User:Jeremygbyrne/Minor Works

What follows are notes towards some of the Minor Works of the User:Jeremygbyrne/Alchemy Cycle:

"Conditional Pass" (aka. "Nation Building")
"Anyone can tell you that world war three began on September the eleventh, two thousand and one. Very few can tell you when it ended, and there may be no definitive answer. This afternoon I will pinpoint the very beginning of that end-the moment at which the events were set in motion which led inexorably to the conclusion of hostilities. To pre-empt further risks spoiling the tale, so I'll simply begin at the beginning.

A Swiss, an American and a New Zealander went into a bar."

...

Only the American wasn't an American any more, and the Swiss was really a European. But the New Zealander was a kiwi, and his name was Dan. At least, that's what it said on his pale blue uniform.

...

" 'If only I could see the world through everybody's eyes' ", I said, mainly to myself.

Rob looked up, half-smiling. "Who is that?" said Helmut.

"Um," I thought, hard. "Some old Spike lyrics--a few years back, I think," I said.

"Sounds a little creepy, Daniel," said Rob. "Kinda Big Brother."

I hadn't ever thought that, and I had to think about it. Helmut said what I would have. "Enlightenment. Everyone's point of view. Typical pseudo-Buddhist psychobabble," Well, maybe not exactly what I would have.

"How come you're an expert?" I asked, a bit abruptly.

...

"The New Zealander's name, as many of you have guessed, was Daniel Lee Harding, who served a two-year voluntary term with the UN peacekeeping force in North America. The final sequence is taken from his head-camera, and although the quality of the recording is too poor to make out exactly what he wrote, I don't doubt you'll share my conviction about the way in which he wrote it, and that those definite, calm, self-assured understrokes point clear to Texas.

"The pool of refereed English-language texts holds that war was legally concluded with the re-entry of the Confederation of North American States into the UN in August of two thousand and nineteen. Scholarly vogue trends to the final Rumsfeld appeal and the pronouncement in Northrop Grumman in twenty twenty three really putting the efrit back in. Of course the diplomats will tell you only universal constitutional reform will fulfil the conditions of the Solstice Declaration-and the fanatics will tell you to wait for the Spike, which could well come decades sooner.

"The volksgeist generally credits the Austin shootings, but although it's hardly Zapruder, there's significantly less vision of those events than of NYC more than a decade earlier, and modern datapooling and mining technologies are next to useless where prevailing capture practices simply can't provide the grist. Harding's precise motivations have been the subject of more bad biography than those of the men he shot, so …

Doing the Ton
Some of the events discussed in "Conditional Pass" were filmed as "Doing the Ton", released in 2019.


 * "Doing the Ton" (2019) tells the story of then New Zealand UNMNA volunteer Daniel Lee Harding's involvement in Theodor Meron's plot to kidnap Donald Rumsfeld from CNAS-held territory in western Kentucky, under cover of a faked heist of one of the three $1Tn Kennedy Commemorative coins from the Fort Morgan Depository. Set in a Sorkinesque fantasy 2015 and transparently timed to influence the Altamira accession talks, this egregiously hagiographic portrayal of the master terrorist's formative combat experiences should serve as a stark reminder to Federalist sympathisers of the ongoing cultural influence of the PalCal axis. No stars.


 * Kathryn Bigelow's Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning "Doing the Ton", as reviewed on the Prison Planet Affiliate Network.

"PÜL"
(Much of the following has been incorporated into User:Jeremygbyrne/Datapool.)

Russian hackers develop the datapool in secret from the mid eighties, and when announced it is running on a huge array of devices. The ability for secrets to be released and not recalled leads to a situation where there are no secrets. They've used sf worldcons to meet over the years.

A major source of funding for the development and deployment (for which they subcontract a veritable army of independant hacker groups) is running protection and loans systems within multiplayer online games, and trading in virtual currency and goods. Seven (in her guise as Sophia, a purely online "Czech teenager") provided very useful information to help set this system up.

The final-phase PÜL is developed in (open-sourced) VB, advertised via mass proxy-cache replacement (much of it legitimately negotiated with ISPs) and distributed, via millions of zombie boxen "stolen" from spamnets, with an "opt-out" option available. ("You have the ability to participate in the greatest sharing of knowledge ever undertaken. Click here to pass this up.") It auto-activates on 01-Jul-06.

"Red Planet"
[Red Planet is the title of a Heinlein Juvenile, BTW.]

A thousand days after they nuked the Queen of England, the Chinese conquered Mars. I remember I'd just finished "The End of History MST3K", and spent the whole week watching the broadcast.



It is January 2021 and the remnant People's Republic of China has just announced its imminent intention to resume its long-suspended programme of terraforming the planet Hou Xing (formerly Mars).

Random Notes:

China landed two humans on Mars in 2008, two weeks before the UN mission, and claimed the planet for the Motherland. (Five years earlier Lt. Harvey L. Farmer (NASA) had raised the UN and US flags, claiming planet for "the Democracies of the World", via remote-controlled robot, but this had never been officially recognised by the majority of the UN member nations.) They officially renamed the planet Hou Xing (the Mandarin name for Mars) and began work to establish a colony, announcing plans to terraform the planet within 15 years using Chinese nanotechnology.

When China dropped "the People's Republic of" and held its first and only "democratic" election in 2019, the martian colony--which by this stage consisted of a huge complex of modules and prefabricated enclosures housing more than 480 men and women--announced its independance, and claimed the title of the PRC for itself.

"Why the Union must be Broken"
a political essay by Sylvia Roslyn La Some, July 2005

THIS ESSAY sets out the case that US nationalism and its counter-original-intentional adherence to the involuntary Union of States, as promoted by the power-obsessed Lincoln at the price of 750K civilians and 100 years of Jim Crow, stand firmly in the way of the natural direction of Human Development.

It promotes the stengthening and democratisation of the UN (which, after all, is an institution of which the US can be justifiably proud) and, suggests practical methods to assist in the natural devolution of the Union (and proposes one likely future, following the secession of Hawaii, California and Texas and the New England Confederacy as independant States), and discusses how "extra votes" in the UN will naturally be beneficial for the former US in the longer term. (Are the 25 States of the EU giving up their individual votes, after all?)

Set after a Bush/Rice victory following a suicide-bombing of the Democratic National Convention which kills Kerry and leaves Edwards to receive the Democrat nomination and to select Senator Hilary Clinton as his running-mate.

Practical Discussion:

Note that they refer to countries as economies; this is a chink in the armour. Economies are defined by separate currencies, and the US Dollar is a unique currency tied into the world economy in a special, privileged manner. Note that Iraq's major economic crime was to start valuaing oil in Euro, and the Arabic nations have been working on a gold dinar standard. The breakaway nations must start using their own currencies, or existing international currencies like the Euro or the Canadian Dollar.

Alchemical: A Collection
Short Fiction which inspired The Alchemy Cycle

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" -- Core of Xianism

"The Star" -- Standard Religious Idea Not Correct

"The Way of Cross and Dragon" ?

"The Safe-Deposit Box" ?

Something Lovecraftian

Lyrics for Single Gun Theory's "Take Me Back"

"Forever Missing Light"
I believe that the moment I heard the President say those words, I began my Jihad against them.

Set in 2034, this flawed-narrator first person tale tells the story of the instigator of the so-called Butlerian Jihad, leader of the Army of the Infinite Monkeys, Marvin Butler (original surname the French word for Household Servant), who believes God sent him to defeat the rise of the AIs.