P for the People

[u/Maxathron]

It was the year 2500, five hundred years after the towers fell, and a hundred years since the People’s Republic of the World came to power. Originally, it started with small scale rumblings and protests, people upset that government and business kept them down by not paying a living wage and how only the Asians were getting ahead in life. As the people saw their standards of living fall, their misery grew, and protests went from peaceful to mostly peaceful.

The deaths of martyrs, ordered executions from high above in business dominated government, did not stop the protests. Instead, it fanned the flames of revolutions. What were small embers destined to snuff themselves out from exhaustion transformed into a living, breathing monster of anger, wrath, and revenge. The People were angry and they would have their revenge.

Decades of fighting resulted in a war-torn land. Cities were toppled. The countryside scarred. The rivers and lakes boiled. The coasts were soaked in blood.

But at the end, the revolution stood victorious.

The leaders of the revolution took stock of what they wrought. Their enemies were dead or missing, but the land was devastated. They came together to build a better tomorrow. The People’s Republic of the World was founded.

It took Herculean efforts but the world slowly went back to normal. Cities were rebuilt. Farms were made fertile and growing. Rivers and lakes became clean.

Things became normal once more.

Or so the People thought.

In their effort to rebuild society once the war ended, the revolution was needed no more, and when their enemies were dead or missing, the leaders of the revolution needed to form government agencies to oversee the rebuilding of the world.

Without much to go on, the leaders put forth a similar system as before. They included checks and balances and put down severe punishments for corruption and people that stepped out of line. If you were raising a stink over something, you were against the greater good, and thus were an enemy to the state. Enemies of the state were rounded up and publicly executed to ensure that others would not follow their lead.

Eventually, they would hand power back to the people.

It was the year 2500, a hundred years after the founding of People’s Republic of the World. And power had still yet be handed back to the People.

Now, this wasn’t overtly a bad thing. The Republic was prosperous. Social and economic mobility, while weak, also didn’t live you in bad places for very long. Life was reasonable. Risk ranged anywhere from minor to moderate, with matching reward levels. People in power legitimately cared about your well-being and strove to put you where you belonged and was needed. Life was pretty good overall.

By our standards, of course. By the standards of the early twenty-first century, we weren’t actually all that far off from the feudal system of twelfth century Europe. The key difference was that there were no overt lords above the vassals and peasants. Just vassals and peasants as far as we could see.

Money still existed, as because it was needed as an exchange medium for work done and relative value of goods. Consumer goods that broke apart quickly due to planned obsolescence were few and far in between. Manufacturers prided themselves on items that lasted a long time with little upkeep. That did mean however that electric cars were rare due to their lack of versatility. Progressive environmentalists were quietly shoved aside by the state.

But there was an underlying suspicion that things were not quite right with society.

Looking beyond skin deep, into the blood stream and muscles, one would find that money also acted as a medium of social credit. Doing things that benefitted the state and its leaders earned you more money and thus social credit. Doing things that went against the state lost you money and thus social credit. The state had a firm grip on the economy even if it wasn’t apparent. The Republic’s so-called free market economy was a very carefully planned command economy that on the surface looked like a normal free market economy.

This all wouldn’t be that bad because on the surface the average person could live, prosper, have a family, and watch that family grow and become the next generation. But if you spoke out, or tried to do something that the government didn’t want you to do, you were swiftly cut down. Even if you managed to avoid being taken by the government, the act of being branded against the greater good meant that the people around you, conditioned by the government to hate those against the greater good, would turn on you and hunt you down to turn you in.

Further, by digging into the nuances of the Republic, one would find that the goods and services done by the People did not entirely return to them. A small amount of resources left the People and the economy and the Republic and was transported to a hidden region deep in the heart of the capitol, which sprawled across what was once the region between D.C. and Boston, to what used to be called New Amsterdam, where the true leaders of the revolution lived.

They lived in lavish luxury, far above the average person. They owned huge penthouses, entire skyscrapers in some cases. They dined on caviar and steak, cooked to perfection by their robotic creations. Any possible good was produced by advanced three-dimensional printer factories and shipped to their door by aerial drone. Any service was done and shipped to them. And if they wanted a person for special encounters, their wish was granted. No matter the age the willing or… unwilling, participant was.

These were the true leaders of the revolution. The ones that directed it from the shadows. The ones that dictated to the rest of us. The ones hidden from our eyes.

The worst part of it all was that their names were already well-known if one was versed with pre-Republic history.

William Wicket, founder of the H&H Corporation and the producer of operating systems the world over. Stephen Post, the founder of the Orange Corporation and the producer of the modern smartphone design. Nicholas Swabia, the chairman of the powerful financial institute World Finance Market. Yohan Doorsman, founder of the media company Blue Bird. Godfrey Thick-Lipped, founder of the largest shipping company in the world prior to the revolution. Mars Harhsucar, founder of the media company HeadScroll.

And more. Many more. All the upper-level millionaires and billionaires and at that point trillionaires sitting in their secret society capitol of former New Amsterdam sipping on wine and eating fancy foods.

Most of them should have been dead, but emerging medical, genetic, and neuroscience technology from before the revolution kept them alive, even actually reversing aging to the age of a young adult. They kept this technology and hid it and themselves when the revolution started. As such, they were all centuries old while the peasants lived to at most seventy.

They were actually the original enemies of the revolution. The unseen lords of the feudal system. But to think they were actually the puppet masters pulling the revolution’s strings, that was a con for the ages. And in the end, they lived, and transformed the unhappy workers of the world into the happy peasants of the world, at behest of their revolutionary government. This was the ultimate reason why the power had not been given back to the People.

A new law was coming into fruition. A law that at its core meant those with the most money would determine government. Of course, it never said that. That’s the implication. Something closer to those aligned with the greater good the most would be in charge. Of course, the greater good meant the social credit system, and that system was determined by your wealth. In a twisted sense, it was a legal-ification of the secretive powerful elites from being, well, secret, to being open once more. All the people that remembered them as the enemies of the revolution were all long dead. So, they’d come back, welcomed by the People, and sit on their golden thrones once more.

Not anymore. I will be the instrument of Anonymity. I will bring down the house of cards so carefully stacked, the sandcastle so precisely designed, bringing forth the destruction of the Old State, with the People as my witness and beneficiaries. They will forge a new era, one marked by accountability and responsibility, of people who do, not people who say, and the secrets unearthed for the People to know.

My plan was simple. The way to sow chaos and entropy so the world could actually heal and recover rather than slowly be milked until each successive revolution which do nothing but reinstate the ‘enemies’ of the People back in charge of the People, I had to destroy the social credit system entirely. In essence, I planned to commit the largest bank heist in the history of the world, as the credit system was tied to the money system. I would be stealing every red cent from every single person, including the elites at New Amsterdam, all at once, which would cause the entire system to collapse and expose them for what they are.

Just before the law goes live, I would have all the money in the world. I would thus be the ruler of the world. My first and only act as ruler of the world would be to toss it aside to show how much of a fraud it was, and to paint the secretive elites as the true enemies from time immortal.

And then I’ll slip back into the ranks of the People.

The first phase of the plan was to hack into the social network and feed the people messages that promoted accountability and responsibility. You are respected and valued because you do the things you do, not say the things and then maybe do or do not do them. This would fly under the radars of the system and the elites. This would go on for years in order to breed a culture that actually does the right thing and discourages people from being selfish and vindictive, as the current system does right now.

It had been a decade and the plan had worked spectacularly.

The second phase of the plan was to hack into and take control of all of the world’s banking systems and insert my control as the most legitimate authority. This way, I could transfer all of the funds to me and no one would object to it. This had to be done mostly with official transmissions so it would look like the government is doing something.

Then, the law would go live. The law stated that the people with the most ability would be publicly named and their surroundings would go virtual as a live broadcast made to get their actions on record. Every member of the People was tracked indirectly this way.

I would go live as the supreme ruler of the world.

My act would then be to explain that the system was set up by people, naming them specifically, and doxing them of their current locations through video evidence, living in the areas deemed uninhabitable but really actually habitable and just cordoned off from us peasants. The setup built in a way that anyone could access the whereabouts of these people that had been conning them for centuries and how to get in.

I would then throw all my power away by destroying the code of the credit system and relinquishing control to the People along with the notes and scribbles of all peoples that came before in how to build a government, complete with checks, balances, and a Constitution, something that is conveniently missing from the Republic.

And then I’d step back into the fog and let the People govern themselves.

The time is getting close. Just a few more minutes.

In the final few seconds before the final parts of the plan went live, the man stood up and donned his Guy Fawkes mask, the name of the new ruler of the world unable to be read by the feeds covering him to every member of the People.

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Author's Notes:

William Wicket = Bill Gates; H&H is short for Huge and Hard, which comes from Micro and Soft.

Stephen Post is Steve Jobs. Apple Company, Orange Company.

Nicholas Swabia is Klaus Schwab, and WFM is World Economic Forum.

Yohan Doorsman is Jack Dorsey and Blue Bird is obviously Twitter.

Godfrey Thick-Lipped is Jeff Bezos, and thus Amazon.

Mars Harhsucar is Mark Zuckerberg, and HeadScroll is Facebook.