Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [273]
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Reid said airily. ‘If we lose it’ll be because the Yanks come in, and then you’ll die anyway.’
‘Doesn’t that apply to the rest of us?’ Julie asked. ‘I mean, why bother with –?’ She waved her hand.
‘Dear citizen,’ Reid said with feigned patience, ‘the Yanks have a list. He’s on it, and you’re not.’
‘Well,’ I said after this reassurance had sunk in, ‘how can I refuse?’
‘Good man,’ said Reid. ‘I hope I see you again.’
‘So do I, mate,’ I said. ‘So do I.’
The following day the ANR offensive started (Bang On Schedule! as the Sun-Times noon edition put it) but stalled and fell back before the day was over. There’s a story that this was down to some kind of software problem, but it’s hard to credit. I think the general strikes and local insurrections that broke out at the same time had a lot more to do with it. Fortunately, over the next few days this civilian uprising carried the revolution to victory. When it became obvious that America too was on strike and the troops weren’t coming, the Restored Hanoverian government departed ignominiously in helicopters to ‘continue the struggle against terrorism from exile’, as they put it.
The fall of the US/UN has been similarly attributed, in the sort of conspiracy theories I once thought I’d exploded forever, to an engineered viral assault on the global information nets. But a moment’s objective thought will show that the insurrections in Britain and Siberia, concurrent with an escalating arms-control dispute with Japan, were what finally convinced the American people that world domination wasn’t worth yet another tax hike and draft call-up. Copycat insurrections, as they were called, spread around the globe with the speed of an Internet rumour. The disruption associated with what amounted to a world revolution is, in my view, a more than adequate explanation for the chaotic state of everybody’s computer screens over the next few months.
At the time I had more pressing matters to attend to, like trying to figure out a way of losing my new job without handing it to somebody worse. I should have known better than to become a dictator in the first place, but that’s anarchism for you. It’s just no preparation for the responsibilities of government.
February, 2046. The coldest winter in years. People said there was a hole in the greenhouse, as they lit fires with yesterday’s money.
We had our own greenhouse, our geodesic dome on the edge of the Trent Park, near the university. The students were occupied with making mistakes about democracy and elitism that had been considered passé when I was at Glasgow. I left them to it. Annette moved slowly about her horticultural experiments, with a lab-coat made of fur. I rattled out net propaganda, spoke myself hoarse on the cable, convened virtual meetings of Norlonto’s factions and hammered out a line to take to the national government.
For relaxation I talked to people in space. Beyond the Lagrange settlements and the Moon it was easier by email, a more natural medium given the lightspeed lag. Asteroid miners solemnly asked my advice about mutual banking, Martian colonists grumbled about being abandoned now that Space Defense was being cut back. Soldiers’ councils on former Space Defense battlesats bounced ideas off me for profitable ways to use laser cannon. (They were good kids, really, or they’d have thought of the obvious way.)
Meanwhile the civil wars went on. The Republic’s modest aim of combining national unity with local autonomy clashed repeatedly with locals whose idea of autonomy was a good deal more expansive. As a state, the Republic was in many ways weaker than the Kingdom – with its ever-present, over-the-horizon orbital back-up – had ever been. More fundamentally, the revolution had put everything up for grabs: created incentives to defection, as the game theorists put it.
Refugees poured into Norlonto from the countryside, and continued their fights in the shanty-towns and camps. The strain on our charities and defence-companies alike increased by the week, and