Infinity Curve - Lamentations to Unseen Friends Across the Vastness of Space

EP. 57 - TRILLIONAIRE'S MASSACRE

SOFIA WALKED INSIDE THE house, her hands covered with soil.

"How'd you get so dirty?" Rick inquired.

He knew the hydroponic gardens, the business that sustained their existence on leased reservation land, included no dirt per se. In fact, the vertical garden buildings they had constructed were comprised mostly from scrap materials collected over the years.

The gardens business was a livelihood in which they both were engaged. Sofia managed the gardens, the choice of crops, and the irrigation systems, while Rick focused on the business aspects like selling to local retailers in the Navajo community and shipping their products to distributors via drones or other transportation.

It worked out well for them and the profits were enough to live on as supplemented by the monthly inducements from the oligarchs running the Westrich government. Everyone considered those payments more as a loyalty bribe than a real attempt at a universal basic income.

The Great Debacle of 2037 annihilated over half the population on Earth, and things were far from 'back to normal' in 2065. Despite the extensive, finely threaded oversight of the oligarchy's AI planning mechanisms, commerce was slow to resume at a pre-Debacle level for a variety of reasons. The 2037 event changed many things, including the levying of additional taxes to support allocations for the multiple new requirements of the day.

The front burner of government spend was directed at defensive systems to protect citizens against another genetic disaster. And there were so many ways another disaster might occur, given the widespread use of gene editing.

The government could hardly control the legitimate gene research and development taking place, much less the surreptitious and malicious. It was this threat more than any other, the threat of another global pandemic, that brought humanity to its knees in the years following the Debacle. This democratization of lethal tech forced the oligarchs to take and maintain control of matters in the midst of the chaotic governmental and societal disarray in the aftermath.

Alone, any single individual might create the next genetic horror. Alone, no individual had the ability to prevent that horror from happening again. As a result, humans were not only lenient toward extensive government control and intrusion into their lives, many expected and even demanded it.

And so began the impetus for the enhanced surveillance state of the oligarchs, aided in substance by myriad new technologies available to them. These included highly evolved artificial intelligence systems; monitoring devices and systems in businesses, homes, and streets, but also in the remotest territories. Drones were extensively used across the oligarchies to efficiently deliver payloads ranging from subsistence food and living essentials to knock-out mists or lethal missiles.

In a small way, the spark of this societal dynamic of control started much earlier in the century after two jet planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York. With a mandate to prevent similar terrorist attacks, governments across the globe gradually and increasingly instituted active surveillance of their citizens.

As social media grew to become the de facto repository for storage aberrant ideologies and radicalism, some of the responsibility for monitoring citizens naturally fell to large corporations. They were already doing it anyway to enhance advertising revenue and profit, using algorithms to predict purchase behaviors. It was an easy reach to extend this tech to monitor and control individuals.

After the Debacle, previous distinctions between corporate entities and governments became further blurred. A typical person never knew or cared much about who had what data on them or how it was being used, as long as they continued living without the threat of a Debacle repeat. Many considered these controls rational and just, given the alternative.