Posthuman existence was an endless vacation.
Most Continuum citizens owned their own private universes, but everyone also had a home in Zeon. An unbounded plain with an Earthlike atmosphere, Posthumanity's shared home had no sun, but a cycle of light and darkness emanated from the heavens.

A Fractalscape of hills and valleys widened into lakes, seas, and oceans. Chains of tropical islands were connected by bridges and air and surface ferries. Many isolated atolls were never visited.
No one was real, so no one could die. A few inhabitants had always lived in Zeon, where time could fold back on itself.
There was no central government, or even an accurate census. Inevitably, it developed centers of power.

Absorbed in a million year project, Harold surveyed his estate, a dense forest island. Every day was almost the same, only slightly more complex.
The first paths and wilderness outposts had taken centuries to plan and construct. Now he was ready to build his first mansion in a jungle peninsula.
As he improved his minor empire, the rain on the tree canopy represented endless entropy.
Someday, when he had earned his first quadrillion credits, this would become the nucleus of his own universe.

He had nothing in common with his distant neighbors, who owned sterile zones of absolute order. The new universes branching off from Zeon were as different as they could be. Everyone became their own country.

The OmniPattern inscribed the Posthuman essence into the laws of a mathematical universe. Across impossible distances, the Continuum still linked all Posthumans.
Harold could never hope to visit the Core. The main transfer routes were almost gridlocked. Even his local sector had traffic delays, with no improvement in sight.
Their isolation meant each sector developed its own iron traditions.

Harold belonged to the small minority of the decillion Posthumans who had begun to question their existence. An even less popular faction wanted change.
Their appeals to form new sectors and shared universes were summarily rejected. The very notion was subversive, until the current sectors could be improved no further.
Posthumanity's common goal was to analyze every meaningful life. Only then would it make sense to advance to the next level.
The wait was intolerable.
The Outsiders only option was to take drastic action. It was time to escape deeper.


Harold woke to a line of sunlight projected on the wall, and the busy signals of chirping birds. To him they sounded violent.
His narrow room was almost cool after the unseasonable rain.

Like many people with unsolvable problems, he felt a giddy tranquility.
Today was more intense. Never before had he felt so strongly that something big was going to happen. Outside, the earth roared, a combination of wind and traffic sounds.

He had been dreaming about the Simulation again. Hopefully the virtual multiverse would replace actual reality before he died in the next few decades.
The current (strictly online) version already contained millions of user-generated simulations.

No time for breakfast.
He sat on the edge of his folding bed, reached for his pad, and checked the status of his contribution, Sygmap21:


Surrounded by endless ocean, the immense island archipelago glittered in the morning light.
The islands had many sizes and shapes, millions of them arranged in strategically interesting patterns.
Most were independent nations participating in a web of alliances, populated by nanobots that were slowly inventing more advanced weaponry.

Until recently no ship was allowed to sail the ocean. All trade, combat, and conquest had happened by air. Nine great wars scrambled the political map.

Far below the apocalyptic air battles occupying its neighbors, one of the smallest islands had regained its independence after an epic struggle.
The inhabitants emerged from their impregnable underground level to begin the rebuilding. Small robots with many-segmented arms cleared paths through the rubble. Simple CGI plants had already filled the ruined island's craters and furrows.


Harold checked the simulation stats. It would require dozens of iterations to achieve Level Two definition.

He glanced around his room. There was a silver Terminator skull, a Noctis poster, an old model flatscreen, defaced legal notices tacked on the wall, a hi-res 3D poster of the current love of his life, crossover songstress/actor Juanita Phelps.
His home looked heroically shabby. His true possessions were ideas.

He went back online to check the most popular Posthuman pseudo-heaven, the source of his now forgotten dream.
In fact his dream had been an unauthorized extension of that simulation.


Like the universe that had spawned it, Flatland was too complicated to show on a map.
There were too many borders and weirdly contorted enclaves. No district spanned even a millionth of the whole.
This was reflected in the absence of large political parties, religions, philosophies, or shared goals.

All politics was local.
There was little contact between neighboring cities. They wouldn't have understood each other anyway.
The only thing they shared was the drive toward self-improvement, what their Mormon ancestors had called eternal progression.
Immense new languages evolved everywhere.

Hard to believe this was the most primitive part of the hypercivilization, the only area were old humans would have felt at home, if they could master unlimited patience.

It took a ten-million-year commitment to design a typical Megalopolis, where each building and neighborhood had a precise function.
After many social and personal breakthroughs, after exploring all the subtle perceptions a human-level mind had to offer, a few prominent citizens would be invited to relocate to a more advanced Megalopolis, were slightly higher mind-states could be accessed.

Only thirty trillion citizens had managed to enter the core region known as the Eternal Empire, where they might ascend to archangel-like states.
In the Capitol District, the Great Hall glowed in golden light. Here, the High Council (the top deliberative body in the known multiverse) served at the pleasure of the Grand Imperator, one level below God.
Few citizens could communicate with him directly. The Imperial Ministers were the equivalents of demigods, a pantheon of frightful monomaniacs. The Executive Bureaucrats (Ranked 1 through 10^12) were undergods.

Any citizen who hoped to join their ranks had to be promoted through forty power levels which made a mockery of any human political campaign.
Such a grandiose ascent required unshakable willpower and self-confidence, first-class connections, and flawless social manipulation skills; plus the fortitude to withstand a series of grueling examinations and ordeals.

Only one million citizens had attained top Patrician status. The rest were Serviles with circumscribed rights, to be reassigned as needed. Even they had many minutely measured gradations.
All had accumulated immense wealth over the ages. By now, each subject owned at least one giant estate and many smaller holdings.

Still, someone had to be at the very bottom, the 'poorest of the poor', as far removed from the glorious Capitol as possible.
This person barely owned a hundred acres.
In a less competitive society, he might have converted his misfortune into a notorious celebrity. It was a cautionary tale.

"My main palace contains barely thirty rooms, and is located in the least fashionable Z-Edge district.
My most presentable residence is a tiny condominium near the tenth most important Outer Core Boulevard.
The highest functionary I could hope to contact is my local Deputy Executor.
Above him is the acting District Overseer. Getting an appointment with her executive secretary would take at least four centuries - plus a Class-VIII achievement bonus."


Did you ever dream you woke up and suddenly understood what was going on?

The text seemed to tremble as Harold read the latest reports, user comments, and auto-generated SimLogs.
He stared at the graphs like someone first noticing the Milky Way while lying on his back in the snow, a snapshot of an immense explosion.
For weeks, he had been awaiting an epiphany.
Cultures were chains of laws arranged from simple to complex. A subject had to understand them all to participate.

He checked more detailed simulations completed in the past twenty-four hours. Why had their users gone to the trouble of generating them?

Communities of gas giant balloon organisms, disembodied AI networks, mole creatures, Hobbits, Smurfs.

Someone visiting the surface of the sun inside the heavily armored hull of a battleship would stay alive just long enough to feel pain.

The surface of a neutron star was covered with a strange superfluid. Push against it, and a bump instantly appeared on the other side.

Slowly, Harold returned to his base reality, the place he least wished to be. From the end of time to the end time.

His physical existence on Earth in the year 2020 seemed increasingly precarious.
Mostly, he handled his problems by ignoring them. That would not be possible much longer.
Harold had managed to offend three powerful interest groups (lawyers, bureaucrats, and seniors), plus too many powerful individuals to remember. He fell on his squeaking bed muttering a series of curses.
His real life was defined by the concept of legal liability.

Five years ago, an innovative trial lawyer had won a trillion dollar civil judgment from the company managing an under-funded emergency room in a rural county hospital.
Harold had happened to reside in that county.
A wealthy old person had died because not enough doctors had been on hand to handle her complex medical condition.
All 117,204 county residents were responsible for paying the medical neglect verdict, which took the form of a one-time tax assessment.

Obviously, it would be impossible to collect even a meaningful fraction of the amount. The verdict was reduced over 99% after a round of appeals. Senior citizens, honorably discharged veterans, and those under the age of twenty-one at the time of the judgment were excused from paying altogether.

Harold's final share had come to $5,270.48.
This was still more than he claimed he could afford to pay. He had already taken out a loan to pay his elevated property taxes.

At first, many residents had simply ignored the bills. It took them several months to become aware of the new reality.
Most saw the light when someone they knew lost everything after their bank account was seized. They got with the program by dialing a debt consolidator's toll-free number. A new breed of superlawyers negotiated thousands of individual settlements, where the amounts owed were further reduced.

A minority of residents had their wages garnished or even their homes seized. Many had to move to more modest accommodations.
Declaring bankruptcy did not dissolve the debt, though many tried to go that route.

After five years of delaying tactics, Harold's problems were about to get real, as the certified mail tacked to his wall attested.
He had acted as if the law would be changed. Instead, it was strengthened. The most recent verdicts should have filled him with dread.
In some cases, failure to successfully apply for and retain a suitable job or other income stream was considered contempt of court. The Supreme Court refused to hear further appeals.
Harold claimed to be unemployable in the current recession, but that excuse no longer worked. As a member of his 'Frank Pledge' he was expected to do whatever it took, no matter how painful.

The President had declared the next fifteen years would be a 'New Dawn', an era of hard work. The upcoming demographic transition meant everyone had to 'hustle and bustle' to provide for their 'extended families' and society.

Many of Harold's neighbors already worked twelve hour shifts to pay for universal healthcare, wealthcare, and the federal debt payments, as well as their own middleclass aspirations.
"We can relax when we're dead," the President had not entirely joked. He often invoked the name of Jesus.

Harold's claim that he couldn't pass a criminal background check was similarly inadmissible. After all, he only had himself to blame. He should not have posted all these inciteful, illegal rants.

It was all the fault of BIFAPS.
In an age of massive healthcare costs and other entitlements, the Bipartisan Family Protection and Stability Act of 2016 had brought fiscal order and predictability.
This included maintaining a low but fixed growth rate in healthcare spending. The new infertility treatments, the resulting premature births, and longterm dementia care costs sometimes exceeded a million dollars per day. Politicians claimed healthcare spending was actually falling behind, because a shrinking portion of possible treatments was fully covered.

That was only the start. Under BIFAPS, all economic and legal rights acquired before January 20th, 2017 were to be retained forever. Their rates of increase were also to be maintained within reason.
By law, medical benefits and pensions could never be reduced. Promised benefits were paid to senior union members before anyone new could be hired, though that rule was soon relaxed.

A long list of economic simplifications was also ruled out. To prevent disruptive innovation, licensing rules became much stricter.
Those who wanted to join the economic elite had to earn admission by putting in a decade of study and apprenticeships. The number of lowly paid interns multiplied.
It triggered a massive increase in college costs, as most of the online universities were shut down.
Discount medical clinics had six months to meet tough new care standards. Most were bought out by established hospitals.
Housing costs burgeoned, to the relief of struggling homeowners.

An immense bureaucracy solved any contradictions by expanding itself, looking for new ways to keep money flowing to politically connected recipients.

BIFAPS was crafted to benefit most elements of society, but it required sacrifices from everyone.
Massive new taxes were on the horizon as long-promised services for the elderly were added. That legislation would only be passed after the next election.

50% of the economy would soon be dedicated to interest payments. Economic growth would come to an end, but experts disagreed about whether that was a bad thing. Stagnation would ease the restructuring into a well balanced, 'mature' economy that could maintain itself indefinitely, without the annoying boom-bust cycles that had caused so much misery through the ages.

Harold cared more about the unpredictable effects. He was about to experience some of them himself.
Criticizing the legislation was of course perfectly legal, but he had gone too far by speculating online about ways to evade it, including how to hide income. He had encouraged others to do so, providing them with case-specific information. That had resulted in his first misdemeanor conviction.
Even that had only happened because he insisted on representing himself in court. The prosecutor had offered to assign him a public defender, though Harold technically hadn't qualified under the means test.
His passions usually overrode his restraint, especially when he got mad. That would be the end of him.

"If you're not working by the fifteenth of next month, you could be detained," Tyleesha, Harold's court-appointed caseworker, had warned him two weeks ago. "Your driver's license will be suspended and your bank account frozen."
She spoke like a parole officer, her usual laid-back attitude on hold.
"You have to get a full-time job. If twenty million undocumented migrants can do it, you can too."

Almost 4 percent of the population was currently under government supervision. Harold dreaded joining their ranks.
In an age of chronic unemployment, the new federal work programs (the 'Temp Camps') were quite tough.

One of Harold's weaknesses was that he liked to appear as if he had ample options. He hadn't replied right away. They sat in a room of sun-slanted shadows and unplanned earth tones. As he cleared his throat, his caseworker had continued.

"You seem to be running a hate campaign against society, not just the government. You're inventing new legal problems. Hate is always wrong."
Once again he realized that almost all advice was awful. It only generated more stress.

"The world has decided to enslave itself," he remembered replying. "Someone has to fight back. That would be me."
Between the otherwise uneventful years of 2010 and 2020, humanity had finally been tamed. For the first time, society had developed the means to block disruptive change.
The rest of the world happily joined the USA and Europe in preserving its existing institutions and privileges. Many regions were even more thorough about it. No global pressure was applied, yet not a single country, no matter how small, had opted out. Not one.

"It's too early for history to end," he had said. "None of the good stuff has happened yet."
"Oh, I'm sure it hasn't."

Then Harold remembered giving a long, impassioned speech, summing up his greatest insights. In his mind his impromptu performance had equaled Galt's finest perorations, though his online transcript had generated rather less enthusiasm.

"Humanity can sometimes achieve the hardest goals," he had declaimed, "but not the easiest ones. Technology is useless against simple poverty, ignorance, obesity. The reason is that most people are unnecessary. All the essential labor can be done by an elite cadre of experts. But everyone is still expected to make themselves useful, even us low-value individuals."

"I call it the Stasis Paradox," he went on. "It's why everything sucks. The world is incredibly complex yet incredibly crude. Centuries of accumulated traditions, interest groups, and bureaucracy only become more entrenched as new institutions are built on top of them. Now mankind has chosen to block all meaningful change, and to seal off all the unexplored side paths. Those in power benefit the most."

"Is this a Scifi conspiracy?" his caseworker had wondered.

"No, it's an emergent phenomenon, a crystallization network, democracy amplifying itself. The deadwood has become the forest, choking everything. It's a conformity effect, a brain function shutting down critical thinking! The only way to make things better would be to make them worse first. At this point, it would take a world war to reboot the system. Or maybe everyone should take powerful drugs to shatter their mental cages."

Two years ago, his first caseworker became furious at this point, and had started yelling incoherently. Harold must have said something else to have caused such consternation.
His second caseworker had used unfunny humor to avoid discussing taboo subjects.
Harold's odd beliefs did not necessarily indicate a mental disorder, but his efforts at converting others seemed borderline delusional, since he invariably failed.

"I think the world is a bit more complicated than you say," his final caseworker had objected idly.

"No way!" he countered. "We're too simple. Whenever a problem is solved, the solution becomes just another box in a flowchart. The new insight doesn't change us, or spread to other fields. Society may get smarter, but individuals don't. The smarter society gets, the more complicated life gets for its subjects. Things will only get worse until the final collapse. At the end lies chaos, not God. The opposite of meaning!"

Government workers were instructed not to debate politics with their clients, but his caseworker had an hour to spare. One of Tyleesha's other clients had committed suicide the other day.

"You left out one thing," she said. "Most people actually like the new system. Life is more predictable now. The majority has benefited from the new rules. Only a minority hates them."

Harold felt a moment of vertigo. He rarely heard valid counterpoints.
"But things are getting worse, and not just for me! The new polygamy movement is locking up women like slaves! Surplus men kicked out of their compounds turn criminal, and watch out if the patriarch gets mad at you!"
Harold had changed the subject again, another sign of his lightning mind.

"You must be talking about the New Dominion," Tyleesha replied. "Most people haven't even heard of them. They seem low-threat."

Thousands of cult members had been kicked out of Texas three years ago before reconstituting in Harold's area. Most members had gone underground, but the group was still expanding. Soon they would join the mainstream.
The government had suspended most criminal prosecutions. In the spirit of BIFAPS, many New Dominion practices were being formalized. For an outsider to attempt to seduce a plural wife could be a civil offense under the new religious accommodation laws.

"There are more than they let on," Harold replied. "And other types of polygamy are even more common! That's why I am single."

He thought he glimpsed weary amusement.
"Even if you're right, you have to make some concessions," she objected. "In your case sooner rather than later. Even the thought of rebellion is dangerous. Better hide your intentions."

She sighed. "I hope I'm wrong for both our sakes, but I don't think you will get a steady income soon. You haven't even tried to meet Judge Garrin's expectations regarding your online profile. I could say one thing: we won't make any extraordinary efforts to find you, should you make yourself scarce next month."

That announcement had affected him more than any well-meant warning. Leaving the fifth floor of the County Office Building, Harold was unexpectedly shaken.
He could not handle the future. For the first time he focused on himself. Things were about to get real.

When he returned home, his first impulse had been to look for others like himself. He needed allies.
This was no easy task. Harold turned out to be weirder than he'd thought.

Currently he lived off a modest annuity, the fruit of a lawsuit his parents had won against a drunk driver.
All his adventures and thrills were online, where he conducted 'meta-scientific' research.
His other brush with the law involved a police interrogation about stalker-like activities around a certain celebrity. He had been caught with an infrared camera designed to see through clothing (paparazzi upgrade) inside a gated community at night.
Good-cop/bad-cop was not a myth.

At this point, only three distant relatives and an ex-teacher might care that he existed. Even the crank websites ignored him.

Online, he learned he wasn't quite alone.
At least five members of his judgment class were jailed or confined to house arrest for hiding assets.
Others faced the threat of prison for their proclaimed inability to pay fines or child support.
A group of men lived in barrack-style housing in a high-crime neighborhood, along with dozens of illegal aliens. One had even offered to help Harold move in.

He had also found a few genuine outsiders online, a loose conglomeration of resisters, malcontents, conspiracy theorists, stymied innovators, and aggrieved losers who were more talk than action.
They differed among themselves more than normal people, but they did agree about one thing: all social progress had ended in the past decade. History might even reverse itself.

Harold's online investigations had hit a snag when a Malaysian potentate shut down Google for two weeks, and temporarily confiscated its 1,000,001 servers.
The potentate's goal had been to find the overwritten trail of a single search, evidence in a polygamous divorce proceeding. One of his wives' secret lover had been researching untraceable poisons.
It took only one court order in a friendly jurisdiction (Dearborn, Michigan). Because of an attached gag order, no one knew if the potentate's search had succeeded.

This episode had first made Harold aware of the social changes in his own area. Otherwise he might have missed the polygamous New Dominion movement operating behind the scenes. Their backroom manipulations included zoning changes and tax exemptions for an agribusiness collective, a private resort, and even the incorporation of a small town.

Stories about 'Lost Boys' being expelled from their communities in large numbers so that older men could take additional wives were mostly false. Instead, they voluntarily moved out of their crowded dormitories to try their luck in regular society.
There had been more local bar fights, sexual harassment charges, and a proliferation of moneymaking scams.

The movement owned extensive local investments, donated to charities, and had even managed to get a member elected to the local school board.
All part of a bigger trend . . .

He had spent another week searching news archives: reading about the increasing number of laws, regulations, and bureaucracies; price inflation trends; hidden taxes and unfunded mandates; the rise in banking charges and toxic loans; a boom in privatized debtors prisons; the pathetic handful of active resistance movements and their declining protests; police chases and standoffs.
Artificial scarcity was the new basis of the world economy.

Harold integrated all the data, and finally accepted the unbearable truth: The world was fucked.
All was lost.
So what else was new?

This morning his perceptions were heightened like on the morning of a final exam, a combination of fear and hope. He still had options.
His singlewide trailer was located on the edge of a trailer park surrounded by woods, one hundred yards off a rural road ten miles from town.
He had two revolvers (a heirloom .45 (his preferred suicide weapon, should all options be removed) and a Zunghou .38), a single action shotgun, a bulletproof vest and a tactical helmet, ample ammo, and hidden cams around his property.

He was still better off than most of the forgotten victims of history. Tomorrow, he could choose to submit to the politicians and visit the nearest JobCorps intake center, or he could delay further by falsely filing for a student loan, or he could go into hiding.
Or he could resist.

Harold believed the human brain contained a mysterious 'sub-brain' evolved to resolve intolerable dilemmas. Responsible for the placebo effect, it also absorbed prayers and schemed against authority figures.

Presently he remembered the worst pain he had ever felt, courtesy of a three-millimeter kidney stone. He had purchased his first handgun three days later.

The doctors and nurses had kept him in agony for eight hours before giving him a pain shot because his RealID hadn't conformed to federal regulations.
As he lay writhing, moaning, and cursing behind a thin curtain on the emergency room examination couch, they explained his 30-day provisional ID had expired and needed to be upgraded, which required his birth certificate and employment and/or utility records he didn't have. (This was not the hospital that had been sued for a trillion dollars in damages.)

When he had managed to crawl to the hallway to holler for pills, Harold was tackled and tasered by two guards.
That additional flash of pain had actually made him feel better, erasing the sordid indignity of the scene.

He remembered that feeling this morning.
He realized he wasn't going to run. He would stay in his home no matter what.
The first thug to break through his prefab door would die along with him.

"Bring it motherfuckers," he sneered at absolutely no one.

And it might well come to that. However, a miracle would also be welcome.

He knew from game theory he should narrow his predicament to two compromise choices, make a loss/benefit diagram to rank them, and use a properly weighted dice to make his final decision.
There was even an app for that.

Instead, he started from nothing.
As a noted crank philosopher, he believed in deep patterns. The Bootstrap Principle, Boto Rimeno: why did something exist rather than nothing?
The simplest entity was absence, which implied its opposite: one bit of information.

The simplest equation to generate all binary patterns (0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111, 0000, 0001, and so on) was supremely unethical. It would eventually generate all bad, evil, and horrific patterns, including exact digital descriptions of every unpleasant historical event, including Harold's present conundrum.
The highest purpose of reality should be to prevent such patterns from existing.

In the past decade, the whole world had been simulated online at low resolution. The Net had already begun to explore some of the horrors mankind had managed to avoid by blind luck alone, as part of the Reality Project.

He studied an alternate-world simulation replaying the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
World War Three began with one week of US air strikes against Soviet missile bases in Cuba.
Then the Soviets fired five short-range nuclear missiles against the Marine landings west of Havana.
The US responded with the prompt nuclear destruction of dozens of military bases in the USSR.
That same day, every large to medium-sized American city went through a chaotic mass evacuation that killed over ten thousand civilians. Things only got worse.
The Soviet nuclear response destroyed the main US bases in Europe. Then came seven days of all-out nuclear war, and the destruction of much of western Europe and the entire Soviet Union.
Only twelve million Americans were killed after six missile and ten one-way suicide bomber strikes, but almost two hundred million Soviets and a hundred million Europeans perished within a year. There would be a hundred million additional cancer deaths throughout Asia.
Uncertainties about the long-term effects of the fallout destroyed what remained of the world economy.
It ended with the US annexation of Siberia.

This was just one of millions of Armageddon scenarios set in the Twentieth Century. Altogether, mankind barely had a 60% chance of escaping that century in better shape than it had started.
The number of possible future cataclysms was of course infinitely greater. Mathematically, there was no way to escape certain Doom.

Something had to be done. Nothing could be done.
He needed a fundamentally new insight. Only possibilities mattered, no matter how remote.

The mere existence of a sufficient force automatically elevated him, even if it also made him obsolete. If he could live in a world where the X-Men were real, he would be ten times cooler, although relatively he would be even less capable.

Once again Harold sensed an immense presence ahead. Not an obstacle, but a mystery more important than his own oblivion.

The ideas came faster as his search entered stranger byways of the Net.
He believed it was time to upgrade human nature through mind enhancement technology. Powerful new drugs could strengthen emotions, make life more meaningful, activate everyone's personal visions. Then would come the shared visions.
Global brainwashing, if such a thing was possible. It might start as a hoax, a meticulous deception inducing mass focus. It might be a virus.

The longer Harold stayed awake, the more sense it made.
He was at the start of an epic adventure, a real one this time. Every adventure began with a single anomaly. He had to find that anomaly.
The first clue was what he was doing right now, a type of search he couldn't have imagined seven years ago. His computer was generating and pursuing leads like an extension of his mind. Sometimes their roles even reversed.
In a primitive way, the Net had become aware. Human awareness was now an extension of the massive network describing known reality at increasing resolution.

Unfortunately, this mind merger had only begun after human civilization had decided to freeze itself. Had it started five years earlier, a new intelligence could have arisen before the current order was locked in place.

Harold spent eight more hours online, chasing stray leads he had collected over many months.
The world was not quite as boring as it appeared. There was at least one miracle out there. He had to find it.
No doubt others had already had the same idea. He could try to find them instead. They were extremely powerful, operating on a global scale . . . perhaps a reclusive billionaire funded the group.
If only they existed.

Sometime between midnight and 3 AM, Harold had to face the truth.
There was nothing out there. He was on his own.
Only darkness on the horizon - or perhaps the shadow of something immense. He reclined unblinking against the wall for many minutes.
He realized the greatest conspiracy of all time began with him, at this very moment.

Fortunately, most preparations had already been completed for other purposes. He found plans disguised as simulations and overly detailed fiction.
He merely had to choose and combine existing ideas, and pretend they had more power than anyone had thought. Then he needed money and co-conspirators, ways to attract the best programmers, disgruntled managers, and angry fools like himself to execute each step.

He imagined a series of disruptions to shake the world.
Last year, someone had put bounties on the heads of hundreds of CEOs and politicians, supposedly to intimidate them into moderating their excesses. The perpetrator had never been caught.

Harold had ventured far into the wasteland, but he never entirely lost touch with reality. He understood that any plot he could put into action would be found out. The majority of mankind wouldn't believe it was real, even if it was real. There had been too many hoaxes already.

He began to see what had to be done.
Only the most spectacular intervention could work. The world transformation would be forged in a shock of creative destruction. The tension would give rise to the very organization he needed to form, to solve the global threats it had created.

To attract members, he needed one big lie. That lie was that the group already existed. He would rewrite the past to backdate his conspiracy. History falsification was the ultimate control tool.

He imagined an elite order promising its members immortality, better than any religion. Of course Harold would not benefit personally, at least not too much.
The illusion of an all-powerful revolution was more valuable than any actual conspiracy. People responded to authority, no matter how unjust.

He needed an origin story. A future entity manipulating history to create a feedback loop leading to its own invention? He wondered if he was being manipulated right now.
Additional visions came as the hours passed.
Properly planned and managed, an escalating series of false terrorist attacks would monopolize public attention, creating the illusion of mass discontent, leading to actual calls for change.

In Harold's case, ignorance was a weapon.
Operating by whim and passion rather than logic (with frequent breaks and occasional naps), he set his plan in motion.

It turned out there was a large constituency for resistance. They just needed someone to tell them what to do.
It took only a week to establish his first reliable contact. Then the network began to double every few days.

Somehow, the online intelligence agencies missed all the preparations.
When things actually began to happen, Harold thought he had discovered a type of magic.
More likely, he had unleashed a pre-existing force which had been biding its time, waiting to assert itself.

Within two months, his impromptu scheme was responsible for mass disruptions in ten cities.
The attackers created false news videos and websites, used social networks for propaganda purposes, infiltrated emergency services to spread disinformation, tampered with infrastructure and sabotaged pipelines, deployed chemical irritants, sent death threats and paid out bounties for failed attempts, set off powerful smoke generators and diversionary fires, hijacked a dozen tanker trucks to create devastating blasts in evacuated factories and city centers, and used suicide attack teams to disable power plants and command centers.

They also released the first nanotech anti-personnel weapons, the 'Skreechers' secretly developed in Russia and China. The cleanup was vastly more expensive than any damage they did.
The goal was a breaking news story every hour.
The few operatives who were captured told sensational tales about a global brotherhood of doom, claiming the World Mind had sent them.

While not particularly destructive, the scattered attacks were unbearably ominous. There was no way to predict the next target. International travel and trade plummeted and oil prices skyrocketed.

The first copycat attack (just as the original effort was petering out) caused the first significant loss of life.
Targeting a cabal of wealthy investment bankers who had helped cheat their clients and taxpayers out of half a trillion dollars, the attackers sprayed several kilos of capsaicin into three office buildings. More than a hundred employees died in the stairwell stampedes or jumped out of windows.
Generating over ten thousand fake 911 calls in half an hour, a second copycat group shut down rush hour traffic throughout the NorthEast Corridor.

Then a third group used the opportunity to execute their long-planned massive attack.
Tens of thousands of commuters collapsed where they stood as persistent nerve agents penetrated their lungs and skin, death following within minutes.
The effects reverberated far and wide. For the first time in seventy years, a political group had dared challenge China's Communist Party on its home turf.

They couldn't have done it without Harold's help.
Half a dozen opportunities to foil the Beijing plot were later identified. All were ignored in the chaos of the false attacks.

More apocalyptic outrages soon followed, plus targeted assassinations of officials who sometimes didn't deserve it, plus the wanton alteration of court and police records in many countries.

Exactly as Harold had anticipated, the world went to hell in a handbasket. Insanity could be contagious, as the panic reached a crescendo.
The public thought it was a fundamentally new threat, a cancer from humanity's dark heart. They might be right.


"So I caused all this," Harold sighed. "I guess I did find a job after all. Didn't manage to get paid for it, though. You may have heard of me: I am NightMaster."

Sitting in the familiar county office, it was unreal to let the truth out. He felt like Himmler trying to negotiate his postwar release.
An image flashed through his mind, a fireball engulfing a huge skyscraper.

His caseworker listened to his degraded tale with mounting incredulity.
"You did no such thing!" Tyleesha exclaimed. "This whole mess would have happened anyway. You coincidentally happened to come up with the same idea at the same time as the morons responsible for . . ." she checked her notes ". . . the 'Morumbo' false conspiracy, who inspired the 'H-9' and 'Suko' groups to do their evil shit, and then of course 'Al-Lianza' joined in."

At least fifty thousand 'persons of interest' had been detained in the past month, most of them doubtlessly innocent.

She continued: "You admitted some of what you told me on your blog, though I wonder if anyone else read it. Your pranking may have subverted their communications. You probably saved two or three lives in the process."

The Morumbo group had been a much better persuader than Harold. Apparently everyone had ignored his agitations.
"You're saying I'm not in trouble for trying to destroy the world?"

"Had you made a serious effort, you would now be talking to a federal agent four pay grades above myself. That would be most unpleasant. I called up your files when you asked for this meeting. You were added to a watch list long before the attacks began. You probably guessed that was why I was assigned your case. I only deal with troublemakers. The Net surveillance was probably illegal, but good luck proving anything under the Terror Laws."

"I know I'm being monitored."

"TIA would have detected illegal communications. All you did was post rambling wish-fulfillment fantasies that less than a dozen people commented on. Couldn't you tell that no one acknowledged your orders? That's what we call fantasy."

Harold had just received a six-month case extension, courtesy of the current crisis.
At the end of that period he really would lose his freedom, unless he found a winning lottery ticket or someone was crazy enough to hire him. Tyleesha had coughed something about a 'mental health' extension, but he wasn't about to play crazy.

Six months seemed a lifetime away.
Anything could happen by then. Anything at all.

Harold remembered the most spectacular attacks, barely a month ago, though it already seemed longer.
Biotoxin airbursts and water poisoning had exterminated over two million victims in the largest cities of the Third World. They had already been 'replaced' by new births, but the pain would be felt for many decades. The average death toll per target had exceeded 10,000.
Epidemics were breaking out among the tens of millions of refugees.

Similar attacks against low-density Western cities had killed only a few thousand, thanks to the ability of the residents to stay indoors for days at a time, allowing area decontamination.

The most shocking detail was the low cost of the attacks. The required equipment was cheaper than a luxury tour bus and would fit inside one, along with most of the operatives needed to carry out the attacks.

Humans were vastly more vulnerable than expected, and absurdly fragile. They couldn't have much of a future.

Each target city had well over a million residents, though Harold didn't think he had heard of any of them:

Dongguan
Wuhan
Shenyang
Pune
Chengdu
Surat
Xi'an
Chonging
Fuzhou
Abidjan
Hangzhou
Porto Alegre
Bandung
Suzhou
Busan
Daegu
Dalian
Kanpur
Tianjin
Fortaleza
Salvador
Kano
Kunming
Jaipur
Changchun
Surabaya
Taiyuan
Guayaquil
Kaohsiung
Faisalabad
Mashad
Nagpur
Puebla
Campinas
Changsha
Aleppo
Lanzhou
Medan
Shijiazhuang
Patna
Qingdao
San'a
Nanchang
Changzhou
Indore
Jinan
Zhengzhou
Maputo
Baotou
Douala
Jilin City
Fukuoka

As a result of the attacks (and the total failure of the authorities to respond effectively) there had already been three revolutions. China's supposedly unshakable Party hierarchy had been terrorized into introducing its first democratic reforms.

He remembered the cataclysmic spectacle of the world's third largest supertanker ramming a high-rise city in grandiose slow motion.
Then came dam bursts, truck bombs at government buildings, bridge detonations, the senseless vandalism of public and financial records of every type.

Harold knew he actually was responsible for every nightmarish moment, though he hadn't anticipated any of them.
He was absolutely certain of this fact.

His double bluff (or was it a quadruple bluff?) had succeeded brilliantly.
He did not consider himself morally responsible for the countless personal tragedies. The world had been sick to begin with. He had merely triggered the long overdue immune response.

To top it off, Harold had just admitted his crime to the very government that still sought his enslavement, and they couldn't do a thing about it.

No matter what happened next, he would no longer be a loser.



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Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon