Over the six weeks that followed what was named 'Day Zero' by the Dissemination Army, the severity and intensity of the violence gradually subsided and various political and social interest groups began emerging and fighting for space to be heard in an attempt to bring back some order to their local areas and return a sense of stability and community to the organisation of their respective societies. Further signs that the situation was settling down soon became evident as people began to pay considerably more attention to the establishment of new safety zones, both within and without the pre-existing zones, and of organising the distribution of food and other provisions, providing essential services, such as healthcare and schooling, and reinstating and maintaining the public utilities and other kinds of fundamental infrastructure.
Monitoring the emerging situation, and fully aware that there was a real danger that the chaos could have still turned in on itself cannibalistically and intractably, the Dissemination Army identified and invited thousands of people to represent the needs of their local areas' environmental and socio-cultural diversity at what it called 'The World Representative Assembly for the Creation of a New Apparatus of Prosocial and Inclusive Opportunity,' which was scheduled to be held in orbit the following week, exactly seven weeks after Day Zero.
Chapter 27
Near the exit at the back of one of the auditoriums being used for an assembly in one of the commandeered space metropolises, Samuel sits among thousands of representatives but barely listens to the speaker making her case about how best to proceed considering the short timetable and the urgencies inherent to the situation; instead, he's consumed by his own thoughts — speculations about what Ikaros would have made of all this. Believing that Ikaros was quite level headed about what was involved in massive change, Samuel feels confident that he would have ultimately been supportive, although critical and sceptical throughout.
Samuel looks around at the audience, rises from his chair, and heads casually for the exit, comfortable with the fact that he's not needed in this part of the process and, importantly, that everyone at the assembly has been given a clear understanding of what the consequences of failure are as long as the Dissemination Army maintains its dominance in space with its various kinds of support on the ground. Expediting this, despite its being decidedly ironic, the fledgling democratic apparatus of governance already has high on its agenda the need to implement promptly a series of restrictive policies and security measures to try and prevent the emergence and strengthening of such groups as the Global Domination Corporation's Dissemination Army and Laboratory Network, although it is never targeted or mentioned directly: the knowledge of recent events and the history that brought the world to this point has amplified and generalised the fear of what may yet come, which is a predictable motivator in this context considering the ever-present threat of a range of recently emboldened and radically ideological insurrectionist groups attempting to take a foothold in their local areas while harbouring intensely held aspirations for their own particular brand of global domination and restructuring.
Although the Dissemination Army is already doing all it can to prevent counter-revolutions by way of aggressive targeting and facilitating suppression and diffusion, Samuel knows that such attempts made by a revolutionary army or an established state are ultimately futile and that the key to stability and a society worth living in lies elsewhere. His main concern is with three main areas: 1) the broader and softer social policies and programmes that foster community bonds, social inclusion, civility, education, and cooperative and ambitious endeavour for the future of science, technology, the individual, society, and the environment; 2) the way the colluding and machinating news media of the status quo ante is radically reconfigured and constrained within agreed upon principles of newsworthiness and procedure; and 3) the structure and functionality of the emerging people's representative democracy, which has already been decided by the Dissemination Army that it will be conspicuously lacking in any 'professional' politicians — instead, governmental incumbencies are to be held by those who have been randomly selected from the general population, subsequently subjected to screening and filtering by a panel of their peers, and then assigned roles in which they must serve their period of duty as the people's representatives unless wrongdoing or incompetence sees them dismissed beforehand.
Intimately aware of the speculative and experimental nature of all this, and the inherent difficulties in averting the monkey-wrenching of political entryists and opportunists, Samuel prefers to take a quiet, wait-and-see approach while remaining in the wings, ready to intervene if the need ever arises — he more than half expects it to but is unfazed by this prospect as he views engagement in events as an exercise, no matter what they entail or where they lead.
Stepping into a hallway on his way to a shuttle bay, he merges with a large crowd of representatives walking briskly from one auxiliary meeting to another; he remains largely unnoticed and unrecognised despite his distinguished appearance, and is thankful to be left alone to mull over a memorised passage from The Philosophy of Action in Extreme Conditions: The Memoirs of a Free Agent:
Insofar as I'm interested in organisationism, the establishment, and attempts to generate, extend and perpetuate the handling of power, I'm also necessarily interested in organisational breakdown, disestablishment, and the interruption of power and its reconfiguration, which, from our rich historical experience, we know can occur through a wide range of change modalities. Within the dynamics of organisationism, there is no basis for an end point in this cyclical process, and thus we need to postulate a heterogeneous condition of continuous change, which provides an intractable problem for the maintenance of power and control in both positive and negative terms, be it opportunity creation or prevention and suppression, etc. Therefore, we should expect that an organisational form may make use of whatever resources and techniques are available as required in the prevailing and emerging conditions; moreover, although some actions have varying detrimental effects on others in the field of influence — whether directly or indirectly — this should be taken as a common feature of organisational forms in both society and in nature, which is to say that the process of organising is dialectical.
Nevertheless, through following the trail left by an organisational form, any one of us is free to make the judgement that the price is too high to pay for the continuation of its modus operandi or its likely trajectory of adaptive transformations without there being some forceful kind of interception followed by re-routing and reconfiguring, or disestablishment and supersession. It's here that those among us with the will and the opportunity can attempt to intervene in whatever way they can or have a desire to; however, if they're unprepared to engage fully in the dialectics of organisation, their prospects will be correspondingly compromised, and they'll be quite vulnerable and likely only ever be a negligible or partial yet manageable threat or temporary victor.
In contrast, while a thorough-going dialectician is prepared to do whatever it takes without compunction if they believe it will achieve their objectives, a humane agent, although also being prepared to do what's required if need be, will hope that it won't come to this and will act accordingly while considering the required resources and the possible manoeuvres, then weighing the potential costs of an operation and the calculated chances of success against the desire or even the perceived obligation to make an attempt to effect change.
Unless circumstances force people to be reconstructed, most will never come close to being a change agent of any great standing; choosing not to aspire and take to the path, however, is often a miscalculation as the cost of withdrawing away from change agency is often much higher than engagement despite all its inherent dangers.
AGENT ZERO
(NEW WORLD TRILOGY)
Olsen Jay Nelson
Copyright © 2012 Olsen Jay Nelson
All rights reserved.
Third edition: July 2012
Written between December 2011 and April 2
012.
Approx. 15.6K
Description
[SF context: AGENT ZERO is near-future, high-tech, R&D, revolutionary, world system, dystopian radical speculative fiction with a very limited space presence.]
A jaded tycoon refocuses all his energies on disrupting the undeniably diabolical course of the future for the good of the world system.
After years of being undermined and targeted in business because of his progressive views and intentions, Henry 38 becomes fed up with the corruption of the elitist establishment and realises he’s in a strong position to resist current trends and make changes on his own terms. He gradually rechannels his time, energy and extensive wealth into R&D programmes focused on disrupting the future, an important part of which involves providing opportunity and power to those who have a strong desire for systemic change.
He observes and facilitates his social experiment from a distance for many years, eventually coming out of the dark to participate actively in the course of world changing events executed by the organisation put together by his most successful aspirant, Ikaros Jonez.
Henry and the revolutionary organisation pool resources and proceed to develop an effective R&D environment to experiment with New World Dynamics in an attempt to generate a progressive, stable and prosocial world system.
Not all is as it seems, though, and everything they’ve achieved and believe in will be tested on a grand scale before coming close to reaching their ambitions for a better world.
[AGENT ZERO is either part 1 or 2 of the NEW WORLD TRILOGY. AGENT ZERO expands on a pivotal character featured minimally in DAY ZERO, and it also alludes to, and overlaps with a few events and facts found in DAY ZERO. Due to this, both titles contain spoilers of varying degrees, so it can’t be said with confidence which one should be read first. Readers will only be able to make their minds up after the fact.]
Part 1
Houston, Texas: April 17, 2052
Henry peers down from high up in his office building to the street far below as Ikaros Jonez climbs slowly into the back of a cab, which soon heads off and merges with the late-night traffic. Henry looks away and out at the lights of the city and the darkness just beyond. After conducting operations here for so many years and being the last to abandon the empty office space, he takes a deep breath, turns and heads towards the elevator. Thoughts about the trials of his past and his hopes for the future intermingle, clash and compete for attention, all of which is enhanced by his now-mild intoxication. This continues while he sits quietly in the back of his chauffeur-driven car on the way to the airport, where he’s to board a private jet, head up to Canada, and, with a sense of relief, slip quietly into a more connected and purposeful kind of isolation … with freedom and creative control.
• • •
Twenty-two years earlier, Henry, who was 45 years old at the time, was being lambasted by the media, certain politicians and political organisations for being responsible for the synthetic oil crisis that disrupted the world economy and saw thirty-eight countries severely affected by the shortfall. Every day for a month, Henry and his media team fought back and conducted interviews and their own media campaigns in an attempt to minimise the damage to the company and the accusations that seemed to be taking hold, much to the delight of the instigators of the fiasco: the covert alliance of crude oil power holders and their political supporters — known only to themselves as the Black Gold Syndicate (BGS), no matter how ironic that had come to sound — had been taking it upon itself to disrupt and undermine the operations of the synthetic oil industry in an effort to offset the continuing diminishment of the market share of crude oil and to maintain relevance in the economy until no hope remained for the ever-dwindling reserves of oil. The past, present and the future were against them, yet they still continued to struggle.
In the months leading up to the crisis, Henry was beguiled by the rapid increase in demand for synthetic oil and worked night and day to ensure that production met demand and that all the delivery mechanisms were in place, bringing on board several new transport companies to deliver faithfully all the orders. Unbeknown to him, the International Shipping Guild had been infiltrated years earlier by moles employed by the Black Gold Syndicate who gradually made their way to positions of greater power.
After considerable planning, and aiming for a critical threshold that would provide a substantial impact, the Black Gold Syndicate and the International Shipping Guild put into effect their operation that saw thousands of ships delayed for several weeks; the result of this was that the countries affected suffered major disruptions to industry and productivity, which quickly caused a cascade of other problems locally and globally, such as food and water shortages that provided quick deaths to nearly two million already desperate people living on the edge, and a temporary famine for over twenty million more. The active members of the Black Gold Syndicate in their positions of leadership and control in business, media and politics proceeded to spin propaganda about the inadequacies of the synthetic oil industry in terms of its delivery mechanisms, blaming it for overstretching and being unable to fulfil its productivity quotas, which evidently needed to be compensated for by crude oil.
Henry and his colleagues and competitors in the synthetic oil industry were particularly perplexed by this as peak oil had already long-since occurred and crude oil had increasingly been confined to a niche market, and any long-term aspiration to maintain a stable and large share of the oil requirements of the world were fanciful; nevertheless, dealing with the death throes of the crude oil industry was something that they had to take seriously as there was obviously so much at stake, at least in the short-term.
Being the CEO of the largest synthetic oil company, SynOTex, and the president of the International Synthetic Oil Association (ISOA), Henry was the primary target for the international scare campaign, which included character assassination: certain media outlets initially gave Henry the pejorative moniker ‘Henry 38’ because of the thirty-eight countries affected during the crisis. This was soon elaborated on, and it was less than subtly ‘revealed’ that he was already known by this name and that it had originally arisen from a suspicious body count totalling 38 that had piled up in the early stages of the development of his company — evidently, these apparent victims were those who had stood in the way of his ‘megalomaniacal desire for power’ and were thus ‘taken care of’ by Henry personally, or by a number of international hit men. Although the intimation was clear, the specifics were never disclosed publicly, nor did they need to be: the ‘revelation’ into his character went viral. Further, it was claimed that an investigation was still being actively pursued by the FBI and that informants had suggested that the case was coming to a conclusion and that an arrest warrant was about to be acquired; nothing ever eventuated from this, though, and officials neither confirmed nor denied any investigation had ever been undertaken into Henry’s reputation and alleged past actions.
The extent of the campaign against synthetic oil and Henry was so pervasive and powerful internationally that it looked like much of what was being thrown out there would stick, despite the best counter-claims and any possible apologies that could be made. Something more substantial and systemic needed to occur to swing things around: Henry, his media assistants, the board of the ISOA, and the few politicians they had on side around the world did their best over the weeks that followed the crisis to ameliorate the situation, but their results seemed negligible if not futile due to the inherent, opportunistic biases in the media and the politicking and sabotaging that persistently overwhelmed them.
Three weeks into the crisis, the crude oil companies implemented a well-crafted strategy to take up the shortfall in distribution, which resulted in the economic and social conditions starting to ‘re-stabilise.’ Although Henry knew that this was only a temporary matter, the Black Gold Syndicate promoted the idea through their spokespersons that the progress made in rectifying the situation should be seen as an indication of the responsiven
ess and functional capacity of the crude oil industry to continue to meet the demands of a large section of the oil market. Henry and his colleagues evidently weren’t pleased.
Six weeks after the beginning of the crisis, Henry and his entourage of ten assistants flew to London for the Annual World Energy Conference, where he had several meetings and presentations scheduled and hoped to gain some support and assistance in taking on his opponents. The conference was held over seven days and had speakers from all around the world and discussion panels on a wide range of the issues and challenges that the world’s growing energy needs faced. In that regard, the conference seemed that it would be full of allies — Henry, though, was quite concerned about the extent of their influence compared to those who were absent, or present yet invisible and perhaps indistinguishable.
Over the first three days of the conference, Henry was generally treated with some caution and viewed as an awkward kind of celebrity with considerable notoriety. Predictably, some didn’t seem to know how to take him considering the slander that had proliferated over the past few weeks; however, while a small number of others coldly felt he was worthy of ignominy regardless, the majority were sympathetic to his situation. They knew that he was part of a well-planned and malicious political assault that alluded to higher-level machinations that had immediate and broad-reaching consequences for their own initiatives insofar as they were likely to tread on powerful toes themselves the more their companies emerged and attempted to find their niches in the new-world energy economy.
NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) Page 22