Unable to help themselves, the Marshal said through clenched teeth, “I’ve been out there in the desert with no one to talk to but myself and you degenerates don’t even have the decency to acknowledge a few lousy questions?” In a flash, they drew and fired their hand-gun—its pink blast ripped through the crowd and disappeared into the wall behind them, more than a dozen people collapsing in its path.
Furiously, they shouted, “Are you really more scared of Morton than you are of me?” The Marshal fired again and another row dropped. “Fine!” They fired twice more, but aside from the bodies hitting the floor, no one moved. Residual guilt from the slaughter at Buena Vista came flooding back, but then they fired again. Lowering their arm, the Marshal asked with earnest confusion, “Are you people of principle here? Is this some of that fabled Old Earth determination? Do you all answer to a higher power?!”
Are you kidding? These people don’t even believe in Natural Order, much less gods. There has to be another explanation. With the Logo, they reached out again for wireless connections but still found nothing. Turning to stare at the bartender with their burning blue-grey eyes, the Marshal shouted, “What the hell, man?!”
With prerecorded familiarity, the bartender replied, “Can I get you a drink?”
The Marshal leapt over the bar, manually accessed the vendor’s terminal, and within a few strokes found an automated security protocol that had been activated just before they arrived. Deactivating it sent another brief pulse of signals through the air to release the bar’s patrons—there were a few shouts and screams but most of them ran for the door without a second thought.
The stampede was unruly, and the Marshal considered stopping a few people for interrogation, but they felt bad about the bodies laying on the floor. Fortunately, three men assembled at the bar voluntarily. When things finally quieted down, the Marshal said, “Pour these men some drinks.”
The bartender did, and grateful to be alive, the men started talking about everything and anything that they thought a Marshal might want to know.
“Morton’s been gone for at least a month,” one of them blurted after taking a sip.
“No way. Less than that,” said another.
The third said, “It’s been at least five weeks since I’ve seen him, and I’m in here all the time. Word is, they hopped on their train and went down south. Lookin’ for that werwolf.”
“Yeah,” the man in the middle agreed excitedly. “Wolfchan’s contract bonuses are insane. I’d think about going down there myself if I could stand the stench.”
The men laughed heartily at that and talked a lot about the war down south. They characterized all poachers as dirty anti-establishment hobos, and said that since most of them were not happy with the state of their new union under Kravinov, it had been especially easy for Wolfchan to recruit them. The Marshal was not surprised by the prejudice they harbored against poachers—there was plenty of legal trapping on Earth, but the people out there doing it showed no respect for Natural Order. Still, they were caught off guard by how offended they felt when the men referred to their prey as “manimals.” Considering how Earth’s animal genetics had deviated from Old Earth’s genetic spectrum, they saw it as a clear example of how corporate influence had co-opted the embargo, and they found the whole system despicable. The Marshal muttered contemptuously, “Fuck the animals.”
One man laughed, “Hah! You’re heartless! Who doesn’t like manimals?”
Stony-faced, the Marshal explained, “No, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that the animal kingdom is supposed to be about natural selection. Survival of the fittest. A free market where whatever abilities and characteristics prevail perpetuate, and those that don’t... don’t.” All eyes were on them and they appreciated how intently everyone seemed to be listening. “It defeats the purpose of the embargo. Ever since the gene banks introduced manimals, as you call them so crudely...” They trailed off with obvious frustration, but after a small sip off the top of their drink, they resumed somberly, “It’s not that they aren’t similar to the animals from Old Earth, but why do they have to talk? Even though they breed on their own, they’re a commodity! I don’t know... Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who cares about Natural Order anymore.”
It didn’t show, but the Marshal was embarrassed to have blurted out so much of their personal conspiracy. After taking a much longer draught of their drink, however, they continued with even more passion. “And you poor gits... Do you even realize how messed up it is for you to have CBis? Interfacing directly with computers is prohibited for a reason! Like, what the hell is going on down here? Has the whole world lost their minds? Don’t get me wrong, the animals probably have it the worst out of everyone, and you city folk have it better than the ones working out in the sweatshops, but you’re all slaves!!” She put her drink down a little too hard, and then laughed, “I mean, I guess I am too... but whatever.”
After a long silence, the man sitting closest to them admitted, “Yeah... I think about that stuff sometimes.”
The others nodded in agreement and the one sitting farthest down the line added, “Me too... I take a little offense to your callin’ us city folk though.” The men laughed again, but the Marshal still did not. “That term is reserved for those livin’ in the megacities. This here’s Mechanicsburg. We work for a living.”
They talked about New York for a while, and from the way the men described city folk, the Marshal could understand why no one liked them. Descriptions of their immense wealth and limitless lifespans under pristine white domes reminded the Marshal of pre-ed memories of life aboard starships, and the association made them sick to their stomach. Then they talked about what it was like to live on Earth. The men complained about their jobs. One of them said he sometimes wished he didn’t have a CBi. They said life in a minor city was comparable to the migrant rings minus the benefit of travel, but it didn’t sound like they knew what they were talking about.
At no point did they mention feeling honored to live on humanity’s homeworld, or show any appreciation for how the embargo sheltered them from the onslaught of technology. It made sense, to an extent, because there was no way for them to know how bad it really was out there, or comprehend how many galaxies full of Naturalists now considered Earth to be their Mecca. Nevertheless, the Marshal wanted to scream the truth at them—remind them of the Machine Wars, what enslavement had done to their species, and how Natural Order would restore humanity’s true potential—but internal programming prevented them from doing so.
They talked about Morton and his floating train for a while. Even though their accounts of where the ‘smuggler king’ might have gone were a little dubious and conflicting, it was better than interviewing desert laborers who knew nothing. The men said they had willingly allowed the security protocol that had paralyzed them as a prerequisite to entering the bar. Without a doubt, the Marshal preferred Harvey to this bartender, and Buena Vista to Mechanicsburg. Wondering whether that suggested a causal relationship between population density and enjoyability, they started to worry more about New York.
Staring blankly at the wall behind the bar as they enjoyed another beverage, the Marshal thought to themselves, Maybe we should go back to the tunnels. We saw less than .001% of what’s down there and there’s a more than decent chance that the core facilities are how Morton’s getting things offworld.
Besides, it’s not like the city’s going anywhere.
No.
We’ve wasted enough time already.
The Statues of Liberty, Justitia, and Columbia are waiting.
It’s time to hit the Big Apple.
Nodding in agreement, the Marshal slapped the countertop and stood up. Without bothering to finish their drink or say goodbye, they started for New York City.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Board of Trustees
Minister Brian still didn’t seem to understand why everyone was so upset, so Minister Portsmith stood up to yell some sense into him
. “Because, you fool! For all we know, the damned thing could be Werbian!”
During the period most Naturalist historians considered to be the dying breaths of Old Earth, Dr. Paul J. Werbos inadvertently created a computer that in his words “had a soul.” Born September 4th, 1947 OE, Dr. Werbos was alive to see the birth of the Information Age. After completing his thesis, Beyond Regression: New Tools for Prediction and Analysis in the Behavioral Sciences, Harvard University, 1974 OE, he became a pioneer in the field of machine learning and was dubbed ‘the father of the backpropagation of errors.’ At ninety-eight years of age, which in those days was considered a relatively long career, Dr. Werbos introduced the world to the first functional Computer-Brain interface.
With CBis connecting their minds directly to the internet, people were able to perform tasks at previously unimaginable speeds. Like wildfire, the revolutionary technology reshaped the global economic infrastructure and humanity itself was forever changed. Although they were on the precipice of vast new horizons in terms of capability, more than half of the human population lost their jobs and civilization entered another Dark Age. Most national governments relinquished their sovereignty and United Services incorporated swallowed up their crumbling infrastructure. The unified labor conglomerate kept the economy alive through a long period of blight and inequity, while carrying humanity’s ability to work to new heights. Medicine, engineering, communications, education; virtually every field that affected quality of life was brought to its apex, where they plateaued.
Alongside the financial and political upheaval, the use of CBis turned numerous hypothetical ethical dilemmas into reality. Referencing the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Dr. Werbos famously said, “A key aspect of the noosphere species theory is that the dominant partner in the brain-soul interface is the soul or dark matter side. Thus in attempts to connect traces of psi with data like brain recordings, we should not expect to find anything like a psychic reception or transmission organ in the brain or the peripheral nervous system.” The idea that the content of one’s soul was immeasurable held fast the commercial digitization of minds was prevalent, and critics said that Werbos had been disproven by his own invention. It wasn’t until centuries after his death, when the Werbian machine race revealed itself as a descendant of an AI that he had created, that his theories were validated at the cost of humanity’s freedom.
Silence overtook the virtual conference room. Aside from Brian, every other member of Earth’s Board of Trustees had been harboring the same fears; Portsmith was just the first one who dared to say the word “Werbian” out loud. Most of them imagined Werbian lifeforms the same way they did Marshals; large amorphous clouds of destruction rolling through entire solar systems without pause. As they collectively considered how this scandal could ruin their careers, along with planet Earth, few of them had the fortitude to do anything but cover their mouths and avoid eye contact with one another.
“What?!” Brian asked, looking around the room with genuine confusion. “How did you reach that conclusion?”
Seething, Minister Portsmith stood up to yell something else. Inside the virtual meeting, his holographic belly protruded through the intangible table that the board members were all sitting around, while out in the physical world his actual stomach knocked over a real table and spilled things that audibly broke upon hitting the floor. Frustrated even further, Portsmith bent over to pick up objects that only he could see as he muttered, “For Pete’s sake...”
No one was in the mood to laugh or answer his question, but their silence made Brian’s face go pale. There was palpable fear in his voice as he cried confidently, “No! We get reports of creatures like this all the time! Rogue mutations and whatnot that don’t even get mentioned in these meetings! I thought we were just talking about this one because of the bounty this Wolfchan character put on it!”
Spittle flew from Portsmith’s mouth as he screamed back at Brian, “Do you even hear yourself!?! You think the reason it has such an enormous bounty and HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of poachers chasing it is because it’s like all the others?! It moves faster than any organic lifeform should under the embargo’s genetic guidelines and is growing at an alarming rate... I would be surprised if you weren’t the only person in this room who hadn’t lost a great deal of sleep over it.”
A grumble rolled through the board before Minister Jacoby silenced them with a loud harrumph. Projecting his proudest, most commanding military speaking voice, he boomed, “You all cackle, but Portsmith is absolutely right–”
“No one was cackling, Jacoby...” Minister Beverly cut him off casually. “You can do your grandstanding for military intervention here in a moment, because even I think this is a situation where that needs to be on the table, but I want to remind everyone that nothing has been proven. We have no idea what the creature is, and at this point in time, even discrete actions on our part may well be more costly than letting things work themselves out naturally.”
“Hah!” Jacoby scoffed, making no effort to hide his disdain. “There’s no time for a plan that you admit is reasonable, yet time enough for you to advocate for us to do nothing... Typical. Is there anyone else who would like to weigh in?”
Before anyone else could speak, Minister Beverly snapped back, “Aside from those of us in this room and the poachers down on Earth, few people are paying any attention to the creature. Even if it is–” Involuntarily, she hesitated at the word. “–Werbian...” She had to pause again to compose herself. “If someone does start looking at it closely, all they will see is an impressive monster.” She glanced around the table at representatives from the gene banks and entertainment industries, for whom that was comforting. “Whereas, if we give any indication that this is something more than that, it will become more than that...”
“A horse of another color,” Portsmith tried.
Ignoring the questionable usage of the idiom, for the fat man was known for butchering colloquialisms, Minister Jacoby crossed his arms and assumed his signature scowl. With dry sarcasm, he said to Beverly, “At least that’s a specific objection and not another vague generalization.” He sighed with audible frustration. “However, I am confused as to your actual position. Normally, I’d wait for you to unfurl your black magic, but I think today we should cut straight to the chase. As we’ve been discussing, the time to do nothing is done. Is there any type of motion you would like to introduce?”
Enduring her scowl, Jacoby went around the room looking for volunteers. “Anyone? No? Fine. Minister Beverly, if you hadn’t interrupted me I’d have said this by now, but I do not think putting troops on the ground would be prudent at this juncture.” Many ministers looked visibly surprised by his uncharacteristic statement, but Beverly glared at him unabashedly. “I would still recommend requisitioning an armada to keep at the ready, in a distant orbit, outside the dampeners, but we already have a Marshal down there. Ordering her to eliminate the monster would be a better use of our resources.”
“Two birds with one stone,” Minister Portsmith said thoughtfully. There were a few laughs but far more disgruntled murmurs, for they had spent a good deal of time discussing the Marshal’s precarious predicament as well. Since the incident in Buena Vista, the board had informally agreed to keep the Marshal hidden and busy until they had everything figured out.
“Excellent usage!” Minister Beatrice said enthusiastically. Then she turned to Minister Jacoby and said with scathing sincerity, “But seriously, did you two miss the other half of our meeting? We agreed to stay the course!”
Although he had been voted down several times before, Minister Lewis decided to speak up again. “Concealment and redirection have worked well for us so far, but as things progress–” For liability reasons, they all had to be careful not to mention technical issues with the Marshal program explicitly, and Lewis hated speaking in metaphors. With a deep sigh of frustration, he continued, “We are sitting on a powder keg... and every day we wait, anothe
r fuse is added to it.”
In a very good impression of Minister Jacoby, Minister Shinto shouted, “Put troops on the ground!”
Everyone laughed, including Jacoby, who took back control of the conversation by shouting, “The thing about powder kegs is that they all go off eventually.” Standing up, he began pacing around the room. “Even if you get them wet, they dry out and become dangerous again. Putting the Marshal and the monster together is risky, but it will help us control the burn.” Murmurs of understanding trickled through the board. “And on that same note, I think our dear Matron mentioned the perfect venue for the encounter...” He pointed to the virtual wall, where a diagram of the planet’s core was already projected. “As we’ve learned, the maintenance tunnels have been compromised and that has proved a difficult situation to remedy.”
Even though Minister Brian understood the hidden message there, he forgot his subtlety. “So, you want the Marshal to fight the monster in the tunnels?”
A hushed silence fell over the room, for although no lines had been crossed, Brian’s statement was more explicit than most of the ministers felt comfortable with. The board was under the impression that the potentially Werbian creature had been smuggled in through the planet’s core, and although that was a lie told to them by the Matron, admitting any ability to control the creature or knowledge of its origins was unacceptable.
With a frustrated sigh, Minister Portsmith tried to move past it. “Put all our eggs in one pot, so to speak. If everything goes well, we could even issue a public statement about what happened. If not, at least it’s all underground...”
Under the Shadow of the Plateau: Frontier Forever Page 23