## an encounter _where the fk are we? mud evi _ Outside the front door drops of liquid trailed away towards a man reclined upon on a bed of pine needles. the man lay against the trunk of the tree, dark blood drained out of a horizontal slit in his ribcage, pooling at his side and ebbing against a trail of fragrant resin seeping out from between the bark above his head and down the spine of a large root rising out of the bed of straw. "Are you okay?" the technician ventured, slowly approaching. The answer to this question was clear but every conversation has to start somewhere. Recently he had found success in starting conversations with completely mundane statements or greetings that make no room for a reply; after being volunteered to sit in the front seat of a vehicle driven by a stranger for example. A simple "hello", completely eliding the "how are you?" a clear statement of intent. "Well... not really." came the reply. _What is to be done in situations such as these? one feels that they must do something, but how much responsibility is to be borne?_ "I will call for help." "There's nobody you could call," the man responded with a guttural growl, words elongated with resent. _no hospitals_ "It wouldn't make any difference. Do you have anything to drink?" "Inside," gestured the technician, "I will bring it to you." He hurried inside to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of pale white liquid. The man scowled as he saw the pallor of what was being offered him, but eventually took it and began to drink. As he did the technician had a moment to raise his eyes and look around. Stacks of detritus were all around. Piles of twisted metal, ambiguous pieces of plastic, a broken bicycle with a heavily rusted chain, an animal cage stuffed with reams of cable, all of which was completely absent when the technician had gone to bed in the early hours of the morning. He returned his gaze to the person before him. This man had been in a bad way long before he was stabbed in the chest. He was clothed for the cold, layers upon him, seemingly accumulated in the same way as the objects surrounding them. Some kind of vagrant, one of an increasing many in recent times. "What is all this stuff?" "It has its uses." came the reply as a matter of fact. It was true in a sense; some of the metal was pressed into convoluted shapes that seemed to serve a very specific but completely unknown purposes. The snake pit of coiled up cabling was brand new, though it had not yet been terminated, leaving its role unspecified and potentially increasing its value if you had the means to deploy it. If not, it was still high quality scrap metal. The bicycle was junk. The puzzle of how it got here remained, there was far too much for a single person to carry. It must have taken several trips. "Where are you taking it?" No answer. The plan either did not exist or was a secret, one likely to be taken to the grave given the deteriorating state of the vagrant. "Is there somewhere I can take you?" "There is one place, but," he paused, "maybe it's better if you don't." _expand the conversation ?_ The thrum of a large petrol powered engine could be heard approaching. An oversized white ute, recently manufactured and replicating the style of a turn of the millennium American pickup truck, was powering through the slush and mud covering the road as it climbed the hill towards the house. "You're in for it now!" cackled the vagrant. The technician flicked his eyes between the truck and the clutter before answering incredulously, "I don't think it's me they want to talk to." The vehicle skidded to a halt beside them, showering them in the filth of the blacktop. The technician shuddered as he read emblazoned upon the door in a black gothic typeface: ``` BABYLON INCORPORATED ``` The darkly tinted driver's side window lowered revealing two men wearing white military spec helmets, their eyes hidden behind the gloss of black snow goggles, the same tint as the windows. Cragged jawlines jutted out from underneath the helmets, identical, but with a mirrored asymmetry in the sagittal plane, sinister half smiles crawled up the left and right sides of their respective faces. Submachine guns were held with nylon straps across their chests, extremely compact, without stocks but with suppressors attached to the barrels. The passenger's pointed out the left of the vehicle, away from the pair, while the driver's was aimed above their heads giving preemptive warning. His left and the passenger's right hands grasped the pistol grips of their weapons, index fingers resting in a disciplined point down the side. Before they spoke, a thin metal bar flicked out with the speed of a stiletto, anchoring itself with a series of whirs and clicks to the roof as a tripod, then levelled at them yet another black mirror in the form of a video camera. A _bright red LED_ signified the unit had completed powering on and begun recording. "Explain this." they demanded in unison. These men, if they could be called such a thing, were the genetically engineered property of their organisation, derived from the base construct of some exemplary employee in years passed, honed over the years by a series of CRISPR-Cas9 gene edits tailoring them precisely to their intended purpose. Unlike true identical twins whose genomes are nearly identical, theirs was distinct but complementary: the driver was designed to be left handed, with increased skin and bone density on the weather facing right side of his face. Not police in the traditional sense, they were the paramilitary security apparatus of Babylon Incorporated, BI in everyday parlance. Unsure of exactly what explanation was expected, the technician began with the medical emergency, "He is badly hurt, he needs medical assistance." If they were directed to these men could help; they were both trained and equipped for treating the grievous injuries routinely inflicted both by and upon them in their brutal profession. They were artificial, but they were not disposable, and most certainly not cheap. "To whom does this belong?" the driver clarified, giving no indication that he was interested in the dying vagrant. The passenger was looking out his window, focused on something, not a cloud, but a dark amorphous shape on the eastern horizon pulling itself into the sky with globular tendrils. Looking at the surrounding objects once more, the technician spotted something familiar and let out an involuntary gasp. The driver followed his gaze towards a stainless steel coat rack. Various trinkets hung from its hooks but on the top rung was a hand crafted teacup. The handle had been broken off some years before, and after being reattached the lacquer had been dusted with gold. This technique, 金継ぎ - kintsugi - gold-joinery, both highlights the history and damage of an item and further embellishes it with the addition of a precious metal. Indeed, this was one of the technician's most treasured possessions, and the gold dust had been both costly and difficult to obtain. In a whisper: "That belongs to me." "Wrong," the uniforms thundered together, "this material is the property of Babylon Incorporated." Having been given what could constitute a sufficient admission of guilt, they began to declare their facts to the recording camera. "That," the passenger indicated, pointing with his right hand, "is a construction site of planned residential housing for BI staff." "Security systems indicate that at 4:01am this morning an unauthorised person accessed the site, stealing metal framing and cabling from the network infrastructure room on the second floor," elaborated the driver, his head and the roof mounted camera swivelling simultaneously, taking notice of each item amongst the refuse before continuing, "you claim it is yours." Speaking at the same time again, effecting an authoritative two against one, "we conclude the intruder was you." The passenger swiftly looked away towards the shifting mass in the east as it rapidly approached, seemingly speaking to himself as he made a report over a radio receiver plate in his neck. "An invoice will be issued to your employer for the cost of materials, our deployment, and an appropriately punitive measure." Having handled the matter and in doing so incrementing one of their KPIs while offsetting their operational costs, they both turned to face the technician, resumed their crooked smiles and drove away. They never even got out of the car. ## $the index$ There was no arguing. No local council, state government, federal entity, or justice system existed which could offer recourse. Corporations like BI had completely subsumed the states of the regions they operated in. Individuals were exploited completely, they earned a wage, it was reduced by a series of fees: food, shelter, transport, medical, and ancillaries. They did not have their own accounts or manage their own finances, their employer was their bank. An encounter such as this would be lost among thousands of other opaquely labelled line items on a payslip. ``` Network Cabling Rack Mount Framing Security Inquest - Asset#abc Security Inquest - Asset#ijk Deployment - Asset#ijk Discouragement Fee ``` _the ultrarich havbe just completely fucked it up. need more detail about it_ _bro too many spoilers bro_ However, this was not true at all levels of society. Class distinction was a matter of ability to insulate oneself from the outside world. The _ultrarich_ were not subject to the same kind of weaponised demoralisation that was ceaselessly inflicted upon ordinary people. Their superyachts lay crumpled on the floor of the ocean beside their prototype moonbases. Some maintained a land component, connected by networks of tunnels behind the rocky cliffs On the lunar surface, the ruins of such habitats were littered. more detail about these bases, how long they were there etc. These were not the inspiring bases of a futurist humanitarian mission; the stations bore the names of the board members of the company that had launched them and were reviled by all. Undeterred by the failures on the moon, the board had launched a final mission to Mars, in doing so fulfilling the necessary condition of an enormous bonus clause assigned to each. The station touched down and come the evening of its founding, the board, citing human overpopulation as limiting the power available to their systems, unanimously voted in secret to enact a reduction in headcount by simultaneously deploying an artificially constructed gene transfer agent that sterilised 98.7% of the male population within 2 generations, and at least three, but according to some sources up to seven nations' thermonuclear arsenals. _do these people have a deathwish or something, why_ Those were, at any rate, the details of the document exfiltrated and made public following the death of all hands on the station after an 18 gram micrometeorite pierced through the base's roof, destroying the water filtration system. Back on Earth, the company's virus had fizzled, largely attributed to shoddy workmanship. Several nuclear warheads had detonated, it was true, in one circumstance without leaving the silo it was housed in due to a neglectful maintenance routine, and large swathes of the former empires were now uninhabitable for thousands of years. The remaining wealthy overclass was not nearly as incompetant and was composed almost entirely of amoral psychopaths, also unburdened by any attachment to the quality of life of human beings ruthlessly exploited them for profit. THEN there was the volcano _team righteous wizard_ had hermeticised themselves in nuclear fusion powered terrariums cloistered deep within what used to be the forests of the nothern hemisphere. The woods within them were fortressed against the acid rain and noxious winds that howled across the frigid tundra surrounding. Fewer interactions meant you were less likely to incur some kind of infraction, inadvertently buy something or enroll in a subscription. At that moment the technician's own company would be dispatching its own equivalent