed to, just... well, with more creature comforts.
Which meant that the city had stratified to some extent.
There were cultural districts that had formed hugging the gigantic bulkheads which featured murals and tapestries and outdoor stalls selling all sorts of niche food, clothing, and wares. These neighborhoods were mostly low-rise buildings, with people living above the stores they ran, with only a few spanning above the third story. The tops had sky bridges running between them with open plaza spaces that often hosted parties. Once you got away from those, you ran into what were traditionally 'working class' neighborhoods. These were tall stacks of apartment buildings around the central structural pillars holding up the 'sky' of main underground sections of Armstrong city. They were reminiscent of the old mega-buildings of the UNAS, though with far more greenery and more external community spaces on the massive bridges that connected them.
The mega-buildings on Earth, though, had been hellishly tight spaces. Having lived in the penthouse of one for six months, even that had been a fairly claustrophobic existence. Even with the run of an entire floor, it was like living on a small island disconnected from the rest of the building and humanity at large. In designing the spaces, I'd tried to give as much thought and impetus to forcing occupants to intermingle as possible.
As such, there were fairly grand shopping centers, food courts, entertainment areas, and all sorts of things that interspersed the residential areas. So far, my analytics programs were considering the experiment a moderate success.
The neighborhoods, though, were the wealthiest. They took up the 'central strips' between the bulkheads and furthest away from the industrial sectors for secondary material processing I'd built into the cavern's walls. Really, I hadn't wanted to see the palatial mansions built at all, but after a dozen conversations with Armstrong's previously wealthy residents and the new political class of the Stellar Council, I'd caved and agreed to exert pressure for a limited number of high-class estates to be constructed in exchange for steep limits on government salaries.
The result?
Port Royal, Gotham, Kandor, New Sodom, and Madripoor. Five districts of sprawling properties fit more for deities than kings and queens. Getting to name them as I had was part of the deal, though I'm honestly not sure how many of the residents understood the implied insults.
At any rate, though, I usually avoided these places like the plague.
Today was a special exception and, as I stepped out of my pod onto the landing of Armstrong's most expensive and elite restaurant I had to wonder if I even lived in the same world as the lunatics who thought this kind of bullshit was worth it. I know I was whining like a little bitch, but the... artifice of the entire affair was grating on me. Make a post-scarcity society and people impose artificial scarcity for the sake of creating a social peerage.
"Ah, Minister Lopez!" The receptionist cried, drawing the attention of the various well-dressed individuals who turned to stare. "We've been expecting you! The other ministers are already here! If you'd prefer a quick trip to the sauna or any of the other services we offer first, though-
I sighed, waving him off. "No, I know where the table is... Johnathan. Do you prefer John?"
The man colored slightly as we went off-script. This wasn't some two-bit fast-food joint we were at, of course. 'The help,' didn't wear name tags. They were 'the help.' That was the whole point. My overlay didn't care about that, though. "Ah, y-yes sir, John is fine."
"Sweet," I shrugged off the exchange in a monotone and swept through a few gestures on my AR display. "50K tip, just for you, big guy. Rock on and have an awesome day."
Leaving the man gaping and stuttering I traipsed across the restaurant like I owned it.
"Minister Berneis, Minister Rogers," I greeted them unnecessarily loudly as my two targets sat in the middle of a large ballroom, a respectful distance enforced around their table by the staff along with a set of active sound baffles preventing anyone from overhearing while giving the illusion of transparency. Raising an eyebrow at the latter of the two, I fed her an unimpressed look. "I wasn't aware you'd be joining us."
Samantha Rogers grimaced as I directed a waiter to get me something with too much sugar in it. "Minister Lopez, I am sorry for the deception, but you've been studiously avoiding taking my office's calls for the last two months."
I nodded blandly and looked over the chair before noisily scrapping it out of the way and shrugging my coat off.
"The reason I had Hugo ask you here, though, is-I'm sorry, what are you doing?" The redhead twenty years my senior asked me in consternation.
"Magic trick," I replied, using my AR interface to trigger the portal generator I'd built into my coat and watched in pleasure as one of the chairs from my home emerged beneath it, raising the coat up as it appeared. Pulling the coat off with a flourish, I took in the completely baffled expressions on everyone's faces as I draped my garment off the back and dropped into the new seat just as my drink hurriedly arrived.
The look on the maitre d's face as I placed the floral-print glass made of a single piece of solid crystal into my luxury gaming recliner's cup holder would have made someone inclined to believe I'd just murdered his firstborn child.
Hugo Berneis, the Minister of State, actually snorted. He was the main reason I'd agreed to take the meeting in the first place, even if I'd already known the reservation was for three people and his husband was engaged in overseeing some of the physical schools we'd built. "I told you he'd be like this, Samantha. You weren't expecting anything else, were you?"
Minister Rogers sighed deeply and shook her head as I very explicitly ordered a double-bacon-cheeseburger and cheese fries from the waiter and dared him to try to talk me out of it. "Admittedly, I had thought that he'd be a bit more reserved given the location, but it was foolish of me to expect special treatment when we weren't in front of a press briefing I suppose."
I lounged as I answered. "Oh, you're getting special treatment alright. You've decided to drag me out here to give you the same answer to the same question you've been asking me for the last six months. I'm being obnoxious on purpose to drive home the wages of sin here."
She glared at me more openly now. "I am the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Science and Technology Ezekiel Lopez. You, yourself, were integral in delineating my duties. You have also made them substantially more difficult, if not outright impossible to achieve, by your repeated obstructionist policies."
I shook my head. "No. The Scandinavian Union has agreed, what's left of the EU has agreed. The friendly half of Brazil's civil war has agreed, along with Argentina, Peru, and Chile. Japan and Australia have agreed. If the UNAS doesn't want to play ball, they get to be the new Cuba. Which is especially funny because Cuba took the deal, too."
The woman took a deep breath, building up a full head of steam. "Look, every nation you just named has agreed because they weren't a global and cultural hegemon for the last two centuries. A foreign power like the New United North American States requires a more subtle hand and softer power to control."
I took a sip of my drink. "The nano-fabrication units are my gift to mankind. I've permanently leased them to the Stellar Council for a few small considerations. One of those is that the technology stays in my control. Meaning that if I want the average joe to be able to walk up to one and print off a new car or holo player or enough food to feed their families, then that's my prerogative. A government that's outlived three-quarters of its own population and was complicit in the murder of billions of innocents does not get to tell me how to use my technology."
"It does get to say how and what laws are enforced in its own territory, though," Samantha replied bluntly. "They are willing to allow civilians access to the nano-fabbers if you hand over documentation about their construction or they're confiscating the units and dismantling them-"
I opened my mouth to respond.
"-which, as you have repeatedly assured me, will net them nothing but frustration due to your efforts against reverse-engineering," She continued, holding up a hand for silence. "Regardless, though, that won't see your objective accomplished either."
I contemplated her for a long moment, making sure she'd finished saying her piece. "So what you're saying is that there's no point in making an agreement with them at all, because I'll lose something unacceptable no matter what."
Samantha Rogers stared at me for a short eternity, as if she wasn't really seeing me, then closed her eyes and rubbed at her eyes. "No. I'm saying you should give ground on something to allow them to feel as if they're walking away with a deal that lets them win."
"I don't see why I should." I stated frankly with a shrug. "If the UNAS government decides to remove and destroy my fabrication units, then I'll just send more. I have plenty of production capacity these days, considering I can nearly hit exponential growth with an automated program. If they think they can take the PR hit from repeatedly and systematically denying magic boxes that print food to an actively starving population, they're welcome to try."
Samantha opened her mouth to argue, then stopped.
Instead, Hugo spoke. "Samantha... you're not going to get anywhere. Ezekiel is the kind of man who holds all the cards and won't make a deal that compromises what he believes in. Worse, he has the will to back it up."
Samantha rubbed at her temples. "We can't just... politically freeze out the UNAS."
I stayed silent, unwilling to share my real reasoning. I'd been tracking the Last Dogs for months now, what remained of them anyway. Even they couldn't exactly get through the apocalypse unscathed, after all. The problem was they used short-range burst communications with repurposed civilian devices and tight-band lasers. That combination had proved deviously difficult to track down once I'd deduced the continued existence of the group from the shadow of their influence.
A coup here or there was to be expected. Sometimes a strained system snapped and you couldn't do anything about it, but there had been too many coincidences in the last year. When a gang war accidentally burns down a food storage warehouse, one faction steals a water purifier that gets destroyed in the fighting, and then a politician orders a massacre to maintain order... well, variations on those same plot beats have happened a dozen times now. A push there, a poke here, and suddenly everything came tumbling down.
Specifically, things came tumbling down that my otherwise accurate prediction models had shown to be mostly-stable.
The problem was...
The UNAS had been calculated to have the highest number of infiltrators.
Oh, it wasn't anything I could prove, exactly, and it wasn't as though other national remnants didn't have their own infiltrators, but there weren't entire factions within them that I could point to that had likely been suborned by the enemy. After having read the latest report during some of my downtime in the past few days, I still wasn't sure how I was going to approach the entire issue. Having my suspicions finally confirmed though, had reinforced my resolve not to bend the knee on this subject. I'd have worried about Rogers buckling under pressure, but despite her best efforts she couldn't give them what she didn't have and having burrowed deep into her office and personal systems I was very sure she didn't have access to my designs.
"You must realize that you're destroying whatever economic stability is left of their country and reducing them to a client state for their industrial needs over the next few decades," Minister Rogers finally stated.
I shrugged. "I bet they're realizing exactly how much it sucks all those times they did it to someone else." I paused, cocking my head. "Oh, wait, I'm a UNAS citizen and self-reflection to avoid the mistakes of the past isn't something we do."
Rogers looked as though she wanted to strangle me. "If you know what you're doing, you obviously know exactly how poorly it turned out for the UNAS and other nations when they performed these same maneuvers on third parties."
"Uh, no." I stated, taking the plate offered to me by the waiter and rolling my eyes at the vain attempt to turn fast food into a work of art the chef had made. "I'm not destroying their environment, turning their populations into slaves, wage or otherwise, and raping their lands of their natural resources while backing a politically exploitative and despotic regime with a litany of human rights abuses."
She winced at that, frowning as she looked at her lobster.
"I know why the UNAS is angry, you know why the UNAS is angry, and anyone with half a functioning brain knows why they're actually angry beyond the performative bullshit they're spewing." I took a bite of my burger and nodded slowly. Okay, regardless of anything else, that was a good burger. I might actually have to eat here again if the chef knew his shit this well. "They were the global hegemon, in one form or another, for the last two centuries; as you pointed out. The Stellar Council represents an existential threat to their supremacy. Allowing us to dictate policy regarding the nano-fabricators undermines the idea that the old order is intact, that humanity can return to the days of the megacorps, and that their political power is still in play."
Minister Berneis sighed as he cut into his steak. "You could go a bit easier on her, Ezekiel. Not all of us have your nerves, you know."
"That's because she's still seeing this as a problem." I informed him, gesturing with the chunk of burger in my hand. "It's not. There are very few true problems. The vast majority of what you see as 'problems' are actually opportunities."
Minister Rogers crossed her arms and stared at me. "And how would you describe the UNAS State Department badgering my office whenever they can get a clean signal as an opportunity?"
I rolled my eyes and pointed at myself. "Treat them like I've been treating you. You have a once-in-multiple-centuries chance to break the UNAS' near-monopoly on soft political power and you're complaining about it? You've already effectively got a coalition you can mobilize against their political interests. Start isolating them."
It would just be a strange coincidence that the groups I most suspected of harboring the Dogs were the ones who lined up with putting pressure against my own efforts. I didn't know precisely why that was, but there was an obvious effort to tear down most of human society. Why? I wasn't sure, but the most plausible reason was to remake it in their own image, whatever that was.
Samantha started, jerking back in surprise as I could see the thought begin to settle. "Oh my god..." Such were the growing pains of a new nation. It had never occurred to her to rock the geopolitical boat so much as to take on the political titan of Earth.
I nodded, grinning at Hugo as I pumped my eyebrows. "So, with that out of the way, did you have anything you wanted to talk to me about or was this just paying back a favor?"
Hugo chuckled and shook his head. "Well, I did look forward to catching up, Ezekiel, but if you're asking, I was hoping to speak to you about arranging some of your personal security robots. We haven't exactly had threats yet, but the more outspoken critics of the CRA have started using loaded language and I'd like to be ready."
I drummed my fingers on the table as I nodded. "Okay, I think I can make something happen."
When we were done, I tipped every member of the staff another fifty-thousand credits for shits and giggles.
Skill List:
Mathematics: 1-10
Computer Programming: 1-10
Physics: 1-10
Material Sciences: 1-10
Nanomachines: 1-5
Orbital Mechanics: 1-5
Quantum Mechanics: 1-5
Artificial Intelligence: 1-5
Artificial Intelligence Shackling: 1-10
Blackboxing: 1-10 (New)
Robotics: 1-5
Ruggedization: 1-5
Molecular Assembly: 1-5
Safeguards: 1-5
Failsafes: 1-5
Genetics: 1-10
Astrobotany: 1-4
Medicine: 1-3
Social Engineering: 1-5
Public Speaking: 1
Speed-Reading: 1
Teaching: 1
Critical Thinking: 1
Logistics: 1-5
Strategy: 1-5
Public Relations: 1-5
Corporate Espionage: 1
Automation: 1-5 (New)
Business Management: 1-3
Economics: 1-3
Aperture Science Technologies: 1-10 (New)
If you like what I do, please consider supporting My . Four chapters of Industrious up on & Subscribe Star right now, There's also FOUR new chapters of The New Ron out as well! Oh, and don't forget the first second and third chapters of my New SAO story "Where Your God Is" and two chapters for Winning Peace!
If you'd prefer Subscribe Star for whatever reason, I recently made an account there, too! SUBSCRIBE STAR