Tag - A Technothriller (13 page)

“Another factor was the perception that peace would inevitably increase the influence of the common man. Sweeping Europe, and already established to some extent in France and the United States, the common man was a growing influence like never before in history. To the men and women in the meeting, these were problems that had to be dealt with. A simple but very effective plan, with two principal criteria as its objectives, was developed over the course of the next three days. The first was to maintain control of the common man, and the second was to keep his numbers down to manageable levels. The meeting concluded with the name ‘Hawks’ being adopted, as the discussions had led them to an inescapable truth. War would achieve both of the objectives that they set for themselves. This was a time-proven historical fact.

“What we are dealing with today are the children of those twelve. If you regard them as the trunk of a tree, then today we are dealing with the leaves, and the leaves are thick enough that you cannot see the branches. We know that there is an induction ceremony, and that it involves vigorous questioning, sometimes to the extent of torture and many times involving truth drugs or Truth Treatments as UNPOL like to call them. Once past that questioning, the induction ceremony is not elaborate, but each Hawk is given a dagger, usually by an elder member of their family.

“Hawks operate within their own sphere of influence. There is no secret handshake, hidden tattoo or code words. You either know someone is definitely a Hawk or you do not treat them as one. This makes them extremely difficult to penetrate. They meet, but not often, and word is discreetly passed along the original branches, and out to the new branches. Representatives are sent to meet and talk. And what has been decided upon is then passed along to the leaves.

“It was the Hawks who drove us to the last three so-called Great Wars – WWI in 1914, WWII in 1939, and WWIII in 2056 – and why they label wars ‘great’ is a mystery to me. However that aside, it was the Hawks who presented a plan that unleashed the endgame potential of global nuclear conflict. It was them who said, ‘Fire first, otherwise they will. Fire first, and we will win’. It was them who caused the massive loss of life. They have been quiet, but not silent, for a long time since then. You might say investing their time in the current plan.”

I turned my attention away from the Devscreen in front of me and looked at Gabriel. He was watching me and he paused, his eyebrows raised slightly in question. In my mind I could see the small group of twelve and I knew he was telling the truth. I nodded at him to continue.

Gabriel’s soft voice continued clearly. “Sir Thomas was initiated into the Hawks on his sixteenth birthday in 2051. As the son of a Hawk, and of course satisfying at least some of the criteria, he is a very smart and very dangerous opponent, with an IS of 153. At the time of the Great War, Sir Thomas was a mere youth of twenty-one, but he had already risen to a superior position in NATO forces. There is lots of trace for more than rumor that Sir Thomas had a significant hand in initiating a nuclear attack on the Geographic of Romania. By dissolving the political base for war in the dissolution of individual countries, but maintaining them as Geographic regions for the people who remain in those spaces, the global elite that remained after the Great War came to the conclusion that it was in everyone’s interest to disarm.

“The problem for the Hawks is that without conflict and with all humans being treated as equal, their share, their quota, is shrinking. The fundamental premise of the Hawks is that Earth has limited resources and those resources should be used by those who are most capable of fully realizing the potential of those resources. Embracing Darwin’s concepts of evolution, they seek on a periodic basis to reduce the strain on the Earth’s resources and improve the gene pool that survives. Who really dies in wars, disease, starvation and natural disasters? Sure maybe some percentage of the elite do, but even the estimated ten percent of one percent is still a very small number compared to ten percent of fifty percent. But generally the vast proportion of the population can smell a rotten meal when they’re being fed it, and since the Globe Popvote of 2066, global disarmament and consolidation of the nation states into the United Nation of Earth, the ability for the Hawks to create catastrophic devastation resulting in large loss of human life has greatly diminished.

“A cornered beast is a dangerous one, Jonah. Given the compulsion of Hawks to control a disproportionate share or the world’s wealth and power, Sir Thomas has come up with a way to get rid of about sixty-five percent of the global population, without spreading a virus, or bombs. Worse, he’s come up with a way whereby sixty-five percent will volunteer for their own deaths.”

I was stunned and raised my hand for him to pause.

“Sir Thomas has figured out a way to persuade sixty-five percent of the planet’s population to volunteer to kill themselves?”

“You’ve seen the suggestions for the Tag Law on the newsfeeds. Did you see the news on the Paris bombing yesterday?” Gabriel asked, pausing to take a sip of what looked like water in a clear bottle.

“Yes, I have.”

I turned my thoughts to the Tag suggestions I’d seen and the safer life they portrayed for everyone. It was a huge issue. One of privacy, but then, how much privacy do we really have now? I had seen the comms and tracking unit’s main console back in UNPOL’s complex in New Singapore. Devs the size of long-haulers and screens that could relay thousands of life-size images laid over a grid of where the circumstances were happening.

We may not have Tags embedded in our arms yet, but for the amount of privacy we have now through the PUIs on our Devsticks, we may as well. The pros of the suggestions focused on the benefits of the uplink and downlink to the Tag. The ability to read an internal biocheck and have it tracked in real time. A monitor for those in the care of children: never would youngsters be rushed late to healthcare again, nor would they be mislaid thanks to the map overlay updated constantly on your Devstick.

Gabriel put the bottle down and continued, “Well that was the Hawks and it is the start of the endgame in Sir Thomas and the other Hawks’ plan to make sure that every new special Tag contains a toxic wafer. On a command relayed through the downlink to the Tag, the wafer will melt, releasing the toxin into all tagged humans with an Intelligence Score of less than a hundred. Within a week of the command, the first victims will start to die. Before the end of the second week we estimate that about six point three billion people will be dead.”

Again, I had to pause as the scale of what Gabriel had said sunk in before signaling at him to go on.

“At this point, the Hawks will move globally to declare a national disaster and proclaim that the deaths are probably an attack from an alien power that we have been unable to detect. Despite there being no evidence to support this theory, the Military Security Council will then issue a global state of emergency and, acting on behalf of the United Nation of Earth Security Council, declare martial law. Under martial law, many of our basic freedoms will be suspended.”

The enormity of this struck me full on. My body reacted. I vomited. A hot flash had spiked through my guts as the realization of the importance of where I was hit me. It was simply too much, because in my gut, my ‘gut feel’, I knew that everything Gabriel had told me and shown me, was the truth.

Luckily there was a recycler next to the Dev and after I had vented my stomach of the ProCarboVite bar in it, I spat, and looked up at Gabriel, wiping my mouth with the sleeve of my outers. He looked back. There was no expression on his face, it was just him. It said there is no artifice here, no hidden agenda. This is real.

Seeing the panic in my face, Gabriel said, “It’s OK, Jonah. We can stop it – you and I and our friends – we can. This thing cannot happen but we know when they want it to happen. We know which Ents are building the wafers, which scientists perfected the formula for the toxin, and whether they were murdered after completing their work. And we know that the Intelligence Score limit has been set to one hundred. But what we don’t know is which people are connected with the planned moves directly after the extermination. If we can find out who those people are, then when we blow the whistle we have a chance to block them. But if we blow the whistle now, they’ll either fade away to fight another day, or move to implement immediately, and through perhaps messier means.

“The Tag Law is due to be put up for global PopVote on 15 March 2110. We probably have a week after that, maybe two, in which the Tags will be distributed. We understand that the tag can be self-administered, and has a fool-proof delivery mechanism. So they’ll probably be delivered to each person’s home. If you haven’t injected it, you’ll be noticed by your absence online and requested to report to a nearby hospital to have it administered to you. That’s what we know about the delivery.

“Shortly after it is confirmed to have been delivered to all households and individuals, the implementation suggestions will start. Globally the deadline to inject the Tag will be two weeks so that by 1st April everyone should have injected it. After that Sir Thomas will take the serial numbers of the Tags sent to people, and using lists that the Hawks have drawn up, will match people with serial numbers and issue the command to the Tags. In essence, it is the largest eugenics experiment ever conducted.”

I held my hand up to interrupt Gabriel’s monologue.

“Hang on, why don’t you just expose all of this? You know where the Tags are, you know about the wafer and the toxin, so why not just lay it all out there and wait for the response? I mean the whole thing, the Tag Law, the toxic tag, the lists, the Hawks – everything....” I trailed off as, while I was talking, I realized that what I was saying would be fruitless.

Gabriel smiled. “I don’t need to probe your mind to know what you are thinking, and yes you’re right, it wouldn’t work. All of our evidence to date is circumstantial. Everything is covered by extremely plausible denial, and we, or rather the information we supply, would simply be regarded as another crazy urban legend. The Tags would be swapped for genuine Tags, they’d be offered for inspection. The toxic Tags would vanish, probably get destroyed – it is easy enough to replace them in the future. We’d be discredited, arrested, and brain-wiped off the planet. And some time, one or two decades from now, the Hawks would suggest an upgrade and then they’d kill another five hundred million just for good measure.”

I nodded. It was true – the evidence without a toxic Tag was purely circumstantial, the claim so outrageous it would be aligned with the wildest conspiracy theories of the wildest crazies. It would be deemed as laughable to bring an action against Sir Thomas. There was no hard evidence, only conjecture, and worse there was no one to bring any action against. That I believed it and understood it only made the task ahead of me the more impossible.

“So what is it you specifically need me to do?” I asked.

“We need you to go inside. You need to gain Sir Thomas’s trust. You’re an arbitrator. We want you to use being his ‘nephew’ to get inside the Hawks and find out what you can. In parallel, work out a case against the Tag Law, and at the same time build a stronger case for individual privacy laws. Just before the vote we’ll go online, lay out the case, expose what we know and call for a full public investigation. If we’re successful, we’ll be heroes. If we’re not, we’ll probably be dead within the week.

“Of course, those arguments can be worked on under the pretext of building a strong case against any amendment to the Tag Law for the Hawks. The deeper you get, the more your uncle will trust you. He has to see you as a Hawk and therefore you have to become a Hawk. That’s not going to be easily achieved because your uncle views you as a smart liberal softie. We’re going to have to change that, which means you have to quickly scale up into a ruthless person. We’ll help with minor background alterations, but within a month you’re going to have to do some pretty awful things to people to convince Sir Thomas you’ve got the makings of a Hawk. You won’t be able to do this immediately but the clock is ticking. We’ve got to be able to expose everything before the vote on 15th March next year. Your change in character must be seen as a reaction to an event. It must be explainable, for the deeper you get the more your motive and desire will be tested.”

I nodded. I understood exactly where Gabriel was coming from. My so-called uncle had at times tested my viewpoint on various subjects, from education to crime and related punisments. I realized that my arguments and position was that of ‘a liberal softie’, as Gabriel had put it.

Gabriel continued in same soft, even tone.

“At some point you will be asked to open your mind so that a telepath can examine you and report what they see. You must pass that inspection. You must appear to open your mind but you must shield what you really know. It will be nearly impossible to do so, and discovery of, for example this discussion, would mean either instant death or brain wipe. I have had over twenty years of practice with using my mind to probe others, and I find it difficult to resist, but there is a chance that we can train you well enough that you will survive. We will need to work on that next, but first I want to tell you about what we know.”

Gabriel talked about the circumstantial evidence that they did have, and it was substantial. There was a lot of material that I was going to have to study at length later, as in my state and with the volume of the information, I was only able to grasp the highlights of what I was being told and shown.

“You look exhausted,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Perhaps we should rest for a little while and recharge our batteries?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head and looking at the time in the bottom corner of the Devscreen. “There isn’t time. We must continue – you still have to teach me how to protect myself against a mind probe.”

“All right, we’ll move on to that now then. I’m reasonably certain that when you return to Earth, and perhaps even before then, you will be requested to attend an interview. Take a look at your Devscreen.”