A researcher comes up and leans against the railing next to Henry. “I’m following something interesting coming out of Hong Kong: Ikaros Jonez has just surfaced.”
Henry looks at her intrigued. “Really? Already? What’s he up to, then?”
“Well, he’s taken over a piece of prime real estate by Victoria Harbour, and he’s apparently created a company called ‘The Global Domination Corporation,’ of all things.”
Henry immediately chuckles. “Has he now? The Global Domination Corporation. What’s it about … apart from the seemingly obvious?”
“Well, it appears like it’s some kind of stunt: he’s just put up an enormous, provocative sign on top of the building for all to see, and the whole thing’s gone viral… There’s a social uproar, an international media circus, etcetera, and things will probably come to a head sooner rather than later over there, I’d say.”
“I bet it will. Interesting… Follow his movements and let me know what happens.”
“Sure thing.”
“Actually, I’ll come inside shortly and check out some of the reports, if you can get them ready for me.” Henry finds it hard not to smile at the very thought of the situation. “I wonder what the hell he’s got planned.”
“Yeah, there are a few interesting articles and videos I’ve found that you may want to take a look at. I’ll see what else I can find.”
Henry nods in acknowledgement, and the researcher heads back inside. He takes a sip of coffee and speculates on Ikaros’s point of view and what can be done in the background to facilitate the progress of his future activities. The apparent irony of this isn’t lost to him; he just doesn’t agree with it. Instead, he feels sure that he’ll be willing to follow Ikaros’s lead and respect his agency regardless — after all, to do otherwise would be beside the point with an experiment like this and would just be a reproduction of the unacceptable circumstances that he was offered all those years ago in London. With a smile, he turns and steps inside.
Part 3
Over a year later, after receiving an update from his researchers, Henry selected two key scientist-technologists to infiltrate the Global Domination Corporation’s newly formed underground R&D network, which Ikaros had started a while after being kicked out of Hong Kong, signalling to Henry that the programme was moving into a higher gear. Being well qualified to engage in home-based R&D of the required nature, the moles soon found themselves in a position of influence in the sizeable international network, where they were able to contribute considerably to the direction of the programme and had access to enough information to keep Henry abreast of developments over the long years that followed…
The Global Domination Corporation abruptly emerged out of years of clandestine activity in 2071. In a swiftly executed operation that inspired masses of ordinary citizens to participate, the Global Domination Corporation led a worldwide people’s revolution with a detailed campaign strategy, asymmetrical technologies and a guerilla army of scientist-technologists that resulted in the installation of the World Representative Democracy within a matter of weeks after disestablishing the international institutions, nation states and their organs, and private corporations. Further, during its extensive media campaign in which it disrupted all dissemination channels with its own message, the corporation embarrassingly exposed the long-running, publicly-hidden space programmes of the world’s oligarchic organisations, which were largely aimed at benefiting the well-connected and wealthy elites by providing them with sanctuary and relative freedom of movement within networks of space-based metropolises and certain protected zones on the planet surface.
Henry was 86 years old at the time yet was still working tirelessly to achieve his objectives. With mounting anticipation, however, he took pause and keenly observed the unfolding events from his forest-surrounded residence, which had been transformed years earlier into a fortified compound. It remained safely at a distance from the revolutionary action, not least of all because it was effectively protected by a well-armed, tech-heavy security squad, three layers of tall, razor-wired, electrified fencing, packs of wild wolves that were free to roam in the outer-layers, a network of CCTV cameras, high-tech landmines … and, of course, his moles in the Global Domination Corporation, who managed, firstly, to direct surface-based revolutionary activity away from the compound through a series of priority diversions and, secondly, to cloak it from satellite surveillance through image substitution, which thus allowed it to avoid being explicitly investigated.
Henry was impressed by the speed and magnitude of the change that the revolution brought; however, due to the recent events and the knowledge that he had gained from years of absorbing information from various areas of R&D that had made considerable progress and still had substantial, untapped potential, he had pressing concerns that he felt needed to be heard by an appropriate audience. He soon found his chance…
Six weeks after ‘Day Zero’ — the term used by the Global Domination Corporation to indicate the moment of global change through revolution — during the week-long World Democratic Conference attended by the selected representatives of a wide variety of interest groups from around the world, Henry made his way into space from the Toronto spaceport and headed towards Berne, Switzerland. Planning his travel itinerary with the help of his two moles, he found his way onto an afternoon ferry descending to Berne from a non-orbiting spaceport located directly above it in the thermosphere.
• • •
Aboard the ferry, Henry walks casually up to Samuel, the now-infamous representative of the Global Domination Corporation, and stands quietly by his side looking out at the curvature of Earth and the planet’s pristine and majestic appearance.
“It can be a tad deceptive, can’t it?” asks Henry dryly.
Being caught off guard and ripped from his thoughts, Samuel answers innocently, “What can?”
“Earth … from up here, of course.”
Samuel nods. “Ah, that’s right. I’ve been up and down quite a few times, and that’s been my thought exactly.”
“My name’s Henry.”
“Pleased to meet you, Henry.”
They shake hands.
“Actually … it’s Henry Thirty-Eight.”
Samuel stares Henry in the eyes, instantly recognising the distinguished handle that Ikaros spoke of several times when recounting his past in the last months of his life, and when Sascha retold the story time and time again over the long years since. “Are you serious?”
“Absolutely… How could I be otherwise?”
“How did you … I suppose all these years you’ve been observing from a distance, then?”
“Observing and facilitating, you might say,” reveals Henry.
“How much ‘facilitating’ have you been doing since Ikaros passed away, exactly?”
“We’ve come this far, right?”
“Really? I can’t say I’m shocked now you tell me. I’m not sure how far this is, though.”
Henry nods. “We need to do some talking. There are some developments on the horizon that we really should take seriously and do something about.”
“I’m sure there are. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
“No, nor would I if I were you.”
Twenty-five minutes after disembarking from the ferry
Henry and Samuel walk casually together along the back streets of Berne, talking about how it is that they got to this point. Samuel looks at the superficial lines on Henry’s face and changes the subject if only slightly. “Are you really eighty-six?”
“Well, yeah, I am … but I won’t be for long, if you know what I mean.”
“I know about some of the longevity advancements over the last few decades, and also their expense, you know, but I generally stay indoors a lot and pretty focused … on other things … and so I haven’t really had much direct contact wi—”
“What … the ‘elderly’?” asks Henry acerbically.
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
/> “I’m just kidding… I’m not sensitive about it. I’m optimistic as far as this line of research is concerned but just about scared as hell as well. I mean, the more I learn, the more the future inspires me … but petrifies me at the same time. It seems that month by month and year by year we’re getting closer and closer to a point or a series of points that are going to have a huge impact on the structure of society and our place in the world and space and beyond, etcetera, etcetera — the list is long — yet, at the same time, the diabolical potentials are gaining ground as well. I seriously don’t know if or how we can get past this intractable duality, this ‘phase’ in development as the optimists like to call it. I mean, people believe and have done for centuries, even millennia, that we can resolve tensions by transcending and synthesising, creating a new reality and … What’s that German philosopher’s name?”
“Oh, him.” Samuel searches for the name.
“Never mind — it doesn’t matter… What you’ve achieved is a testament to the capacity of the human spirit to overcome intractable difficulties and take on Goliath and come out on top. Just watching on has been quite a ride. And meeting Ikaros on that fateful day way back when was … Helping him get set up was one hell of a thing to do, I can tell you. I could spot him from a thousand yards. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, he wasn’t exactly quiet about it in the early days,” reflects Samuel.
“What I do fear, though, is that we still don’t have enough of a handle on what’s going on out there and what the potential now is. Even I feel this with access to front-line, quality info and a slew of well-positioned informants.”
“This is my worry, too. Over the last weeks, we’ve been gathering a lot of disturbing information on subversive, insurrectionist groups … and individuals, you know, ‘lone, lost soldiers’ … no matter how ironic that may seem.”
“It’s ironic, alright,” says Henry, “but necessary as hell. You guys emerged from a distributed, underground R&D network … of which there are many these days. It was only a matter of time before something big came out of it. My worry is that your ‘new world order’ of sorts may seem to be coming along well at the moment with its various restructuring and social inclusion policies being enacted, and so forth … but the resistance is already high: many people clearly don’t want it and are embittered and indignant about its very existence … and may well remain so. And you can bet that what we’ve seen is just on the surface layers.”
“I can relate to that,” says Samuel. “Many have already gone silent and disappeared underground … from what our sources and data tell us.”
“That’s right. It’s almost inevitable, isn’t it?”
“All this puts a whole other spin on the idea of a peaceful society. Even with a downward trend in violence … no matter how low the percentage gets in the population… Forget endemic violence.”
Henry nods. “As you say, it just takes one. And local outbreaks can turn global.”
“Yeah, I get that. It’s fractal and relative — a village in a country or a system in a galaxy, and so on. So what are we supposed to do?” Samuel thinks about this for a moment, then asks facetiously, “Hunt them out and kill them all? Set the target zone fairly wide despite the innocent lives lost?
“Well, perhaps on special occasions. But, generally, no. You make yourself more vulnerable that way for sure.”
Samuel considers this point. “There was a collateral death toll and incidence of violence projected for the early stages of the revolution, which is still ongoing, I might add, albeit steadily declining, but that was always supposed to be short-term, not enduring. Good social policy was supposed to take over ... ‘is’ supposed to.”
“Mm, exactly. But what we need to do, apart from ‘aiming’ to become omniscient and omnipotent — and this is what I’m pretty sure Ikaros would have supported from what I know about him and his work — we need to prepare for the nigh-on inevitable and hopefully buy us some more time by doing so … if at all possible.”
“How long do you think we have, then?” asks Samuel.
“No one can say for sure — we’ll just have statistics and models of chaos to help us out. I mean that more than just a catch phrase that could apply to almost any situation. It’s more amplified and extensive than earlier in the century, particularly at any time last century or earlier, specifically because of the short-term potentials of science and technology that are now before us … the way I see it, anyway.”
“Sure, you mean that what we’ve created will be lucky to last as long as the Roman Empire, and so on.”
Henry chuckles. “Very lucky. It’s inherently unstable for a range of reasons — a set of powerful interacting factors related to the state and future prospects of technoscience and social organisation.”
“So, it’s not special to the political system. It’s special to the world system’s period of development, and the phase transition associated with it … which comes with no guarantees, of course.”
“Or something like that.”
“So, what you’re saying,” continues Samuel, “is that we may not … if … I mean, when an attempt at a counter-revolution or some masterstroke does occur, we probably won’t even see it coming, even though we know it probably will — sooner rather than later — and even if we try to prevent it the best we can.”
“Just like your little world revolution. You gotta admit … it was inspiring.”
Samuel laughs. “It was definitely that.”
“We just don’t know how, when, where or what — the details. That’s what’s going to be surprising. Anything else would just be naïve, even ignorant. But, instead of feeling hopeless and sitting down and waiting for the possible coup de main that gets us before we pass over the elusive threshold down the track, we need one hell of a plan.”
“A plan filled with prevention and containment techniques … and escape clauses.”
“Now we’re talking, Samuel.”
• • •
Over the following four years, Henry and Samuel joined forces and merged their programmes, the activities of which largely occurred in the background. The core values of the World Representative Democracy provided a framework to increase social and economic inclusion, healthcare provision and a range of other prosocial development outcomes; however, progress was slow not because of a lack of political will but because of the limits of economic and material resources and the available science and technology. In response to this, several new institutions were established in order to foster the acceleration of R&D outcomes that had the best hope of leading to a much-needed, post-scarcity reality; this was an essential programmatic focus since the limits on resources associated with the scarcity environment they were living in was evidently holding back humanity from establishing sustainable and complete coverage, which was forcing large swathes of the population to continue existing on much-less-than-adequate resources needed to lead a fulfilling life as a human being. Additionally, the speed of socio-technological change within the scarcity framework was still resulting in socio-economic tumult and disorder, and environmental destruction, causing the marginalisation of hundreds of millions and the untimely deaths of tens of millions every year.
What Samuel came to realise fairly quickly upon engaging with Henry’s programme and its knowledge of the state of technoscience, its trends and possible future directions was that they really were on the cusp of a series of a large set of important breakthroughs that would lead to dramatic shifts to the way that their whole reality was organised in terms of energy generation and provision, infrastructure development, technology manufacture and distribution, resource allocation, healthcare provision, cognitive augmentation, and more. All these had far-reaching outcomes that would soon likely be available for implementation on a global scale if and only if they were given relatively frictionless conditions in which to thrive and come to fruition. Samuel and Henry knew that they were in just the right position to provide and facilitate t
hose conditions…
In the early stages of their collaboration, Henry took Samuel to meet with experts in various specialist areas and organisations that were preparing for the potential threats associated with the period of progress in science and technology that was about to occur. Samuel sat in on a series of presentations outlining this territory they were attempting to deal with, and needless to say, he was perturbed, even though he had previously thought that he had a handle on some of the possibilities and the context — being exposed to so much detail and such elaboration over so many areas and possibilities left him awestruck in a way that he never thought was possible, although he gradually forced himself to come to terms with the reality that they faced and set about pragmatically doing his utmost to avert disaster. He had known all along the tenuous nature of the road ahead following the revolution, but he had always been optimistic — until meeting Henry, at least — that their new world order would have the potential to last a considerable amount of time and would ultimately result in a stable post-scarcity civilisation that was peaceful, socially inclusive and promoted tolerance, creativity, freedom and human dignity for all. Admittedly, this was an ambitious and laudable yet fanciful ideal that would likely fail, in the short-term at least, due to the prevailing conditions and trends inherent to the world system and the psychology of the population. Although he had been aware of this years earlier, he had largely managed to suppress it. After the revolution, however, he found himself experiencing continuing unease about their situation, except for lingering periods of numbness and exhaustion.
As the months turned into years, Samuel found himself waking up on some mornings wondering whether that day would be the day a counter-revolution would catch them drastically underprepared, showing their current response mechanisms and even those still in development to be totally inadequate for the task. With his heart pounding, he would turn on his computer and scan his updates, which were streaming straight from the heart of all the primary hubs of his distributed organisation. But nothing happened; instead, new technologies continued to be released in worldwide rollout programmes, and Samuel found that much of his time was spent just trying to learn what was happening on the ground and understand what it all meant.
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