B-152-The Prometheus Project-LR.Pdf
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1 * for A K M & MEMC all rights reserved - Tam Fairlie Duxpress 2015 2 The Prometheus Project Tam Fairlie 3 ‘Aude Sapere’ – Dare to Know ! – the Motto of the Prometheus Project 4 5 6 forward It once basked in its reputation and ranked fourth on the ‘World List of Liveable Cities’. But the time of proud plaudits has passed and New Midland has been left with a divided society. Growing extremes of wealth and poverty have been banished to parallel worlds; those in a privileged enclave, the Cadena, live in uneasy proximity to the dispossessed, once middle-class population which has been decanted into carbon neutral ‘Eco-Tainers’. The once prosperous city centre, reduced to an interstitial zone, an area now regarded as the dangerous ‘Stits’, is no longer deemed fit-for-purpose and has been carved up between land speculators who await profitable opportunities for future sustainable redevelopment. This is a society where a free market economy has revealed that there is very little economic value to be derived from many inhabitants. However compassionate social planning practices have been applied to manage a frictionless transition towards a ‘new product definition’ for humanity. Cyber-intelligence, has recast civic life. Those who once proudly styled themselves ‘Noomidians’ have lost political aspiration to anything more than ‘inhabitant’ status. A city once envisioned as an efficient, well-oiled machine has at least succeeded in imposing a dispassionate, unerring machine administered justice upon its inhabitants. Trend analysis is undertaken with precision to anticipate and neutralise anti- social activity. Pervasive consumer data profiling provides a realistic assessment of an individual’s true social value and enables distribution of benefits accordingly. Cyber-intelligence administers community affairs with a scrupulous impartiality that the great law-givers of the 7 past could only envy. Justice is seen to be done. This is a community which can boast that the arrows of cyber-intention rarely stray from targeted outcomes. The New Mid populace has been rendered socially compliant through enlightened schemes for debt management. Originally the high efficiency ‘Tainer’ dwellings were designed to manage a period of orderly transition while unsustainable debt levels were written down. But the advantage of the ‘Tainers’ in securing social stability was soon recognised. Tainers provide secure homes allowing residents to enjoy early retirement and while away their remaining time in comfortable torpor. Cultural identity has supplanted religion in defining a new patchwork of social fabrics. The Tainer concept allows intolerant communities to nurture their animosities without ever encountering neighbouring anathema. Meanwhile the masters of this society live sequestered lives in the fabled Golden Cadena, a chain of luxurious residential towers overlooking the now-desolate waterfront. But even these residents live in fear of losing their closely-guarded privileges. Few dare to cross their secure thresholds into the perilous world of the Stits beyond. Despite these inequities, New Midland is regarded as an urban success story, one of a handful of cities worldwide that has achieved a ‘sustainable’ future by fostering investment in controversial technologies. Foremost among these, the Prometheus Project, lies at the heart of a renaissance focussed on bio-genetic engineering that embraces cyber intelligence. Genetic scientists pursue technology which has radical implications for the future of human society. They jealously cling to their professional mandate, uncovering the painful truth of human insignificance as they work to bring to market a mix of genetic enhancements that are expected 8 to thrive in a much changed future world. Success stories such as New Mid rely not only on good cyber-government but also on the practicalities of enforcement. Security and stability are at the core of a determination to avoid the chaos that has engulfed so many other parts of the world. Es-Tech, a once minor security agency, Securatech, has grown in stature to embrace every aspect of New Mid life. Es-Tech securocrats work tirelessly to promote an environment in which cyber-intelligence can survive and flourish. Es-Tech works hand in glove with Media-Net, the media giant, to ensure a stable productive population. Media-Net, with limitless access to data gleaned from every transaction in daily life, ensures that its ‘clients’ are shielded from counterproductive influences or any sense of impotence and failure. * * * There are however, individuals who have failed to integrate into this smooth running machine. Mara and her community know as Trenchers are among those that have been left behind in the Stits clinging to a marginal existence amidst the ruins of a once vital middle class neighbourhood. This group of relicts has been dubbed ‘Trenchers’, a name suggestive of their defiance. Admittedly most of Mara’s colleagues have no alternative recourse. As paperless ‘illegals’ they are deemed economically dysfunctional. They do hold one advantage however; they have escaped the heavily indebted ‘safety net’ imposed upon so many others who have been dispatched to stable eco-Tainer environments. The Trenchers’ welfare is no one’s obligation. 9 The Diary Leather bound! The dessicated flaking skin of a dead animal! Handwritten fragments of a life lived long ago, battered by years of travel, tumbled about in one of those old handbags that they once used to lug about. After her death it may have lain for years half-forgotten in the bottom of some forgotten drawer. How her world has changed beyond recognition! They used to value such privacy in those days. Yet it remains my greatest treasure! Its last entries were made over 70 years ago. Nowadays keeping such an off-the-record account would be regarded as a subversive act, an attempt to maintain a secretive parallel life, probably even worse than being a Trencher in the Stits! No one would take the time to fashion such a handwriting style in these days of cut and paste. Her writing tools have become as anachronistic as I suppose the quill pen was to her. Not long ago I found an old pencil stub between the floor boards in the kitchen but there is nothing to sharpen its point; everything in the kitchen is blunt and plastic. I never actually met my grandmother; she died long before my birth. Yet in reading through her scattered entries some seventy years later I suspect that I have inherited some of her spirit. Her name too was Mara. Perhaps it was more common then than it is now. Her handwriting is loopy and confident, but often hard to read. It is a script that presents a challenge for optical scanners. Her quirky letters reveal something that we have lost in the intervening years since her last entry. She lived in a time when it was possible to take pleasure in individually shaping letters. Most people nowadays have no such patience and soon resort to auto-dict. 10 Handwriting skills have completely disappeared; my hand would be much too undisciplined and shaky. In a curious aside she alludes to a sense of separate identity arising from her being left-handed. How extraordinary that such things once divided people into separate camps! Nowadays people would only look at you blankly if you asked whether they were left or right-handed. This diary was one of the few pitiful things that I salvaged in my little hand bag when I walked out on Gilb. At the time I feared that walking away would become the story of my life. But I hold onto this fragmentary continuity at least. Perhaps that’s why the Trenchers are now so important, my determination to cling to my last chance. In her scrappy entries she uses her writing to bring order to her private thoughts. She reveals anxieties that make little sense in a modern context. It was a time of dissenting movements, dangerous, divisive politics and even organised warfare. She keeps critical notes of articles she has read or events attended. All this was not a record for posterity or justification of her choices. It was a kind of personal musing. She would be horrified to see that this scrappy remnant has unexpectedly survived as her only testament. It is a battleground of contrary forces within her; often she returns to pour derision on some earlier assertion. She expunges words, looking for simpler vocabulary. In some cases whole pages have been defaced with words of exasperation. Others have been ripped out entirely. Through all this her character emerges. She remains pathetically hopeful that she will be able to address widespread social problems by somehow reforming herself. She lists items that she intends to ‘boycott’ (a quaint term) and then quite poignantly records disastrous failures of resolve. She 11 mentions her determination to be ‘part of the solution’ and yet she also seems to remain solitary in a society that is collapsing around her. She resorts to extended diatribes against the ‘Industrial Military Complex’. Chimeras! Where is that military today? Where and what that industry? My heart missed a beat when I encountered her entry about a movement in San Francisco that she had been reading about, the ‘Diggers’. It is amazing now to think that in those days a person could consider travelling far afield and as she says ‘check them out’. I have searched the database to try and get a flavour of those times. Her interest in these Diggers almost seems too much of a coincidence. Is it possible that some phantom intent has been passed down directly to me through her genes? Those obsessions have mysteriously reappeared in her granddaughter and in the Trenchers. The imagination that induces me to open up the dark soil and plant a seed seems to exist in some core of my genetic coding.