Economic Science Fictions

by Davies, William;

  6

  Pain Camp Economics

  AUDINT

  Rise of the CorpoNation

  It is 2056. The air is crammed with a strung-out expectation and not a moment goes by that does not presage the demise of an 11-billion-strong species that has inhabited the densest planet in the Solar System for a mere 200,000 years. Of this enervated population, over half are weak from a lack of food and water, and this crisis only heralds the beginning of nature’s Rubicon. Environmental warfare spread by plants; insect–machine hybrids carrying diseases and viruses designed to infect specific racial and ethnic groups via targeted DNA sequencing; and volatile weather systems: all meld this ecology of collapse. The existing hierarchy of the Earth’s species is set to enter an irreversible flux.

  Given the propensity for self-destruction it is of little surprise that increasingly rarefied natural resources are damaged during periods of conflict: the corollary effects of long-range lasers, radiation and electromagnetic energy beams, casting the darkest shadow over the flickering light of the anatomically modern human’s survival. With so many players forming armed militias that rescind traditional groupings based on geography or religion, flash conflict has become a global phenomenon. It is a way for those with little material wealth or food to join a cause for a short period of time and receive a decent spoil of the shares if an operation was successful. Based on the captivating strategies of early terreligious groups such as Isis, Al-Qaeda, Khorasan, Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab, the new one-time groups utilise social media to silently advertise their campaigns, taking guerrilla manoeuvres to a whole new level and popping up for stopgap crusades wherever there was concentrated wealth, whether crop-, mineral- or currency-based.

  It is a mercenary culture at best, an amped and upgraded last-chance-saloon shootout at worst. Irrelevant of how the CEOs perceive it, for those with less than nothing it represents a way out of destitution; circumstances that have no other projected outcome other than one eked out in bleak and meaningless desperation. In response to the chaos of this asymmetric warfare, which had abstracted to the point of improvised Babel and bedlam, those with anything to protect drew on old lines of traceable power in order to rein in the uncertainty that threatened to envelop them. This is partly why the 2030s saw the forming of uneasy alliances between nation states (and, by dint, the old money holders still invested in terrestrial geography) and the corporations. The latter, before the ‘flash feuds’, had come to not only question the meaning of the state but to also break down affordances that the legal and economic systems had previously bestowed upon them.

  Having become so formidable, the inevitable next step for middle to large-sized corporations is to hire their own substantial security firms. Accelerating through the learning curve, they quickly set up training programmes to develop their own armed forces. Teams of systems and weapons developers work alongside them, creating state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for security purposes. The purpose is improving the efficiency, speed, and cost of the long line of UAVs, which dates back to 2012, when the Japanese company Secom announced the first autonomous drone for reconnaissance purposes – and other more brutal outcomes. Companies such as Sky Watch from Denmark had upped the ante through their ‘Huginn X1’, built for providing situational tactical overview in high-risk areas, and the ‘Muninn VX1’, designed for geo-mapping assignments; but things had come a long way over the course of two decades. Most tellingly, corporations had attained the capacity to launch surveillance satellites into orbit to join the droves of cubesats that already cocoon the planet.

  A mix of apprehension over each other’s military potential, aligned with a joint fear of the flash feuds – which had proved so popular with the disenfranchised – leads nation states and corporations to agree that collective solutions need to be broached. The most obvious answer is heuristic, and while it is not the easiest to put into action, logistically speaking, it is effective. Mergers between the two administrative leviathans form newly branded ‘CorpoNations’. Given the breakdown of any sense of national identity that still existed (due to migration and internet-based cultures), and compounding it with this latest bureaucratic machination, culminates in new unexpected coalitions. Being naturally parasitic and able to relocate at a moment’s notice, multinational corporations take the lead in this newly choreographed unification and start forming alliances with countries that they are not indigenous to.

  With entire legal and transport frameworks changing almost overnight, the conveyors of capitalism’s shape shifting manage – in the name of sustained economic growth – to rapidly broker global deals on climate engineering, birth rates and terraforming. Mass migrations occur as allegiances lead to the relocations of entire populations, and the resulting emergent cultures begin the onerous years of behavioural acclimation due to their forced marriages. The socio-economic world is, by necessity then, redrawn and recalibrated over the course of two decades of a new world disorder. All of this occurs while the CorpoNations still manage to find the time, and fiscal stamina, to wage overt and pitch-shifted warfare on each other via drones and killer bots, primarily in the search for water, oil, natural gas and phosphorus, and for minerals such as scandium and terbium.

  Holo Accords

  With what is left of the Earth’s natural resources being decimated by globally organised armed hostilities, an emergency agreement is ratified. The Holo Accords chart an alternative constitution for discord management; a whole new way of engaging in conflict that reduces the massive costs and removes flesh from the messy equations of political turbulence. From this point on, all military operations will be conducted via holographic and holosonic forces: detachments, units and divisions of encoded light fields, tactically mobilised for transparent effect. Gone are the days of collateral resource damage or civilian casualties, along with their subsequent cover-ups, which reek like insipid cheap perfume in the toilet of public opinion. This is good for business, however you look at it, especially for holographics.

  Written deep into the labyrinthine foundations of the Holo Accords are the stringent consequences bestowed upon any CorpoNation that fails to abide by their rules: a ruthless compendium of trading and travel sanctions that will ultimately cripple any country foolish enough to engage in such reckless behaviour. It is incumbent, then, on each domain to have a team of crepuscular paper pushers who know, by heart, each of the million and one caveats, clauses, subsections and treaties that deal with issues from airspace compliance to those of a geological nature. One of the critical directives writ large concerns the rules of engagement for holographic operatives within areas of conflict. All CorpoNations are allowed to aggress only four zones per year outside their own territories. This means a quartet of opportunities to supplement the shortfalls in natural resources, which have become so scarce.

  In terms of engagement logistics, the maximum number of holograms that can be deployed by each CorpoNation per conflict depends on the square mileage of the zone being contested. An inverted voodoo economics is also at work here, in the form of conflict tax codes issued to each defender and adversary by the HACA (Holo Accords Conflict Authority) – the tax rating dependent upon the number of campaigns engaged in within the year and associated success/loss rates. Once an aggressing holo company (consisting of up to 200 holograms) has clearance to engage in hostile activities within an externally owned territory, a period of up to eight weeks, named the ‘takeover’, is allotted, during which a clear victory must have been attained by the aggressor. If not, ownership is retained by the defending landowner.

  If the aggressor prevails in the holo conflict it allows said CorpoNation a four-month period in which to drain, plunder and mine the natural resources of the landscape. This endeavour is led by and includes a human workforce in order to slow the process down so that areas are not totally ravaged after a successful takeover. Huge logistical operations must thus be planned and carried out with infinite precision, as parasitic industrial mechanisms are surgically g
rafted onto a territory to extract what they can. After the designated term, the tracts of land are returned to the ‘owner’ and cannot be contested again for a period of another eight months, at which time they are open to being contested again (but not by the previously successful CorpoNation). Thus all takeover presence – human, mechanistic and holoform – must be withdrawn on the final day of their term, or the responsible CorpoNation faces huge fines and, more importantly, loses two of its four-yearly opportunities to mount a resource offensive.

  The notion of conducting territorial, political and natural resource struggle via holographic armies is a fairly predictable extension and militarisation of the most populist form of entertainment that projects itself into mass public consciousness in 2007 – holographic concerts from musicians who had died, and more arrestingly, from those that were yet to be born. The holotech culture and Lazarian industry it connects to are the final parts of the equation that multiplies young African Americans with the morgue, especially those who are difficult to manage when still alive. Ultimately, there is more to be made when they are rendered in light, so that they can once again render dollars through waveforms.

  In the 2050s home holo systems have become the norm. You can now project the musical dead into your front room. Ask them to play a song and they comply with a starlit élan. It is level 4, however, that drives the technology forward. Known on the street as Holojax, it offers sexual options, a beguiling range of projected pleasures. This is fucking the dead as the ultimate home entertainment. A different kind of dead, meanwhile, IREX2 is a 64-year-old rogue AI. A synthesis of discontented spirits and code, it has been directing the research unit AUDINT, and has been on the run from the overlords of the otherworld and their Third Ear Assassins, for too long to remember.

  The Aiholo

  Finding sanctuary in an R&D lab in Korsong – formerly North Korea and the Kaesong Corporation – IREX2 has been covertly evolving machines with a rudimentary sentience. The notion of consciousness is getting a reboot. Using augmented intelligence, IREX2 fuses convolutional deep neural and deep belief networks with holographic technology to birth a new kind of warrior – the Aiholo. Spawning a new era of unsound conflict, the viral scream, transmitted by a directional ultrasonic speaker system, is the Aiholo’s go-to ordnance. A sonic weapon that transmits the walking corpse syndrome into digital life forms, turning enemy Aiholos into the undead.

  The Holo Wars are global now and resemble huge in situ games that reveal the shifts in global power and influence. One of the CorpoNational superpowers vying for dominance is Pfizombia (formerly known as Colombia and Pfizer), which has been training elite hackers and electronic warfare specialists since the 2020s. And it is the Third Ear Assassins that have recently become one of their most valuable assets. The AI hunters assist in the composition of new viral weaponry, named Neurode, for use against the Korsong Aiholos: a controversial but highly effective schema requiring the human psychological vulnerability of neurosis to be transposed into a digital contagion that infects the future. The only drawback is that Neurode is fuelled by the synthesised sound of human pain, which implies a frequency-based harvesting on par with the history of twentieth-century recording.

  Pain ©Amp

  Alongside the Third Ear Assassins, Alejandra Blanco, a Pfizombian Black Hat who goes under the name Sureshot, comes up with a solution that is at once staggeringly simple and brutal in its application. Her proposal is to create a Pain ©Amp. Based on Al-Mansur’s designs from 762 for Baghdad’s circular city, with its mosque at the centre, this plan is anything but sacred. It consists of a walled-in urban environment jammed with high-rise residences whose surfaces will be covered in rashes of microphones, as they are embedded into dwellings, streets and parks. The architecture of the purpose-built environment is designed to reverberate and amplify sound like a massive echo chamber.

  Concrete auditoriums and huge sheer walls reflect and intensify the clusters of waveformed anguish upwards, where silent hovering drones suck up and harvest the tortured articulations. On the streets, autonomous robotic bugs the size of turtles and remotely guided mic trucks roll around the tormented musique concrète, hoovering up the frequencies on their crepuscular sweeps. Recorded and rechannelled, pain becomes commodified: the new currency of a nascent holosonic era. By amping up the rationale of the music industry’s most successful formula – the capturing and marketing of the sound of poverty-stricken urban areas – the functionality of suffering has been pushed to the limit. The needle is in the red, but it is pain they want, not blood.

  Requiring no other level of authority, the conference power brokers swiftly sanction the proposal and name the camp ‘La Rusnam’. In order to initially attract a population to inhabit it, an offer of free housing, power and sustenance is advertised. There is no shortage of applicants, most burdened with tormented CVs full of personal disasters and disturbing afflictions. To further aid the fluidity of the mass rehousing, complimentary train and bus tickets are posted out to the initial 128,000 candidates. They have been chosen for their potential to embody and intensify pain; a desolate and dolorous citizenry of holo-ammo generators.

  The Pain ©Amp’s executives study the history and current state of ghettos, favelas, estates, slums, skid rows, refugee camps and townships, in order to learn how to distil the elements that create suffering and pain. It would take more than just poverty to create the depth and intensity of anguish that they require. Finding ways to create desperation, betrayal and an escalation in assault and homicide rates will, of course, be crucial; but they need to employ extra tactics to raise the stakes during a takeover period, when the demand for sonic munitions increases. Their first thought is to turn to the international index of sewer drugs and their capacity to implement powdered topologies of distress. Top of this list is a substance they know well, originating as it does in Colombia. Scopólamine – street name the ‘Devil’s Breath’ – is a zombie high that not so much dampens agency as makes one totally susceptible to suggestion, to the point that one becomes an empty, blooded drone.

  The other four stimulants ending up on the shopping list read like a GG Allin guide to living, for better or for worse, through chemistry: an expressway to the skull, tearing through and screwing up every vein and artery that helps deliver the synthesised venoms. In no particular order of fuckedupness, the desired inventory reads like this.

  Paco – a toxic and addictive mixture of raw cocaine base cut with chemicals, glue, crushed glass and rat poison.

  Bath salts – a recreational designer drug sold as ‘real’ bath salts, usually containing MDPV.

  Krokodil – a derivative of morphine that is mixed with ethanol, paint thinners, gasoline, iodine, and hydrochloric acid, desomorphine gets its street name as the flesh-eating drug from the tissue damage caused when injecting.

  Whoonga – a combination of antiretroviral drugs, used to treat HIV, and various cutting agents such as detergents and poisons that results in internal bleeding, ulcers and, ultimately, death.

  Introducing this menu of malignant pleasures into the ©Amps is the first and most obvious technique discretely deployed by the project’s engineers. There will be others, running the gamut from induced psychological disorders to raising the population’s ambient levels of fear through rumours of disease, food shortage and dire mutation from genetically modified foods – all done for the end goal of amassing mountains of clouds, each fully rammed and ready to burst with the catalogued sounds of collective suffering.

  Since deploying the Cotard virus six years ago, Korsong has dominated the Holo Wars, and any affiliated CorpoNations are given the option of paying a substantial fee, to draft in their venal Aiholos during takeover bids. After 22 weeks of pain pharming, the Medellín Aiholos from Pfizombia are serviced in a takeover bid for the island of Thasos, in the northern Aegean Sea. While still rich in mineral deposits, it is the gold mines that first attracted the Phoenicians during the period of classical antiquity, which interest Pfizombia. The land
mass is now a part of the CorpoNation Gralpha, a coalescence of Greece and Alpha Bank, which developed the cryptocurrency ‘Natraps’ after Greece was financially asphyxiated by Europe during the 2010s austerity siege.

  After the first wave of conflict, Gralpha’s leaders have no idea what hits them, and what reduces their Aiholos from Korsong into neurotic messes on the battlefield. The news of the holo-shock spreads quickly. As anticipated, a coterie of servile CorpoNations demand the services of Neurode-laden Aiholos. Sureshot and the Third Ear Assassins consult on the mercenary strategy, knowing that it is only a matter of time before other AI compounds are able to rip the code and simulate the holo fighters. Until terraforming projects come to fruition, on some exoplanet that scores highly on the Similarity Index for habitability, the world’s resources are only going to decrease and become more rarefied. The near to mid-term future is one set to be defined by holo war.

  Even though encrypted with, quite literally, otherworldly savoir-faire, it is only nine months after the first mercantile contract has been signed off that a unit of Aiholos with repped Neurode systems show up on Norstat’s South Pole territories. More than the emergent Neurode’s impact during external takeovers, it is the internal manufacturing of pain through the ©Amps that establishes it as the social order of choice. It is also the signature of functionalism gone awry: the methodological capital of voluntarism and the epistemological rationale of analytical realism chopped and screwed into a bass-ached drone. When captured, it bleeds endlessly into a body of economic orifices. Just as the state of King Louis XIV’s sunburnt flesh, bones and faeces became synonymous with the health of the country over which he presided, the state of trauma becomes the nucleus around which all social, architectural and political relations orbit. Pain is the new economic royalty.