NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (30 page)

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 2012.

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.