Chapter 14 - Bread

It was a beautiful day.

As Bertram walked back, enjoying the reality of the wind and the trees and even the irregularities in the pavement, he thought about the promotion woman giving away little bits of bread topped with smoked salmon.

He had enjoyed the reality of the supermarket and had been amused by her insistence that the salmon were 'responsibly farmed' and 'stress free'.

He imagined the stress that might result from a salmon coming to learn that it had been genetically manipulated. Not just by evolution and natural circumstance but by man so that, in response to an irresistible drive to procreate, it enthusiastically returns home to meet its death; and from there to stock the smokehouse; and our table. 

"It seems appropriate that this will be my last supper," he thinks.

Perhaps other farmed animals could be similarly programmed to enthusiastically deliver themselves to the abattoir in return for the guaranteed perpetuation of their family line and species in general?  After all, cows or chickens would not have nearly so many relatives if we did not eat them and/or their ova.

Would farmed animals willingly enter a contract to die to perpetuate their family if they were able to?  Because this is the tacit contract farmers have had with them since domestication.

"Damn!" His thoughts kept coming back to God Freyja Day, sacrifice and the Ten-Two contract. 

He would like to blame Miranda.  Had she entrapped him?  But then Angela would not exist and, although he had tried to be fair, she was his favourite daughter; and they all knew it.

The woman demonstrating the salmon probably didn't have to commit suicide for having another child, she looked to be over sixty.

Maybe he could have had her life.

Was it a challenging job, engaging complete strangers in conversation?  It seems to involve temporally learning and reciting the virtues of a particular brand of smoked salmon, perhaps before moving on to promoting cheese or olive oil or gourmet sausages.  

An immediately attractive persona would obviously be an asset, along with a facility for putting aside any doubts about how a fish might have been born in a breeding tank; then lived its life in uncrowded and stress-free bliss; before being unexpectedly killed then smoked. Penultimately to be cut into little pieces, skewered by toothpicks on her tray.

Perhaps she doesn't do sausages, with their even more problematic provenance.  Totally natural and stress-free chickens, pigs, cows?  Maybe she specialises in salmon, travelling between the few remaining real supermarkets?  Possibly she gets gigs in virtual supermarket productions as well? 

He's finding it hard not to think about death. Maybe virtual reality is a better topic?

Although he has worked 'growing' the virtualisation industry, most virtual shops are not at all Bertram's territory.  The exceptions are electronics and hardware.

Like several of his university-network friends, Bertram's wardrobe has not changed much his entire life.  He replaces clothes occasionally, according to a rough schedule or when they became too disreputable.  He takes a casual, spectator's, interest in feminine fashion but when it comes to clothes, he fails to practice the consumerism he preaches. 

But he makes up for this lapse in good citizenship with a steady stream of purchases in consumer electronics and hardware.  He has always consoled himself that, like the clothes and body adornments sold to Fashionistas, most of his purchase were quickly recycled, often after only limited use, stimulating the economy to continuing 'apparent growth', in the face of rapidly declining population.

At least those worries are over now.

He had always feared the loss of his good reputation when his credit balance began to get out of control.  Once it got so bad, he lost sleep over it fearing he would be sanctioned under a Scrooge Protocol.  Scrooges were outed worldwide in social media for irresponsibly accumulating savings.   

The socially responsible emergency action for high credit accumulators was to consume services by going to a costly restaurant; a real play or concert; a ballet or an opera. 

Now when his credit 'redlines' he and Samantha usually take 'time out' and go on an expensive real, physical, trip somewhere overseas.  This generally gets their credit back into manageable territory.  And they both enjoy the real world.  Virtual travel seems artificial somehow.

Bertram understands the economic realities and he lets his mind wander. Anything rather that contemplate yet again his approaching death. 

Maybe he should write a short economic paper for posterity.

Sometimes he wished that he had not taken University level learning modules to become fully literate, an intellectual, but gone into the physical services sector instead.  He might have enjoyed life as an electrical systems installer. He liked the nickname 'sparky'.  Or possibly he might have become a mechanic or less hands-on, an architect.

Although VPAs had removed the need to read and write fluently these trades and professions still needed the semi-literate and numerate to read and understand a circuit diagram and make and read engineering drawings.

Many traditional professions have disappeared.  Becoming a doctor might once have been fun but much of the interesting stuff is automated and managed by very precise micro-surgery routines within The Cloud.  It's many years since any sane person would allow some human to cut into them and delve around inside with primitive hand tools.   Likewise, all pathology, body scanning and subsequent medical diagnosis are automated within The Cloud.   When, under the International Ten-Two Protocol,  it became illegal to unnaturally extend life, some doctors went underground. Naturally they were quickly found, in the modern world of universal surveillance - soon to be brought before their Local Computer for sentencing.  After that 'doctor' became a dubious title and medicine became a much smaller part of the economy. 

All the people who once surrounded the older courts of law have gone those who might have once become judges of barristers now work within the administrative sector like Bertram.  In addition to its day-to-day management of economic policy the administrative sector, overseen by the executive, advises the World Congress, a body of 24 senior statespersons, essentially a company board, who meet once a quarter to keep things on track and endorse or reject changes proposed by the executive.  Everyone on the planet is a shareholder (stakeholder) and gets an annual vote for new and retiring members.  But naturally, while the Congress sets overall parameters and rules of business it has no day-to-day control over the private sector or The Cloud.

With the disbandment of all armies, navies and air forces, related industries, like armament manufacturers, transferred production to commercial drones, consumer electronics, hobby and sporting or other recreational equipment. Legal wig and gown makers moved into theatrical supplies. 

Similarly, education is almost fully delivered from within The Cloud, until students qualify for research.  

Of the traditional professions: 'church, army or law' only church has prospered, with a proliferation of new religions professing a very wide range of new and rediscovered gods, and a similarly wide range of devotional practices governing the mode and frequency of prayer, endorsing a particular range of food and clothing products and proscribing guidelines to be followed for the enjoyment of frequent sex (marriage endorsed by the particular church and so on). 

Consequently, the priesthood is an attractive career to those who can live the myth and put aside reality.  Becoming a priest ensures a trouble-free secure position for life that often attracts considerable personal adulation and power over others.  And the faithful can enjoy the privilege of paying to them a regular tithe.  Sometimes, if the supplicant is worthy, this privilege can be extended to accepting an invitation to the supplicant's home to be fed or perhaps to be given access to their children and/or their partners for 'devotional activities', according to the priest's peculiar proclivities.

Most occupations now are in the so-called soft services like entertainment, sport and hospitality.  Sports persons and other celebrities and almost all the people who surround them: feed them; organise their day; provide their makeup and clothes; or change their sheets have little or no need to be literate.  Those who are, are likely to be mocked unless they hide their skill. 

Nevertheless, a celebrity's credit accumulation rate can be vast if they can acquire a large consumer following.

But some professionals need to be able to read and write, both to give precision to their thought processes and to put these down systematically in hard text or symbols.

Being literate is essential for interpreting and encoding legislative processes, creating meta-systems, and managing meta-data.  Because these bureaucratic skills are becoming rarer, they attract well above average credit accumulation. 

Of course, at the top of this semantic tree are the computer code writers and systems administrators who translate policy into protocols for The Cloud.

Since the great famine, and the restoration of World Social Order and the Modified Universal Declaration of Rights, our laws have been based on the Utilitarian Principle derived from these that: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong". 

Bertram's mind drifts back to the origins of the Golden Rule.  He asks Emmanuelle who tells him:

"In the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic tradition, the Golden Rule is usually attributed to the Babylonian Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who told Jews: 'That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.'  This is the negative or non-interventionist form.  Around fifty years later a young firebrand Nazarene Rabbi called Jesus, probably under Hillel's influence, restated it in the positive or active form as: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' and 'love one's neighbour as oneself'.

In his recasting Christianity as Judaism for Gentiles St Paul (together with the author of John) was able to represent Christ's earlier teachings (Jesus was dead by then) as selectively replacing the Torah with the Rule.  The Decalogue remained and some of it is indeed simply examples of the rule at work: no one wants their wife or oxen converted by their neighbour, to be robbed or killed.  And Paul/John elected to keep those relating to the relationship with the divine.  But gone were the other 603 Jewish commandments about diet and ritual, and those contrary to the Rule - like destroying other religions and gods and killing their adherents and sorceresses.  Christians no longer needed to be concerned about seething a calf in its mother's milk (Exodus 23-19) but they were still inclined to mistreat a sorceress (Exodus 22-18)."

But Bertram thinks it might be earlier.  Emmanuelle agrees but it was not stated in the same form she tells him:

"It is probably fundamental to all functioning human civil society.  He recalled that back in the 20th century experiments found that treating everyone fairly is basic to even a very young child's innate sense of fair play.  Children without this sense were called autistic.

The Golden rule is found in Zoroastrianism in ancient Persia was already present in Confucianism five hundred years before Hillel.  These cultures had philosophers and have left written records but anthropologists have found the principle at work in all cooperative human groups."

"Now it is the basis for our revised civil law," thinks Bertram.

These days sport hooliganism and substance abuse by young Bogans are among the few occasions when the legal protocols come into effect.  Obviously since Computers gained the is ability old fashioned courts have long since disappeared.   All law is dispensed, without prejudice, by the Supreme Computer using the Golden Algorithm.  The Algorithm calculates the greatest happiness of the greatest number and dictates correctional measures if the harm done by a miscreant exceeds the current societal benchmark (SB) calculated to be consistent with social harmony.

In these days of complete cradle to grave surveillance there is never any doubt as to the role or identity of each participant in an event.  It simply remains to calculate the harm-benefit-to-happiness quotient of their respective actions.

The old concepts of jail, corporal and capital punishment have been abandoned. 

Everyone knows from early childhood that those who repeatedly fail to exhibit fair play and proper social mores are summarily committed by the Local Computer to a correctional program.

Periods of home confinement deprived of sport and entertainment on the MV usually have a salutary effect.  The usual MV programs are replaced by correctional lectures and compulsory activities wearing a full body suit designed to be mildly unpleasant when replayed their crime alternate with pleasurable sensations when they correct their behaviour.  It's an extension of the principle of sending a naughty child to their room or the naughty corner combined with Pavlovian re-conditioning. 

Of course, if culprits causing harm fail to respond to correction, and are determined to have become permanently antisocial, be it through some quirk of genetics or circumstance, they are referred up to the Supreme Computer and will probably be banished. 

The Supreme Computer dispenses major justice and calculates complex decisions and may overrule a less thorough local 'summary ruling'; apply extended periods of deprivation, and correction; and in the case of recidivism impose sentences up to and including banishment from civil society. 

Bertram remembered the controversial case in which someone had killed their lover in a fit of passion. Then a family member of the victim killed him, some-time-later, in revenge. 

The Supreme Computer accepts temporary madness due to unusual provocation as mitigating circumstances and if there is no likelihood of the circumstances being repeated may calculate an acquittal.  But the Algorithm has no tolerance for revenge as this leads to vendetta.  Nor does it tolerate premeditated murder. 

There is no longer such thing as a vicarious victim of crime. Only the injured party themselves can seek compensation.  One seeking revenge or 'justice' on behalf of someone else, for example a murdered child, is likely to find themself undergoing a correctional program to get over it. 

So the lover went free and the brother was banished - but elected to take hemlock instead.

Banishment is not fun. The banished are sent to a wilderness deprived of any societal support. That means they are delivered naked and provided with nothing.  There they must fend for themselves by exploiting the vegetation and wild animals, using tools, clothing and shelter they gather and make for themselves. 

These days everyone knows how to shop and book places at venues and how to operate the latest gadget.   But few have the slightest idea how anything actually works, often imagining that magic is involved in the operation of everyday devices, so the few who elect banishment instead of voluntarily taking hemlock perish almost immediately. 

When someone elects banishment everyone in the world can watch.  The banished person is continuously observed by numerous cameras, and their often-comical attempts at survival in the natural environment make great MV.  The whole world stops to experience their final demise, usually resulting within a few days, from exposure or an animal attack. 

Bertram approves of this form of entertainment.  Like a horror movie or extreme entertainment, it both helps assuage the animal instincts in the population and provides a salutary lesson to those who consider 'doing something hateful to their fellow'.

The banished need to be of a certain mentality and may be encouraged by a rare case, like Big Arnie, who has survived banishment to become an MV celebrity with a cult following - unbeknown to himself of course, as he has no MV or other civilised tools.

To the delight of the watching audience Big Arnie successfully fought off a pack of wolves on his first night in his North American wilderness and even snatched their food. Soon he crafted weapons and tools from stone and wood, using plant fibre, his own hair and animal skins for twine and fabric.  In time he even built a stockade and a comfy log house around a large stone fireplace. 

At one stage he set about finding and destroying the cameras and microphones that he knew would be relaying his experiences to the world audience.  But he soon gave up, as some were decoys, many were almost invisible and any he destroyed were simply replaced by robot drones as soon as he left an area.  That was a very exciting period for the audience where suddenly a big eye or his enormous teeth would fill the screen followed by a crunch and a deliberate second's blackness. This was inserted by the MV director before switching to a different camera behind or to the side. Arnie's anger on finding a camera was palpable.  Marvellous MV!

He is now an old man and has had no human company for thirty years.  He sees apparitions and mumbles to himself or his imaginary (actually real) audience.  Many viewers still find him endlessly entertaining but few want to emulate him.  It is quite some time since the last reprobate attempted to repeat Arnie's exploits in that wilderness and was promptly torn asunder by what were apparently much more hungry wolves.

Given these horrific scenes of most of the banished being torn apart by wild animals, sometimes while still alive, most 'antisocials' of all classes opt for the humane alternative to banishment - voluntary euthanasia by drinking Hemlock.

Bertram feels it is slightly unfair that the same fate awaits him on Friday when he has done nothing more than sire more than two children.

His purchases are getting heavy, reminding Bertram that he has promised Miranda that he will help her make Angela's cake.  But he is not enthusiastic.  Samantha will not be pleased when she learns that he has spent several of his 'precious last hours' with his 'ex'. 

It makes no difference that she is out anyway, having a drink with her girlfriends. 

"Maybe I won't tell her," he thinks.  But then it will be disastrous when it becomes obvious at Angela's party.  "It would poison our last day together.  A double dose of poison... Ha!"

Suddenly he is caught in a wave of annoyance, self-pity and regret. 

Nausea grips him.  He moans involuntarily.  Then quickly looks around to see if anyone heard; a lunatic perhaps.