Singularity considerations

Midnight Imperial One: Cloak and Dagger One

a Singularity consideration

Upload Zero-Minus-One

Those who lived through the revolution didn't necessarily perceive or even understand its cause. The spiraling commodity prices; constriction of personal freedoms; continued indifference radiating from governments; even the numerous brushfire wars over dwindling resources, into which the country had been drawn. It's doubtful that even the instigators were fully aware of what spurred them to such actions – disobedience came from nowhere, from everywhere.

Politics and parties, all the same at their core, no longer offered any choices; democracy had failed. Biased media over-flowed with allegations of corruption and counter-claims of elitist agendas, all at the expense, both monetary and ethical, of the already squeezed merchant classes. But the shift found support among the semi-militarized police and emergency services, themselves being slowly crucified by an out-of-touch legal system and capitalist agendas pursuing profit over moral responsibility. Then the military entered the rebellion on the side of the public, ending centuries of government control. Commentators blamed the politicians' continued taste for foreign conflict, always citing defense as the justification for offence. Not all the military rebelled; enough remained loyal to ensure the revolution wasn't bloodless.

Voltaire once stated that 'an ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination'; the revolution began that way. The lead-up to yet another meaningless election saw the murder of three prominent politicians, each from a different party (though in name only, policies and promises had long-since blurred into a uniform set of lies). Then, on polling day, the incumbent prime minister was shot dead on the steps of a local school, as he smiled for the cameras and lied for the very last time, about progressive leadership and a vote for real change. The gunman was wrestled to the ground by a too-slow security team (conspiracy later suggested they'd been paid to react thus), but when the depths of the dead minister's wrong-doings began to surface, support grew and the City ground to a halt as members of the public flooded the streets on the day of the assassin's trial. A scuffle led to minor violence, which begat general unrest and streets full of people in need of clear direction and even clearer answers. Neither were forthcoming, instead water cannon and baton rounds attempted to quell a riot that, until then, hadn't existed. The first wave of police defections drew even more people to walk the streets in search of a truth no one was able to articulate. Violent skirmish escalated into open revolt.

When the blood was finally washed from the streets a coalition of unwilling leaders counted the cost and tried to bring peace to a fractured country. It was a slow and painful process, kept to an agonized crawl by recriminations and the need to repel unwanted assistance from other nations – nations who would soon face revolts of their own as equally disenfranchised peoples began to see the glimmer of a less oppressive future emerge from that first revolution.

The ensuing global political collapse pushed mankind into a darker age, one the history books have tried to hide behind euphemisms and parables; an age that saw the settling of many old scores, and there was no Renaissance to herald a bright, new world after the fall. Mankind proved resilient and there were survivors.

We crawled from the rubble, stared at the Heavens, but pinned our hopes on an Earth-bound science of sustainability and equitable provision. Though at the time it had no name, no central direction, the Technocracy had been born.

Tomòs Skaeon

(From the Introduction) Moral Compass: Survivor's Guide to Technocracy

Upload Zero: Road to Nowhere

Razorwire; concrete; broken glass.

The boy cleared a space among the mounds of rubble, exposing a meagre oval of hard-packed dirt. With only his severely bitten fingernails it took an hour to excavate a hole deep enough to bury the rat. Swathed in the remnants of an old vest, the corpse made a poor bundle. It disappeared quickly beneath poisoned soil and a cairn of masonry fragments.

Holding back tears the boy bid a silent farewell to his dead companion. Never looking back, he retraced his dusty path across the suburban wasteland and into the city precincts.