day 19 of 30

NanoWriMo2005
J E D Cline
Title: “The Ark of 1984’s Future”
Day 19 of 30

Idealiana was still busy at idealizing for solutions to the overall problem. As she saw it, the human-bulls were horsing around and wreaking havoc all over the place to claim territory and harems, while people really needed to be putting the majority of intelligent cooperative effort into establishing the expansion of civilization into earth stationary orbit cities needing to be built. She wryly imagined that even the process of seeking ideals in solutions to ongoing problems was a waste of time in the opinion of those people who were physical action oriented; their solution tended to be to solve a problem by going in and beating up on the bad guys to straighten them out, get them back in line in their place, to restore law and order, end of subject, to them. Yet she believed that any solution that did not have a reasonable path all the way to the solution of distant needs, was mere spinning of one’s wheels, or going on wrong detours. Those whose instincts were to assault others to gain compliance, tended to pass on abuse from generation to generation, ever howling about the wrongness of abuse. It was the “bully” motivation thing, perhaps the entire problem. It appeared to be a mode also more wired into the brains of some people, or at least a lot more so in some people than others. She had little or no urge to assault anybody to solve problems; although she remembered that if she got totally frazzled and overwhelmed by things far too long, she could get weakened enough to resort to flailing around in the physical world so as to try to right things a bit, or at least to hang on.

So she could understand that mode a little bit; what was more difficult as to why some people seemed stuck in that mode and were powerful enough to not have to stop it. Like the Leroy Brown Society machos, such as Rationallo and his buddy Gurardiano: behemoths run amok in slow motion berserk, almost unstoppable, and being super rewarded by humanity’s resources and provided many progeny as reward, also.

The level of lethality considered acceptable varied according to the level of conflict that was declared for the activity, increasing as the conflict scaled up: from game, to sport, to competition, to rivalry, to war. Somehow tacking the level’s name onto something shifted the minds of the assaultiveness-doers into different gears; “war” seemed to give permission to do most anything they wanted, even kill, so long as it could be made to look as if done toward the accomplishment of winning that so-called war.

Yet it was not caused by testosterone hormonal excesses; it surely was needed by brave souls who had to deal with the dynamics of creating the space transportation system and huge facilities in GEO, took lots of guts and go-do-it testosterone energy, to get the jobs done and sometimes even survive heroically. No, the problem wasn’t the male energy, it was a particular warped use of that energy, one that was highly reproductively successful and thus perpetuated itself, despite being a parasite on everything else. Among humans, it rationalized its assaultiveness by declaring itself a “winner.”

So, how to keep directing the motivations of assertive energy toward that which helped everybody, since the survival of the individual depended on the survival of the support base provided by all those other people?

Composing a working solution would only be identified by its success. It was something like the old saying that if one had enough monkeys typing on keyboards, that eventually one of them would have created one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets exactly. Yet she wondered how many more monkeys it would take to read all those typed pages to identify the one with the Shakespearean writing. Then she went on to ask the related question, of how many monkeys would it take in a former earth jungle to make one of those lunar rovers out there, complete with charged battery. She suspected it would never happen, unless the monkeys got changed their natures and physiology, and they accumulated knowledge and technology. Then what would select those changes in those monkeys so as to enable them to make a lunar rover, God? If God is defined as the maker of all things in the universe, and the universe made of God’s own stuff ... maybe so. So why the making of bullies to romp through civilization’s china shop? It seemed reasonable that it would be a self-correcting system, based on feedback, reality testing. She needed a direction to go, a plan that went more in the direction that would help create the wholesome expansion of civilization.

Maybe it would help to redefine “winner.” Something separate from being a winner by making someone else a loser, for example. She needed to create some vision in which some quick plan could be prepared when the next bullying romp raged through her world.

It was time to stop philosophizing and get back to work, so she set her computer terminal aside, and went out to get into her lunar ground suit. It would be nice to get technology up and running at the level that they could have shirtsleeve-interior vehicles equipped with robotic arms, in which to ride around out there to get things built. For now, all they had were the space suits, and their own muscles to move around on the ground. Stepping out of the airlock, for an instant she thought it would be nice to have a planter with some flowers right there on the porch, then realized the airless reality of the porch and for far beyond, as far as she could see, except for a few structures they had built themselves. Maybe they could import some gophers from earth, to teach them how to live this way.

250,000 miles away, on the Earth’s surface, in his office, Rationallo was also busy thinking. He had three of the remaining working devices that were used for remote behavior modification and interrogation, built long ago. Although they were first invented and were to be used to help a concurring person overcome some bad habit, its usefulness for harassing an unsuspecting opponent without fear of reprisal had soon taken over the technology. Some units were used for supplying specific request action to investigative agencies, to keep in their good graces, of course. Pity that the technology for making them had vanished, back there in the Great World Famine era. Just who had one of these Radionics things was not always known, because it was a powerful tool for messing with someone else, thus quite useful in the struggle for power.

These devices had been quite useful in his rise to power. As much of technology, he did not have to understand how it works, only needed to know how to get it to do what he wanted it to do. It was a mysterious thing, however, and at times in the past he had researched its background, where he found indication others had gone that path before him, and had made the path difficult for others, it was a treasured technology.
It worked a lot better on some people than others. The intuitive types like Idealiana were most succeptable to it. He had not kept DNA samples such as bits of fingernails or hair while she was caged in one of his HaremSpace units, unfortunately. Nor did he have a good photo of her recently, but he did have her photos and other identification data from the latest census database, and the description of a small DNA segment required to identify each person. From these he made his “witness” for the weird Radionics machine.

It was computer operated, an advance over the ones his more distant fore bearers had used. It appealed to the instincts of the hunter to abuse and harass the quarry by doing it oneself; but he did not have the time or the patience to do it himself anymore, so he entrusted the computer to do the dirty work for him. From a standard set of subprograms, he programmed short phrases in that he guessed would have shock value to Idealiana; the machine would send the phrases at random intervals into the liminal receptivity of the quarry, and get a bounced feedback indicating the strength of its impact on the deep beliefs of the person: did the person’s tone become stronger or weaker or no effect., and the computer recorded the results. At the very least, the random interval unblockable messages appearing seemingly impossibly out of nowhere, triggered the RAS startle response, which then had to be calmed down by the rational mind deciding there was no real problem; the interruption of the previous trend of thoughts itself dragging the efficiency of the person down, over time. The computer would work away at the person’s liminal consciousness on and on, and occasionally Rationallo would go over to see the results harvested by the gadget. If the general tone of the person was getting consistently weaker, he had picked a good set of phrases, and from them he could focus on more like them, the ones that shocked the subconscious the worst. He set the machine to go on its first run with Idealiana as the quarry, the target; then he secured this area and went to his regular office area.

Although his workday actual work took only about 15 minutes each day to add up the aggregate corporate subsidiaries’ profits and post the result, the job required ongoing training for all employees, himself included. The general pattern was a sequence of 20 minutes higher education, followed by 15 minutes of personal combat exercise like kick boxing, fencing, or karate. Then 10 minutes of public appearance grooming; then 15 minutes of public speaking about Tanfl operating principles. Then the cycle would start over again, repeating for the full 6 hour workday. It made for a rigorous work style and kept everybody in aggressive shape, physically and mentally. Once a month they had to run a 50 mile marathon, climb a simulated mountain structure, and play Jai Lai. The exercises were dangerous enough that when someone started “losing it”, it showed up in the dangerous activities and so the person was likely to go directly to the digestion vats; thus everyone on the job was in tip top shape all the time.

Tanfl people were the elite and intended to remain that way; and the wealth they enjoyed made it all worthwhile. Many fine parks and art displays were distributed around their part of the city, which occupied three quarters of the city’s area, and housed 5 percent of the city's people. They lived scornfully superior to those of the other one quarter of the city, the 3Musketeers sector, which housed the other 95 percent of the city's population.

Life in the 3Musketeers sector was quite different. Half of the people were employed in menial jobs over in the Tanfl part of the city; the other half were employed in facilities owned by 3Musketeers themselves. Their workday tended to be 12 hours, often doing the same thing all day. They too had daily on the job training, to learn other tasks which they might need to do at times. The workday started with a company breakfast followed by 20 minutes of Yoga exercises; and they had an hour of aerobics exercise each midday,