Chapter One - Kindread's Ascent

 

These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

Claude E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - 1948

 

Kindread hadn't read the Times while on drugs since his days at school, but he needed something to occupy his mind on this longer stretch of the orbital lift network. So, he read, and as he did a growing sense of personal pride nearly eclipsed all of the concerns that had motivated him to book passage from the Lake Weatherford Liftpoint to the Anchor Solar Platform. 

Tension slowly seeped out of his neck and shoulders, allowing him to take a deep breath for the first time since he'd set out that morning.  

During the first leg of the journey, Kindread sat and quietly worried aboard a sixty-four-foot tall passenger module named the E. V. Debs. That lift carried him up a 300km tether to the Sankara Orbital Ring. For the entire assent, he couldn't stop replaying the morning call he'd had with his team of editors. Everyone was panicking about what they'd seen broadcast on the Anchor feed, and Kindread couldn't lead the way he'd like to because he was still hours away from finding out if he could even identify the source of the problem. 

After ending the call, he cut off all communications, marking himself publicly as "occupied" before boarding the lift. He hoped that was vague enough. 

On board, he tried to gather his thoughts. The lift had the smell and feel of regularly sanitized public transit. He found a seat on the fifth level. To his left sat a teenager on her way to the Philipines where she would sit in as bassist on a classics of Industrial Metal compilation recording session. On his right was a retiree who clearly wanted to strike up a conversation about his plans for this trip to Patagonia. Kindread buckled up, noting the distant tinny rhythm of Jesus Built My Hotrod escaping from the teenager's headphones. The retiree leaned forward to take in Kindread's profile, who, in response, reclined his seat and pretended to sleep, a ruse he committed to for the majority of the forty-minute ride. He just kept his eyes closed, let the nervous sweat bead on his forehead, and considered all the disastrous implications of what looked to be a compromise to the global information network. 

When the Debs reached the Sankara Orbital Ring, Kindread transferred to a maglev train, traversed the ring, and disembarked at the Salley Gardens Equatorial Waypoint. The layover at Salley Gardens was just long enough for Kindread to have an espresso before boarding a relatively small torus-shaped lift dubbed La plaça del Diamant. 

That is where he started reading the Times. 

For this final leg, he was one of only seventeen passengers and four crew members bound for Anchor, the geosynchronously orbiting solar power station which Kindread suspected sat at the center of this unfolding crisis.

From "Orbital Ring Systems and Jacob's Ladders" by Paul Birch (1982)

Fortunately, it was difficult to remain on edge in this lift. La plaça del Diamant was managed by the eponymous Barcelonian art collective. They had covered the outer wall in a mosaic of tiny ceramic tiles, fusing Gaudi's medium with the iconography of Miro. The figure of a bird floated among dozens of stars on a field of Mediterranean blue. An accordion and double bass duo were riffing on A Minor Swing just out of sight from where Kindread sat at the well-lit bar hugging the interior wall of the lift. Behind the bar was a facade of exposed brick with inset shelves full of bottles and glassware. The bartop was a glass case from which Kindread could select from any number of tapas.

He had already made his way through most of the croquettes he'd ordered when he started reading the Times. The attendant behind the bar was about to ask if he wanted anything else when she noticed that Kindread had started staring intently at an empty portion of the bar top. Mariel, who liked being good at her work, was pleased to have caught this. She slid a black placemat into his field of vision, making it easier for Kindread to read. 

She didn't serve a lot of readers. Most preferred to listen to the Times. 

Curiosity and a slow shift prodded Mariel to inquire into Kindread's background. She took in his profile and wondered about who he was. The information came to her quicker than expected because, to her surprise, she already knew a great deal about Kindread's work. 

She lifted her eyebrows and nodded to herself as information about her customer clicked in with what she already knew. 

It was no small thing to be serving the architect of variable-audience messaging - and consequently the entire landscape of contemporary human information processing. It felt like big news. Mariel tried to let her partner know, but the soft tone of a return signal indicated he was offline and wouldn't get the notification for at least an hour. 

Mariel wondered if there was anyone else she could tell. She hesitated and then thought, "Fuck it." She let her brother Bastion know. They got back to her right away with a slew of inappropriate questions related to a constellation of conspiracy theories that had, among other things, ruined a number of family dinners. 

"Are his shoelaces blue? Does he have a vein protruding from his right temple? Is it possible he's wearing a wig? Does he smell of ham? Is there a woman on board who appears to be keeping track of his movements? Did he order fried food? When you touch him, is there a powerful static shock? Where are his hands right now?"

It wasn't a surprise when Mariel cut Bastion off. She wasn't as dismissive of her brother's rantings as her parents, but Mariel was at work and thought of herself as a professional. She sent, "I let the customers open up to me, but as a rule, I don't pry." 

Her brother laughed and wished her well.

Back to work. She started securing the bar for the period of low gravity that accompanied the transition to deceleration. It was busywork that allowed Mariel to occasionally peek at her famous customer.

She'd assumed Kindread would have a tick or something else that gave away his abilities. But no, here sat a skinny black man with handsome angular features, thick salt and pepper hair, and a calm demeanor. He'd come a long way since his first brush with fame. As she continued working, Mariel recalled images associated with a younger Kindread, a teenager in the Kenyan megacity of Mboya. 

An aerial photo of the city's wild skyline briefly floated in Mariel's field of vision. The city was a tiny patch of super technology, a home to over fourteen million people surrounded by the green unspoiled earth of Kenya. Mariel was reminded that these memories were over 32 years old. The city of Mboya being remembered was relatively young, established in 2019 after the Kenyans agreed to host the world's first equatorial tether. Nevertheless, it had come into its own well before these memories had been recorded. With its collection of glass domes, spires, vertical farms, sprawling elevated green spaces, and brightly painted housing clusters, Mboya was all color and light twined throughout the five-square-mile block that rose sixty stories up from the floor of the savannah, all of which sat beneath a trio of 200-hundred story towers leaning in towards each other as they reached skyward, eventually joining at a single point. From deep inside that city, Mariel saw photos of the Young Minds Incorporated campus where a teenager's suffering was about to launch the educational reform movement. 

The photos of Kindread were leaked to sensationalist media outlets and shared widely to a global readership still addicted to outrage.

He's curled up on his dormitory bed in a red school uniform wet with sweat. He's teary-eyed, quivering, and drooling after the hour-long "Actual Message" session that served as his groundbreaking final project for the YMI Institute. That was before the pharmaceuticals caught up to his abilities - before he taught the news how to reach people.

Kindread noted and appreciated Mariel's gesture with the placemat. He was enjoying his solitude.

Despite everything the Times had earned him, Kindread rarely had a moment to enjoy his work - to step back and admire it from the reader's point of view. What Kindread normally read of the Times was not a set of stories; it was hundreds of thousands of feeds rushing into the Dallas-based hub where he and his editorial team rendered the data into actual messages or AMs.  There the team customized the AMs for every registered reader using a fluid set of linguistic rules, the ethics mandate, and Evolving Audience Profiles.  The result was the Dallas Fort Worth Times, the most useful daily on Earth.

The Times, as it read, was a thing worthy of Kindread's pride.  The comprehension interface was effortless, monitoring his eyes, his facial activity, and his cognition. The words scrolling across the tabletop never lagged nor lost him.  The stream's reaction was fluid when he wanted more in-depth coverage of a story, and it moved on just as smoothly when his interest waned.  A lot of Kindread's contributions were in that stream.  He had refined the association protocols that brought the stories together into something close to a narrative.  His input taught the Times how to use the second person in a less off-putting manner.  But perhaps most importantly, it was Kindread's contributions to the Evolving Audience Profile that made the Times what it was.  Through the EAP, the Times helped each reader understand how the news touched their lives.  The readers had a stake in the affairs of the world, and it was the Times that told them why:

"...in addition to those savings you will see, the waste management initiative has generated 84 local jobs.  The new jobs were included in the global unemployment numbers for June, which reached a record low of 1.162%. 

"Hill Country Labor Securities predicted it will be able to place workers before the end of the quarter. A spokesperson from the DAH Chamber of Commerce announced this morning that 'continued low unemployment numbers will put more upward pressure on regional wages.' 

"In response to predicted wage hikes, your employer and your labor securities cooporative has agreed to a 'preemptive salary increase of 1.5%. Arnold Gaffner, CEO of the Times, believes the wage adjustments will 'keep employee incomes six weeks ahead of rising consumer prices.' 

"If Gaffner is right, by next week you should be able to purchase outright a signed first edition copy of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.  You marked the book as the next item you would like to purchase once your overflow savings account allows.  There is one vendor that recommends purchacing the item today with credit. While the vendor's recommendation is part of an advertisement, the DFWT has independently confirmed the recommendation's value.  In a recent survey conducted by the Schroeder School of Economics, the vast majority of investment advisers agreed that using credit to purchase durable goods is a wise strategy for personal finance.  Several advisors participating in the study cited a recent Congressional Labor Committee prediction: 'The labor shortage is not likely to abate in the years it would take' to pay off The Forever War. 

 "Beyond continued low unemployment, uncertainty in the energy sector is suspected to be another driver behind the spike in consumer prices.  That uncertainly stems largely from the recent 'Declaration of Independence' that was broadcast from the Anchor Solar Platform..." 

And there it was. Anchor was spinning. 

There was no denying it.  Even with his compulsions tamped down by psychotropics, Kindread spotted the spinning.  His team couldn't have missed so many piques in close succession, "suspected" in the passive, "behind," "spike," "largely," and another use of the passive for "broadcast." 

The trigger words had already set off Kindrick's edit compulsion.  He was sweating and his skin felt tingly, like the flu coming on. He started silently mouthing his thoughts, "Readers will be pushed." His body began an almost imperceptible rocking. "These words generate unlinked interest." 

And then he felt worse when he realized the issue would be exacerbated on audio feeds. Those piques were going to undermine thousands of person-hours worth of editing. 

Sabotage was the only explanation. 

One of the pillars of the Times' ethical mandate was, "When reporting non-editorial material, the words in and of themselves should not generate additional interest."  Kindread had built his EAP protocols around that principle. 

Sure, Kindread conceded to himself, there were plenty of readers with connections to Anchor, or connections to orbital colony development, or energy production, near-space technology, extra-planetary politics, transit infrastructure, or any other number of links to the story.  Kindread knew how the system would remind such readers of those links. He knew how it monitored their interest. He wrote the code that updated reader profiles based on how much of the story they followed.  But that system was not designed for a story that included so many piques.

His left hand started twitching, searching for the edit bar.  But there was nothing to do. He was more than 700km above his editing suite, and the story had been published already. Without a means to remove the triggers, Kindrick's discomfort was only going to grow more intense.  He grabbed his bag, loosened the drawstring, reached inside, and pulled out his self-administers - low-dose tabs that dissolved on his tongue - a fail-safe.  He used them to supplement his regiment when things got bad.  He didn't turn to them nearly as often as he used to, but he certainly knew to keep the tabs close at hand.  There was only one time he'd ever forgotten them. The police found him trying to adjust the hat of every man exiting the Kennedy tram station. 

"I was just trying to fix them." he'd explained.

Mariel saw the sweat on Kindread's brow and a woosy look in his eyes. 

She was reaching for a bottle of water to offer him when the first piece of debris struck the lift. 

There was a loud crash followed by a siren's wail. Then the second impact tore a coin-sized hole through the western-facing wall of the lift. Ceramic tile, insulation, and a pearl of carbon-scored metal clattered across the floor. A whistle-turned-wind howled as the cabin depressurized. 

Mariel did not panic. She raised her voice above the cacophony and spoke with trained authority, "Stay seated. Prepare for segment seals. Fasten safety belts." 

Walls that divided the lift into eight segments dropped from the ceiling, shutting Kendrik and Mariel into a wedge of the lift. The howling stopped. The siren seemed quiet by comparison. They were each fastening their safety belts when the third piece of debris struck. The nearby crash was followed by the sound of a distant explosion. The wedge went dark. The only light was sunlight reflected off the Earth and in through the single port hole.

The cabin shuttered and swayed as its ascent slowed and changed course. The segments were being jettisoned away from the driveshaft and tether. The wedge was now an escape pod. Emergency thrust pushed Kindread down into his seat as the pod was guided up and away from the tether, and if emergency protocols were successful, eventually into a rescue orbit. Through the port hole, both Kindread and Mariel watched the Earth's horizon drop out of sight just before they caught a brief glimpse of another wedge from the lift, a bluegrey emergency craft shaped like a perfect clove of garlic, turning slow flips on its own axis, a gash easily ten feet long cut into the side and exposing the smoke-filled interior. 

Kindread kept his eyes on the port hole as he said to Mariel, "Send a message to the last person you contacted. Tell them you're alone, unharmed, and awaiting rescue."

Mariel repeated the word, "Alone?"

Kindread nodded. "It's me they're after, but they'll let us both burn up in the atmosphere if it suits them."

Mariel sent her brother the following: "I'm safe, but you're going to hear about an incident on La plaça del Diamant. Passenger pods have been jettisoned. I'm onboard one that is intact. Others weren't so lucky. On my own. Looks like I had a rare stroke of luck. May be offline for a bit. Tell Mom and dad I'm safe."

Through the port hole, Mariel could see that their pod had steadied itself onto an escape trajectory. The tether was still visible beneath them, getting smaller as they drifted away. Two other intact escape pods could be made out on the tether's opposite side. Debris from three damaged pods was scattered in a cluttered sphere, detached yet still somehow ascending, riding the inertia it had built before the strike.  

Mariel saw shadow flit across the debris. The rescue effort was arrving. She shifted in her seat to look toward, but no into the sun. She was stunned and heartened to see the familiar shape of the Kis Dio, the famous scavenger craft designed to resemble a 1965 Corvette Stingray. It dipped and pivoted as it slowed its approach and deployed its eight drones that would link to the escape pod. 

Anchor and the elevator

 The tech of a space elevator:

The low earth orbit rings follow the principles laid out by Paul Birch in his 3 papers. 

The discovery of a material strong enough to construct circular rings is the result of a fusion of mechanical engineering and witchcraft guided by Theo and Helena's insights. The two of them guide Jessica, a young ME student at UW-Madison, through a psychedelic experience that allows her to manipulate the Hold in a way that forms a new self-repairing crystalline carbon tube they dub the Lizardo Structure. The carbon nanotubes draw energy from the subatomic vibrations caused by our universe coming into contact with other universes, and this powers the self-repair.  

This discovery is followed by research into nanomachines capable of traveling within the tether that can detect degradation and provide the raw materials required for the structure's self-repair. 

The majority of the material required for the construction of the tether is obtained from the mining of asteroids - an emerging industry that got a jump start in the late 90s when Theo began redirecting his earnings from his post-college investing hobby. 

The lift is powered by a laser. During ascent, after reaching an altitude where the pull of gravity decreases, the lift accelerates to create a sense of gravitational pull for half the journey. The interior cabin then rotates, and the lift decelerates to create that same sensation. 

Bela explains why he could see the end of capitalism coming

After Bela rescues Kendrick and commits to defending Anchor, he explains that he knew this reckoning was coming. When Anchor declared independence, he made his way there because he recognized the spark that would set events in motion. 

Theo asks Bela how he knew.

Bela replies, "I was born inside the corpse of a long-dead empire. Born into a family certain that their precious kingdom was not only still alive, but that any day now, it would lift itself back up and regain all its former vitality. They flew old flags outside our home and hung maps with defunct borders on our walls. They sang songs that celebrated a time that was never as simple as the songs would have you believe. 

"I was surrounded by people clinging to what little they could find that did not yet appear rotten. We flew supplies to Anchor and eventually helped build the first ring and the second, a ring that made oil and gas obsolete. We melted the borders that had defined us and finally admitted our own empire's lifeblood was nothing more than the fermented remains of countless empires that had died before our own.

"How did I see this coming? Honestly, I can't understand how so many people didn't."

Alternate Reality Building

Role of these notes

This is where I'll collect notes for a psychedelic science fiction novel that is set in the 2060s and is rooted in an alternate past that diverges from our timeline in the early 1990s. The goal is to have an absolutely bonkers world built up for the story - bonkers, but made coherent and consistent in these notes. This way I can tell the story in a world that's been fleshed out without feeling the need to explain every little bit of backstory on the page just to make myself feel better about coherence. 

Scope

The complete story will take on the scope of an epic world-saving endeavor, but without an emphasis on defeating evil. The forces working against our heroes are interested in ruling the world, but not because they believe their self-interests would not compromise the world order. Over the course of six decades, the influence of the state, capital, and religion have all been reduced to close to nothing. They have, however, been allowed to persist as concepts that provide some with comfort in a rapidly changing world. Many believe they drive and regulate world affairs, wield power through their bank accounts, or shape lives through spiritual teaching. But they don't.

Those people are made aware of how little power they hold when Anchor declares independence. In an effort to reestablish their influence, they seek to stop Anchor and others from rejecting the ideas of capital and government  

Overview

In the novel's alternate past, a small group of people have learned to tap into abilities derived from their expanded perceptions of reality. Using these abilities, they work to change the trajectory of the world, motivated by a desire to stop the environmental destruction of Earth, root out the systems that oppress individuals, and establish permanent human settlements in space. 

The Mystics were informed by a blend of the anarchist philosophy of Emma Goldman, the outreach efforts of the Black Panther movement, and the path to revolution taken by Thomas Sankara. They work to develop a world where the powers of the state, capital, and religion all dissipate, leaving only autonomy and mutual aid in their place. These Mystics deviate from Goldman in one key way: They do not see violence as a legitimate means to achieve their ends. Instead, inspired by the Black Panthers and Sankara, they facilitate the creation and strengthening of alternatives to the state, capital, and religion. They replace those institutions with systems that elevate the quality of life for people and dismantle power structures.

Unlike Goldman, the Panthers, or Sankara, the Mystics worked to do all of this surreptitiously. They knew that the powerful would resist if they recognized that their power was losing its influence.

By 2052, the results of these efforts include the following: 

• A solar system with a sustainable population of 17 billion humans
• 16 megacities on Earth with excellent housing for all
• Older cities and towns with improved infrastructure
• Reestablishment of wilderness across every biome
• Free, clean, and fast ground transportation
• Food in abundance
• Free clean energy
• A series of space elevators linked by 4 deep-orbit rings that support 7 low-orbit rings for rapid transcontinental trips
• 7 permanently inhabited space stations
• 8 lunar industrial and research sites
• A floating megacity in the atmosphere of Venus
• A thriving asteroid mining industry
• A network that delivers information tailored to each individual's cognitive abilities and personal contexts
• A culture focused on creativity, scientific curiosity, and personal fulfillment.  

There's also a few figurehead governments that take credit for everything, a tolerance for religions that are tolerant, and a class of people who think they own everything.

Plot (with some setting notes)

The plot of the novel will be set in motion when a space station declares independence from Earth. The Anchor Space Station was the first equatorial anchor for a space elevator tether, making it a famous landmark in the development of a global society (also a popular tourist destination). The station became fully self-sufficient in 2037, and its solar array provides 35% of the energy that gets stored in the structural batteries held in the eleven orbital rings' that supply the majority of power to the global electrical grid. 

Its declaration of independence explicitly cuts ties to the terrestrial financial bureaucracy, leading many to realize that "capital" is no longer a meaningful concept. The people who believed themselves powerful because they had accumulated massive amounts of capital (the Capitalists) work together in an attempt to discredit this realization by attacking the station's defenses and reputation simultaneously. The Capitalists use what little influence they have left to corrupt the global information network and launch a preemptive military attack on Anchor.

The remaining members of the group of Mytics who engineered this future have to 1) recruit a team that is able to defend Anchor from the attack and 2) counter the smear campaign in order to avoid the destruction of a peaceful global society where the needs of all are met. 

A major challenge the Mystics face is that in order to counter the smear, they will have to reveal that a close-knit group of powerful individuals has been working in concert behind the scenes to shape world events, oftentimes using mysterious powers to do so. This feeds into a conspiracy theory narrative that has adherents in a number of odd corners of society. These groups start to amplify the messages being shared by the Capitalists. Meanwhile, the military defense of Anchor takes on a Trojan War-like feel with a siege of a well-resourced city-state and a tireless military force at the gates. 

Story Telling

The way the story gets told is part of the plot. One of the Mystics is Kendrick who developed a way to deliver "actual messages," information transmitted to people in such a way that each individual will best comprehend the message as intended. 

Kendrick is tasked with releasing a secret history in such a way that will lead to a rejection of the Capitalists and a global embrace of anarchy.   

Kendrick does this by deciding the order in which to feed classified historical documents into the global information distribution system he designed. That system will then convert those documents into actual messages for public consumption. 

The novel will move between the narration of events associated with the military defense of Anchor and excerpts from the historical documents Kendrick uses to defend Anchor's reputation. 

Each time Kendrick shares something, the texts impact the military campaign and public support.  

The Alternate Past

Helena Rodriguez left Wisconsin in 1989 to double major in anthropology and horticulture at New Mexico State University where she wrote a senior thesis on hallucinogens used in shamanism and witchcraft practiced around the world. 

Shortly before completing her studies, Helena found that she was able to harness energies through the practice of rituals rooted in Hungarian witchcraft she learned during a semester abroad in 1992. These energies help her to grow an exceptionally powerful hallucinogenic strain of heritage psilocybin mushrooms originally found in Oaxaca. 

After graduating, she founded a woman's support group she dubbed the Nine Wind Collective (NWC) in a nod to Mixtec heritage on her father's side of the family. The NWC endeavored on psychedelic explorations in an effort to empower women. The goal was to break down the social barriers that cause women to believe themselves inferior to men and other women. It evolved into a multicultural spiritual community with a profound impact on many women in the region. 

Helena eventually rejected the name Nine Wind Collective because her work was leading her to believe that enlightenment meant seeing beyond the "ordering of the world," an ordering represented by the name Nine Wind. She pushed the group to adopt the name Tloque Nahaugue, which led to conflict and a breakdown in the collective. A group of women felt excluded because they believed Helena was pushing the group to adopt an explicitly non-white identity (also, they couldn't pronounce the new name). 

The divisions in the group led Helena to leave New Mexico. The NWC would continue to operate without her guidance and eventually become a foil.

Helena returned to Wisconsin in pursuit of a self-designed graduate degree in shamanistic horticulture. 

She was secretly followed to Madison by Mary Hertz, a young woman who became a member of the NWC just months before Helena left the collective. 

Mary had been planted in the NWC by Young Minds Incorporated (YMI), a corporate research group composed of psychologists and behavioral scientists who splintered away from an ill-conceived government project to investigate the utility of cognitive diversity. The government project was a dead end - the brainchild of a congressman from California who had seen Rain Man and couldn't get over the scene where Hoffman counted the toothpicks. The congressman, with help from the outgoing Regan administration, got some money appropriated to the DoD for research into (his words) "how retards might be able to help the military." 

A few researchers on the project, however, saw real profit potential in what they could do without government oversight getting in the way. They founded YMI and started studying the way cognitively diverse individuals approached problem-solving and task management. One of the proposed directions was psychedelic therapy. So, when one of YMI's directors heard about Helena's work from a colleague, he and his team sent Mary, a new research assistant, to join the NWC and determine if anyone in the collective could provide insights into the potential of psychotropics. 

After joining, Mary became obsessed with Helena, believing Helena was on the cusp of unlocking a window into reality that would change the world. She hid this belief from YMI because it wasn't exactly what they had asked for. She instead filed unexciting reports with the office as she read and reread everything Helena had ever written: her senior thesis, NWC zines, a short story, journals, a childhood diary, meeting minutes, even margin notes in old textbooks. 

Mary was crushed to learn Helena was leaving New Mexico because she believed the land itself was key to Helena's progress. She followed Helena, hoping to develop a plan to eventually get them both back to New Mexico.

But in Madison, Helena found old friends from Milwaukee, one of which was Theo Tilden, a philosophy student in his sixth year of undergraduate studies who was halfheartedly trying to establish an anarchist co-op with his ex-roommate Casey. 

When Theo consumed Helena's mushrooms, he would say and do things during his trips that opened new ways of understanding for a sober Helena. All of her spiritual and metaphysical work started to click into place. Theo could not remember anything useful when he returned from a trip. Helena told him he was something short of a shaman, more like a lens into the world where shamans worked. She told him she intended to use him to better understand the workings of the universe, and he thought that sounded pretty fucking cool.    

Mary tried to convince Helena that there was no need for Theo, that Mary herself could serve as a kind of conduit to expanded perception. Mary's attempts, however, led to a catastrophe when her tinkering with the fabric of perception pushed hundreds of people at a massive annual block party to become violent and destructive. A riot ensued.

Mary was able to de-escalate things with a group of dangerous rioters, but she did so using information that Theo had provided. Mary accepted that Helena knew what she was doing. This was the beginning of a group that would become the Mystics. They sent Mary back to YMI with a plan for her to rise up in the ranks of the company and eventually take over and steer the company towards goals in line with the Mystics.

[More to come]

The Science

Through psychedelic experiences, the mystics in the 90s see that reality is infinite and infinitely varied. The unified perception of all living things is what shapes our shared experience. That unified perception, however, is limited to that which is traveling under the speed of light from our vantage. In the empty spaces between those objects and interactions, however, entire other universes are moving together at speeds we cannot perceive. Every variation that can be imagined happens and is happening at all times everywhere, and parts of our universe regularly interact with other universes, governed by a set of rules beyond our comprehension. By expanding or limiting our perception, we can catch a glimpse of this. Some can even harness the energy or matter from the universes closest to our own.

The Mysticism 

Because most lifeforms have their own individual perceptions, they find it difficult to understand how their view is just a sliver of the shared perception of all living things. For some, psychotropics allow an individual to see how all of the individual perceptions are woven together to shape the universe we inhabit. For a select few, these moments of clarity provide incredible insights into how our universe functions and even interacts with the other universes that surround us.  

Mary's NWC Zines break down what can be experienced on these trips:

• The Cast is what allows perception. It exposes the world. Its limit is the speed of light. People who can perceive the Cast, like Theo, can focus the intensity of perception and see other features of reality.
• The Mesh is the interwoven drives, motivations, and intentions of all that can perceive. 
• The Hold is what keeps the physical world in order so that it might be perceived. 

These experiences allow the Mystics to predict the future and how different choices will impact that future. They allow the Mystics to manipulate the choices of others. They even allow for some manipulation of the physical world, although only to push around elementary particles like electrons or stuff that is smaller still. 

The Economy

In the early 2000s, Heather Knox inherited a building in Chicago from her wealthy uncle. The building included 3 storefronts, a hostel, and 4 apartment units. While managing the building, Heather started tinkering with how she paid the employees who performed maintenance and repairs. She wanted to pay a living wage in an expensive city. One of the areas where she had some unexpected success was with restroom attendants on the ground floor. The building had three restrooms that were supposed to be "customers only" but were regularly used by tourists and locals. Heather placed a restroom attendant in the building to work during busy times of the day. To the surprise of many, business improved in all of the shops quite quickly. In cooperation with the retail renters, Heather extended the hours of the attendant. The results were dramatic. Foot traffic increased in the stores. Spending per customer went up. The impact was even felt in neighboring buildings. 

Heather developed a business plan to place attendants in bathrooms throughout the city. Part of her business plan involved two-year contracts with both clients and employees. She guaranteed work for people at a fixed rate with the potential for a raise based on performance. With clients, she asked for a base rate with the potential for a rate adjustment after one year based on fluctuations in the clients' business performance. She saw a dramatic increase in revenue that far outpaced the increases in compensation. But she did not pocket the profit; she invested everything into employee training and benefits. Her clients saw more growth. 

Heather got an idea. She worked with an investment group funded by Theo to develop a financial tool called a "labor-backed security." She pooled the contracts she had with all of her employees and allowed investors to pay for five years of labor at today's prices. If, after five years, the value of the labor exceeded the value of the initial investment, investors received a portion of the earnings. The tool took off very quickly. While part of this was through the help of Theo's investment group, the main reason was that the labor-backed securities created a space for investors to hide the bubble that was growing in the real estate and mortgage-backed securities markets. Banks and hedge funds poured money derived from inflated assets into five- and ten-year labor contracts. This spurred an enormous leap in the number of middle-class workers who could suddenly access traditional borrowing for home buying. The investing community worked hard to keep these circumstances from becoming too widely known, and succeeded for a time. However, by 2008 the news got out that labor-backed securities were the instrument that saved the economy from a corrupt network of banks. 

Part of the reason Heather's idea attracted attention was some drama that occurred within her family. When Heather inherited the building, her two brothers also inherited real estate. Her older brother and his wife sold an apartment building to buy and renovate a theater. They threw everything into the production of a variety show that failed spectacularly. During the brief run, the theater contracted Heather's restroom attendant service (at a steep discount). In the aftermath of the show's failure, Heather's sister-in-law was first looking for someone to blame, and then later looking for a way to recoup the losses. She went after Heather's growing business. She claimed that the company's success was due to the publicity generated by the variety show (which did get some major local coverage in the "so bad it's good" reviews). She worked to undermine the company after it gained some media attention. This attracted the attention of an investigative reporter who started recording a podcast that looked into the sister-in-law's claims. When the sister-in-law realized she was going to be made to look foolish, she kidnapped the podcaster. The entire debacle became a cultural sensation and became jet fuel for Heather's rising star.

Labor-based securities became a wildly popular way to invest money. Economists found that a large diverse pool of labor that included people from a variety of industries was a safer way to invest. Investors started to see that increased worker productivity was tied to training, safety, security, and job satisfaction. Investment groups started hiring people to protect workers and workplace environments. When there was still more money to invest at the end of each cycle, investors went looking for more people to bring into labor pools. Artists, entertainers, students, and entrepreneurs were offered salaries along with accountants, factory workers, and food service employees. 

Eventually, a large part of the global financial system was working to ensure a living wage, job security, and job satisfaction for anyone who wanted those things. Productivity kept growing, and the investors saw their accounts grow along with it. Productivity soared, leading to the development of global-scale projects such as the orbital rings and the space elevator.

In 2012, the system turned into a guaranteed basic income for everyone on the planet. All labor was seen as valuable - even labor we would not consider valuable today. There was a vast bureaucracy behind all of this valuation, and a small group of people saw themselves as extraordinarily powerful. Interestingly, their power and wealth were all tied up in the generous guaranteed incomes of the rest of the world.

Information Technology 

    Kindrick was born with a strong predisposition for obsessive compulsion.  That's what got him the scholarship at Young Minds Incorporated - the western hemisphere's most prestigious professional training school.  At YMI, his compulsion was honed into a need to innumerate the various ways information can be interpreted.  He was an excellent student.  At eight years old, Kindrick used elementary learning software to craft his first variable-audience message; he utilized school records to make the "Global Federation's 2018 Education Priority Statement" understandable and contextually relevant to every literate student at YMI.  Outside of the research sector, no one person had ever crafted such a complex variable-audience message for such a large readership.  At fifteen, Kindrick taught the YMI computers how to customize the weekly school bulletins.  Within a month of implementation, every student, parent, and employee reached a 98% comprehension rate.  The day after that project was unveiled, DFT took over Kindrick's tuition fees and increased his parents' credit rate. 

The work Kendrick did off drugs was stunning, no doubt, but it was the senior thesis he wrote while on drugs that brought Kindrick interdisciplinary renown and then a brief bit of celebrity.  His paper demonstrated "computational communication systems that reduce types of uncertainty unrelated to Shannon entropy by integrating systematic human interface into the channel."  It was a breakthrough in information theory, effectively creating a new field of study, connotative computation.  

Various scientific communities dug into his work with great excitement, but it was the ensuing battle between human rights groups and education firms that pushed Kendrick into the public spotlight. In order to tamp down his obsessive compulsions enough to reach a state in which he could write a paper and argue about his theories with the YMI faculty, he had to take a tremendous amount of psychotropic drugs - many of which were still in experimental trials. To come down off those drugs, Kendrick had to endure a dreadful physical state that lasted the better part of a day.  The photographs of this process were brutal, and many were deeply disturbed when those photos went public. There was a fleeting moment of public outcry, but then the pharmaceuticals caught up to the problem, productivity training went mainstream, and the world went on to worry about other things. 

Since taking over the Connotative Editing Unit at DFT, Kendrick had dramatically increased the comprehension rates of readership worldwide. People have access to information that they can understand about nearly every facet of the modern world.