The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  No public service was overlooked. Medical, law enforcement, security, education, each system took the best parts of other models from around the world and overhauled the parts that didn’t work. Despite not being officially recognised by either the UN or any other sovereign nation, our statistics for public health, public safety and education started to become included in the world rankings, invariably being place near the top of the lists. A statistic that I – and the Atlantian people - was immensely proud of.

  I had admired this developing country, along with the attitude and work ethic of the newly named Atlantian people, from my new home in the Nation’s capital – The Tower having not finished construction yet. My title hadn’t yet been decided on and – in another break from tradition, akin to the naming of the nation – neither me, nor Alice had any input in its evolution.

  The national press had started wondering what to call our new political system. The people all had representatives that debated internal domestic policies fairly and equally in the People’s Congress – one of the first building to be completed in the Capital. But I was in charge of the overall direction of the nation; if the new congress couldn’t reach a consensus on a certain subject, I was called in to break the deadlock, but otherwise I had very little involvement in the day to day running of people’s lives. They governed themselves.

  My part in the system was something of an enigma. I wasn’t a monarch; I hadn’t inherited the title and there was no mechanism by which the ‘crown’ could be passed on. A dictator or Autocrat was a more technically accurate term, but the press had immediately discounted that title due to its negative connotations – Hitler had never been particularly altruistic and Stalin wasn’t known for his benevolence and although the compliments made me cringe, the national sentiment towards my leadership was overwhelmingly positive; the people could see that I genuinely cared for their wellbeing and had gone to great lengths to provide for their needs. Then one day, a Journalist had come across a phrase used by the scientists back when they were marketing the island to the world.

  Talk to Marcus, he speaks for us.

  The Speaker; it was a simple enough title and described my job role perfectly. I spoke for Atlantia and would continue to do so for as long as the people wanted me to.

  Whereas almost the entire infrastructure of the nation was planned and built from the ground up – either by myself or by the people - there were two institutions that were born out of necessity and came into being almost as a natural evolution of the political landscape: The Council and Atlas.

  The Council was a think tank that reported directly to the Speaker’s office, almost the equivalent of a political cabinet or advisory board in other governments. The Council was different in a number of key aspects, though; firstly, its members were made up of experts in their respective fields and none of them had to hold any political office to be appointed, they were invited by the Tower and the overwhelming majority of the invitations were accepted with excitement. At any one time, there were economists, psychologists, law enforcement and legal experts, representatives from the Hawking Institute to advise of technological issues, experts on international affairs which could be supplemented with members more knowledgeable on certain regions and usually a number of members of the People’s congress, usually to advise on the domestic political landscape and how the councils recommendations would affect the day to day lives of Atlantians.

  The main purpose of the Council was to provide me with expert recommendations on aspects of the nation – or its policies - that could be improved. I was an engineer and statecraft – especially the literal crafting of a state – was well outside my area of expertise, Alice was able to plan and implement massive swathes of the necessary workload but was lacking when it came to the intricacies of more complex issues. It was, for example, universally agreed that Atlantia would need a police force, but the recruitment, training, structure and distribution of the force needed the advice of an expert; Neither Alice nor I were anything close. As part of the immigration policy, each new citizen was required to disclose their previous occupation, it was possible to find and elicit the help of almost any profession from this vast source of experience. In this case, a former San Diego Police Chief had agreed to advise us and was, in turn, credited with establishing the Atlantian law enforcement arm of government. In later years, the Council would evolve into the formal advisory committee to the Tower, in charge of questioning and evaluating all matters that I asked them to review. They became something of a sounding board by which I could judge the relevance and success of any decision I had made; they had no real authority, but I always took their assessments very seriously. They would soon be called the Speaker’s Council.

  It was one of the economists on the Council that first hypothesised the creation of Atlas. The question was simple; although the essential building blocks for the nation were being harvested almost for free – either from the ever-expanding tapping of carbon emitting sources, or undersea mining – the nation still needed a source of income. Taxation – at least at this point – wasn’t possible, the vast majority of the workforce was employed by the state and needed to be paid, it would be over a decade before taxation could cover the nations expenditure, the money needed to come from somewhere.

  The Spartans and the Artisans were some of the more exotic and exciting creations that had come from the invention of carbonite, but there were countless other – smaller, more benign – pieces of technology that posed no risk of weaponization whatsoever. It was proposed that a company be established to sell these products in the markets of individual countries; instead of a using informal trade agreements to distribute technology to national governments, this company would be able to sell them directly to a country’s population and businesses. Micro-processors, batteries, encryption protocols, communication antennas, commercial aircraft and engine designs; all of these were technologies that sprang from - but didn’t necessarily encompass - the creation of the Atlantian military. Providing they were contained in a solid carbonite shell and immune from reverse engineering, they could be sold for massive profits on the open market.

  Atlas became the umbrella cooperation for a vast number of subsidiary companies operating all over the world - with the obvious exception of a few unfriendly nations - and would quickly grow to include the international trade that had kept Atlantia’s economy in the green until now. The profits they brought in were staggering; a single microchip – the carbonite for which was sourced from a capped power plant and the construction was handled by an artisan at first and a state employee later – cost a few cents each to make, a single one sold for over a thousand dollars, the profits of which were funnelled back into the state coffers. Not only did Atlas allow us to fund the creation and support of the forming nation but would keep national taxes at a minimum for decades.

  Within three years, the three branches of government, the economy, the defence forces, immigration and every other institutional facet of state policy had settled into something that would be recognisable to Atlantians of later generations. However, it wouldn’t be long before those policies – and the lengths we were willing to go to defend them – were put under international scrutiny. For all its advancements, all its laws and social standards, Atlantia was still an unrecognised nation; we were little more than a large populated island, a pariah or rogue state, as the US would call us. The next big hurdle would be gaining international recognition, and that would mean negotiating with the UN.

  “Wait,” Penny finally said, a look of confusion crossing her face, “that seems an awful lot to pack into such a short space of time.”

  “I know,” I nodded, “It isn’t much of a climax is it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Like I said earlier… all the important stuff is boring. The unfortunate truth – at least as far as your story goes – is that I didn’t really have much to do with the establishment of the Atlantian state. I built the island, I created a place for those pe
ople to come to, but the majority of work was done by them. I set up the people’s congress and built the infrastructure that the congress asked for and the people did the rest.”

  Penny still looked unconvinced. “Look,” I continued, “Before Atlantia, there were two types of country: Ones that had been there since time immemorial, or ones who had been established in the turmoil of conflict. The US needed the revolution, the Czech Republic needed the Balkans war, countries on the African continent have changed more times than can be counted and almost all of them needed a conflict of some kind to make that happen. Atlantia is the only country in even vaguely modern history that has been established without either time nor violence; the whole process was unprecedented, but the reality is that these people came here and built the country for themselves, I was just along for the ride.”

  “hmmm… It still feels like a lot of the details have just been skimmed over.”

  “They have been…” I answered plainly, “but they were details that I wasn’t really involved in. I appreciate that you want to get the whole story, but I can’t take credit for the work that I didn’t do. Surely a respected journalist would only want accurate details…” I winked at Jonathan, “Besides, the scientists and politicians who were around back then are still going, maybe you can talk to them to fill in the blanks.”

  “I suppose…” she huffed.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” I smirked at Jonathan who was in turn smiling at his pouting girlfriend, “This was still years before the actual founding of the country. There were a lot of things that happened in that time that I ‘was’ involved in…”

  “Like what?”

  “UN recognition, convoluted negotiations, a war… things like that.”

  Her head shot up, “really?”

  “Yes really.”

  “Ok, that could work…” she said, sounding much chirpier already, “maybe a brief interlude in the story would do it some good.”

  Chapter 28

  Another brief interlude

  “So, what was the world like?” Penny asked, sitting back into the sofa and admiring the view from the Sky room’s windows, “back then I mean, the original Turnbull was before my time and his son was long gone before I was really old enough to understand what was going on. It couldn’t have been easy for Atlantia to become established in that kind of political climate.”

  I smiled at the pretty young journalist, this is the sort of story that thrilled her, it was where her mind belonged. “it was… complicated,” I finally conceded, “but yes, for this part of the story to make sense, you do need to understand the political landscape of the world at the time that it was happening.

  “David Turnbull Snr came to power before I was in my teens” I explained, “and from the very beginning there were claims that his election was flawed. He had won the electoral college vote but had less popular votes than his opposition…”

  “electoral what?”

  “Don’t ask, the US political system is a joke… Anyway, questions about the legitimacy of his presidency dogged the early years of his administration, those questions – and the conspiracy behind them – only became worse when proof of Russian meddling in the election process was found by the FBI. They couldn’t quite prove Turnbull’s personal knowledge or involvement in the collusion with the Russians, but they came pretty close. To the US people – at least the ones who weren’t fanatical supporters of the President – Turnbull was an idiot, a completely unfit President whose election campaign managers had cheated to get him into office and he was just stupid enough not to notice; at least that was all they hoped it was.

  “At the same time, Russia and China were going through political changes of their own. The Chinese Premier Xu had made himself President for life, and – a few years later – Alexi Ivanov, the Russian President did the same thing, both governments ruthlessly crushing any political opposition to their rule. Both countries had been trying to expand their sphere of influence for years, but the Russian’s especially had made a new concerted effort to swing the balance of power and one of the ways they did that was to interfere in the US elections, ensuring victory for the candidate that Moscow knew they could use.”

  “Yeah, I remember learning about Turnbull Snr in my political sciences class in college,” Jonathan added. He had been the recipient of a full Atlantian education, the superiority of which was only recently becoming apparent. “I could never decide if he was an idiot or a genius.”

  “What do you mean?” Penny asked, once again tapping furiously on her tablet.

  “Well, he either bungled his way through his entire presidency, stumbling from one scandal to another, or he intentionally caused those scandals to distract the American people from the international involvement in his administration. They were bad enough to cause a media frenzy, but not quite bad enough to get him impeached and there were too many of them for it to be a coincidence.”

  “A lot of those scandals, however, had the unintentional side effect of isolating the US on the world stage.” I nodded, “An insult thrown at one world leader or another, an unnecessary trade war, heightening military tensions in the middle east only to back down again before conflict erupted, but he really caused concern when he started becoming friendly with the Kim regime of – what was then – North Korea.”

  “Yeah, even I’ve heard of him.” Penny frowned

  “their war with the South had ended in the 50s” I continued, “but their threats against them – and any country who supported them – had grown increasingly aggressive over the years to the point where another all-out war seemed almost inevitable, historically, the west – the US in particular- had supported South Korea, with Russia and China supporting the North. Turnbull took it upon himself to mediate talks to calm the tensions but ended up embarrassing himself when he expressed his admiration for both Kim and his regime – a regime who were renowned for their oppressive and tyrannical methods. This gave Kim all the confidence he needed to increase his threats and Turnbull simply downplayed them all.”

  “Sounds like more of an idiot than a genius,” Penny smirked to Jonathan.

  “The US had had a few thousand Marines garrisoned in the de-militarised zone between the two countries for decades,” I went on, “and the 7th fleet had been stationed in the Sea of Japan to make sure that North Korea could be stopped if they ever attacked the South. The threat of involvement by the US military was the main factor in maintaining peace on the peninsula, so when Turnbull started relaxing sanctions and lowering the numbers of ships and American Personnel in the area…”

  “Kim took that as all the permission he needed.” Penny finished, finally understanding the situation.

  “When North Korea crossed the DMZ and invaded the South during the latter half of Turnbull’s second term,” Jonathan said, his knowledge impressing even me, “All the President did was issue a strongly worded statement, but he secretly ordered his Marines not to engage the North Koreans unless they were fired upon first… The North Korean army simply went around them, the 7th fleet did nothing.”

  “By the time Turnbull ordered military action it was too late,” I added “Seoul fell in a few days and almost the whole country was under Kim’s control by the time the President acted, the war had already been lost. It was here that the full scale of Russia’s influence over the President became apparent.”

  “Russia? I’m not following.” Penny looked up confused.

  “At first,” Jonathan explained, “People thought that Turnbull had just screwed up, he had bought the assurances given to him by Kim and when the attack came, he froze. That hesitation gave Kim all the time he needed to annex the South.”

  “But when an international military coalition was organised to retake the south – Britain, Europe, Australia, Japan and a host of other countries – America flatly refused to participate.” I elaborated, “That raised a lot of eyebrows so people – the press mainly – started looking for answers. It turned out that Turnbu
ll hadn’t hesitated at all, he had been ordered by Moscow not to intervene… and he’d obeyed.”

  Penny’s eyebrows raised in realisation as Jonathan started to speak again. “Obviously Turnbull denied the whole thing, and there wasn’t quite enough evidence to kick him out of office and it was too close to election time – when he would have left office anyway – to start a proper inquiry, but the whole world knew the truth; Turnbull was a puppet for the Ivanov government in Moscow and the South Koreans had paid the price.”

  The news reports from that time flashed through my mind. “The atrocities inflicted on the South Koreans were horrific. The entire government was publicly executed on the national propaganda news network, nobody knows exactly how many people died in total, but there were at least a couple of hundred thousand civilian casualties, maybe even millions.” I sighed, “In 1937, The Japanese army occupied the Chinese city of Nanking, the resulting barbarity – now known as the Rape of Nanking - is seen as one of the worst military atrocities in history; as many as 300,000 men, women and children were murdered, countless more were mutilated and raped. The citizens of Seoul would have seen that kind of violence as a mercy compared to what the North Koreans did to them. The people who survived were submitted to a brutally oppressive and violent regime who subjugated the South Koreans with a merciless resolve. South Korea went quiet, even the presence of foreign journalists no longer allowed by the state; there was an international outcry, but Turnbull did nothing; he had been ordered not to and without American backing, no coalition could hope to match North Korea’s – now United Korea’s – million-man army.”