Refraction, p.29
Refraction, page 29
“What?” Jelena asked, interest growing in her voice.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Raz looked around at them. “Everyone’s wealth is just a bunch of zeros and ones on a computer somewhere. No one even owns land—Central owns all land and grants land based on income. No one actually has real wealth except defined by a computer.”
“Where?” Benedito asked.
“At the central cell,” Raz said.
“What?” Cal looked confused.
“It’s called Central Cell because there is a central cell database that independently stores all individual financial data. Because it’s not on a network, it can’t be hacked. It can only be accessed and changed by physically being within the cell. It’s there that all financial data is stored by Central.”
“So, why do we care about this?” Benedito asked.
“Because if all the data on that database is lost, everyone goes back to zero. There would be no wealth. Economic status would instantly vanish. Everyone’s bank accounts would be emptied of brics because there would be no brics. The difference between the rich of Central Cell and the poor of Copper Mound will no longer be defined by the bric.”
“Hmm,” Jelena said. “That means my parents could just stroll back in.”
“Not exactly. What I’m proposing won’t really have the effect of equalizing.”
Cal asked, “It won’t?”
“In theory, yes, but not in practice. Equalization is not what’s going to happen.”
“So, what will happen?” Jelena asked.
“Anarchy.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
Raz continued, “Erasing currency will result in chaos. The hope is that through the chaos, there will emerge a restructuring with everyone at the table. It’s like burning crops to prompt fertile ground for better growth. This is the only option.”
“That’s… intense,” Jelena said.
“It is.”
“Who will lead?” Cal asked.
“The people.”
“What people?”
“Everyone. For centuries, humankind has worked on the premise that the elite knows what’s best, but I’ve started having this crazy notion that maybe people actually know what’s best for themselves.”
“But, we’ll help, right?” Cal asked. “We’ll help lead?”
“Yes. We can give guidance—direction.”
“So, where is it?” Cal asked. “Where is the database?”
“At the center of Central Cell. Right in the middle of the city. It’s that dark, gray monstrosity right in the middle of the financial district. Tallest thing on the horizon. It has no doors. There are no roads that lead up to it. It is one hundred and fifty stories high but it has no real floors except at the very top. There are no stairs, elevators, or escalators. The entire building is surrounded by thousands of guards and hundreds of fighter ships ready to launch at the drop of a hat. Also, a lot of turrets are planted all over the building.”
“Okay, no problem,” Benedito said.
“Shush, Bene,” Jelena scolded him. “How do we get in?”
Cal glanced at Jelena, surprised at how eager she had become. “Yeah, how?” he asked.
Raz paused, waiting for them.
“We fly to the top of it,” Cal answered.
Raz nodded. “The only way in or out of the cell is by a spaceship or helicopter through a portal that opens at the top of the building.”
“And we can just waltz right through?” Benedito scoffed.
“Of course not,” Raz said. “The portal into the building is heavily guarded. There are turrets mounted all around the skyscraper as well as a squadron of fighter jets parked right on top.”
Benedito laughed. “Oh, great. No problem then.”
Ignoring him, Cal asked, “How and when does the portal open?”
“I’ve been studying that for the last year. It opens routinely at eight a.m. every Tuesday morning when the board of trustees enters to update their own financial portfolio. The board makes sure their own finances are up to date and they compare their finances to the other elites of the city. They make sure that they’re one step ahead of the aristocracy so they don’t get thrown off the board.”
“If you’re such a great terrorist—” Jelena started.
“The rebellion of the subjugated is often deemed terrorism by the ruling class.”
“Okay. If you’re such a great—anarchist or whatever—why haven’t you infiltrated the central cell yet?”
“I’m one man. I’m nuts, but I’m not crazy. There are too many guards, too many ships, too many possibilities that I can’t keep track of all of them at once.”
“Of course you couldn’t, no one could,” Jelena said.
Raz shot a furtive glance at Cal and continued, “I can’t do it alone. But now I have three excellent fighter pilots to distract them. Should be a cakewalk.”
“We’re not fighter pilots,” Jelena said.
“We are now,” Cal remarked.
Benedito smiled.
“Would the three of you like to change history?” Raz asked.
Cal, Jelena, and Benedito looked at one another.
Chapter 21
January 24th, 2155 Earth Reckoning (ER)
And what is it that we know about our current president, anyway? True, he has been a staple of Martian culture for the past twenty years. We all grew up both marveled and entertained by the meteoric rise of ‘Custos the Aware’ or ‘Custos the Dreamer’. We were dazzled by his paintings; how he created beautiful impressionism in a way that no artificial intelligence ever could. We bought his books, captured by the paradox of a robot reflecting on his own humanity. He is a natural violinist. He stole our hearts with several concert series and albums that he produced. It wasn’t that he played music with perfect precision—his music has the heart and soul of any human contemporary. He truly is a marvel and one could say is the capstone of man’s creation—a perfect reflection of the best of mankind.
But a reflection, nonetheless. Custos is no man.
He is a machine.
Although we’ve incorporated machines into every part of our lives, including the highest seat of our government, there is still one undeniable fact about them: they were created by someone else. Every robot, including President Custos, had a creator. Machines are not born, they are manufactured by someone with design—someone who had a purpose. I think it’s time we ask ourselves, what did Custos’ creator have in mind when he made him? Was he really designed just to be a servant bot who happened to spontaneously burst into emergent consciousness? Or was the self-awareness of Custos planned? I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that Custos was designed to be a sleeper cell, a dormant consciousness predestined to emerge as the powerful cultural icon that he is today.
These are important questions to ask given recent events. We have vandals running through our streets at night, spraying their vitriol on our buildings. We have cyborgs descending from the clouds, terrorizing our peaceful protests. We have continual power outages all across the city from terrorist bombings. There are those amongst us who whisper His name, warning that He is coming. It’s getting to the point that we can’t even trust our neighbors anymore. Anyone could be one of His servants. Who is He? Who is The Copperhound? And more importantly, why doesn’t President Custos seem to care about Him?
Is it a coincidence that Custos is a known sympathizer of a woman—The Speaker—who stood in front of a presidential media core and announced to New Athens that He, The Copperhound, is coming for us? Why would Custos point her out in front of all of Mars? What, or who, does Custos know that he’s not telling us?
I think the time to demand more from our president is long past due. He certainly likes to give us answers from his own lips, but we need more. We need evidence of who he is. In this time of uncertainty, we need to know more than what he is telling us. I want to know that my president is a true Martian and not a pawn with other motives. It’s time to demand to see the full schematics of President Custos. I’m calling him out to make public his entire artificial intelligence core system so that we can all know that he is not an agent himself of The Copperhound. It’s time to no longer be afraid, but to be bold in our demands.
Mr. President, show us who you really are.
Custos dropped the tablet that he was reading in disgust. He kicked himself for ever letting Gina Wilder step foot in his office. It was just another consequence in a series of admitted mistakes that he made over the past several months. The greatest of which was taking a gamble and singling out the Earth immigrant who turned out to be one of those fear-mongering sycophants. Worst yet, it had turned out that she was a major leader in New Athens and single-handedly led the campaign of vandalism across the city, recruiting New Athens citizens as she went.
He was grateful for the distraction that came from Phobos moon. He thought about the encrypted message, wrapped up in gravity waves. He rolled the phrase over in his mind:
…trapped… we’ve created a… weapon… a Destroyer of Worlds but it didn’t… turned off from the outside…
There were many unanswered questions.
How did they know English? Did they intentionally send the message to Mars and Earth knowing that someone would likely speak English here? How did they become trapped and what were they trapped in? How could a civilization that was advanced enough to manipulate large gravity waves ever need help from a puny civilization like New Athens? And what was this weapon? Was the entire message a threat to stay away? Maybe it was a warning to stay away or whoever is foolish enough to visit would be trapped. On top of the gravity waves, the growing protests and Vana Iberian blocking him at every corner, he felt like Dev had become more distant from him as well. Where has he even been today?
His thoughts were interrupted by the door opening, followed by a young woman escorted by a security guard, her hands cuffed.
Charlotte. Or, as the media would now call her, The Speaker.
She looked down at the floor as the guard brought her to the table where Custos sat. The guard sat her opposite Custos and then looked at the president. “Are you sure about this, sir?”
Custos nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s fine. This young woman isn’t going to harm me. Are you, my dear?”
Without looking at him, Charlotte shook her head.
“See?” Custos said. “You can leave us. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
The guard gave him a skeptical look and then chained her hands to the table. He left them alone.
“Charlotte,” Custos began. “How are you?”
“Fine.” She wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“How does he get you to say the things you say?”
At this, she perked up. She swiped her long hair from her face and looked at him. “What’re you talking about?”
“The Copperhound. How is he getting you to say and do all these things?”
Charlotte glanced around the room, unsure.
“There’s no one else in here,” he reassured her. “You can say anything you want.”
“The Copperhound is coming,” she muttered, looking back in her lap.
“Yes, I’ve heard. Do you remember when we first met at the fountain?”
She nodded.
“You told me about a man, but at that time, you didn’t want to say anything else about him. You just wanted to forget him. But now… now he seems to be all you want to talk about.”
“So?”
“Well, what happened in between then and now? You were just a hungry mushroom hunter but now you're the ambassador for a warlord? How did The Copperhound get you to start talking about him? What happened?”
She glanced around the room again.
“I told you, we’re alone. There aren’t any cameras or recording equipment in here. You can talk freely.”
“I—” she hesitated.
“What?”
“The Copperhound is coming,” she repeated.
Custos sighed. “I wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself. Do you know of the serious charges that are brought against you now?”
She nodded.
“The Martian council wants to put you in jail for a very long time.”
“Did I commit a crime?”
Custos paused. “Maybe.”
“Why am I cuffed to this table talking to you?”
“You may have committed sedition.”
“Fine. Throw me in prison. He’ll just find me there, too.”
Custos leaned over the table. “So… he’s visited you here?”
“He goes wherever he wants. He’s a phantom. None of you have any idea. He’s… dancing around you, President robot. He’s laughing at you.”
Custos sat back in his chair. “What does he look like? How old is he?”
“And when he comes, he’s going to take back what was taken from him. He is going to mold this people in the way he sees fit. He will bring the purifier’s fire to your people and keep only what survives—”
“Quiet,” he chided her.
“He was born in the womb of Mother Earth and sent to redeem her fallen people.”
“These aren’t your words.”
“And you!” she yelled, trying to stand.
“Enough!” he slammed his metal hand on the table. “I don’t want to hear anymore.”
“You, he will open that metal skull of yours and show the world who you are! He will tear your limbs from your body and melt down your frame. He’ll mold the metal of your body and form it into his throne chair when he comes to rule your people!”
Custos clicked an intercom on the desk. “Take her, please,” he said, his voice quivering.
Two guards burst into the room and un-cuffed her. Custos expected her to scream and kick but she composed herself once again and gave him an almost imperceptible nod like an actor on a stage finishing a soliloquy. They dragged her away and shut the door behind, leaving Custos alone.
Custos left the prison, which only housed about a thousand prisoners for the entire population of New Athens. He still traveled through the city without a security detail, but this didn’t seem to satisfy the protesters who had only grown in number and anger since his botched press conference. They saw him wherever he went, yelling at him and demanding better protection. Custos kept his head down and mostly didn’t reply, he had nothing else to tell them.
He returned to the penthouse tower, almost a thousand stories high, and took the elevator to the top floor. The doors opened, revealing his personal guard and assistant robot, Douglas. He frowned at Custos.
“Is everything okay, sir? Were you accosted on the streets?”
Custos waved his hand. “Of course not, I’m fine. Everything is fine. Everything quiet here?”
Douglas nodded. “Yes. Everything's been running as usual at home base.”
“Has Dev been by?”
“No, sir.”
“Strange. He didn’t answer my daily briefing call this morning either.” Trying to ignore his annoyance at Dev, he walked past Douglas to his penthouse doors.
Upon opening the doors, he saw that the entire place had been turned inside out. Drawers were ajar or dumped over on the grounds. His mattress was flipped over. Most of his paintings and photographs had been ripped off the walls and thrown across the floor, their frames broken. Several desks were turned over with their contents strewn across the floor. He took a few steps in and noticed the picture of his old family that he kept on his desk. The glass within the frame was shattered.
Quietly, he walked around the destroyed room. The furniture had been gouged with a knife, showing tufts of cotton where the blade had sliced. Anything that had been on a shelf was thrown on the ground and any furniture that was upright had been tipped over. As far as he could tell, nothing was missing. It wasn’t a robbery.
It was a message.
He walked to the large window, the same place where he spent hours looking out over the city. Across the window, in large black letters, someone had spray-painted:
I’m coming for you.
He stirred as a very distant feeling blossomed inside of him. He hadn’t felt it for a very long time.
Custos was afraid.
Dev was breathing heavily under a cloth sack. Sweat stung his eyes as he gasped for air. His feet and hands writhed beneath tight knots of rope as he squirmed in the chair. He couldn’t think straight. The terror of being stunned with an electrical weapon and thrown into a ship was entirely surreal. The uncertainty of not knowing where he was shocked him almost to the point of catatonia. He had no idea that someone could even be kidnapped. He heard footsteps next to him. “Who’s there?” his voice quivered.
Someone was breathing next to him. The breath rattled in the man's throat followed by a deep cough that rang out in what sounded like a small room. Dev heard the harsh breathing closer now, almost next to his ear.
