Gov-zone 9

A futuristic magical piece about manipulating the collective unconscious to save people from oppression.

            The goal was to c**k the shaft of the gun all the way to the bottom of the barrel, like cocking a magical theory to the utmost point in the back of your skull. By letting the magic take over me, I'm cocked and loaded and ready to snap. It was like a rumbling grand mal seizure when I let the ammo fly; and that was just the weapon. Take it upon myself to cast a spell, and I'd feel downright tectonic. It's because of the nature of the combination of mind-and-tech that destruction follows me. I'm an Architect.

          A maelstrom of people had found my press-releases and become Architects themselves. I am the original Architect. I designed the psychic weaponry.  The auro-tracking-ether-bombs were my invention. These will disintegrate a small hill without injuring the user. Great for world-building. Great for terraforming. Awesome for blowing the cap off of bunkers.

          Because the greatest weapon is the long series of lies perpetrated by the world government, I am not number one. I am a coder. I build the walls that keep us away from those ideas. I blow the cap off media bunkers and psycho-kinetically disable the computers they're propagated with. And I am not alone. But the gov-zone has reached a penultimate broadcast. We're in for a war, they say.

          “Ms. Agency.”

          “Hello,” I said.

          I pointed right between his eyes.

          “Please stop,” he said.

          “What for?” His head could burst before he finished his answer. I could make him go insane. I could track him for the next five years using the other Architects and bring his whole system down. He was looking at a screen behind me, like a busted teleprompter, sending him inspiration.

          “I've got three children.”

          Bust. Bang. Blow. These words were pounding through my skull. I was a perpetrator myself.

          “Gov-zone-fed-men's children don't need gov-zone-fed-men fathers,” I said. I wanted information. Anything he told me would be poisonous and I would have to be filter it through my meta-filters.   

          Meta-filters take the logic out of logic. Everything applies to the speaker. If he said, “We've been investigating your actions,” it would be translated to “I personally have a fear of being investigated, and I want you to know that I haven't hesitated in my investigation of you.” It was the way gov-zone-fed-men talked. It was monstrous really. The meta-filter didn't work for all gov-zoners, so sometimes I'd have to chalk their speech up to the media-decoder, which would identify the purpose behind whatever they were saying. Their answers were prepared. Sometimes I had to manually look up the meaning of their press releases, or even imagine myself what they could stand for.

          Censorship had been replaced by cryptography. Cryptography had been replaced by computers. The gov-zoners were becoming computers. That's why I chose magic.

          It was part of the singularity, or something.

          “Take it or leave it,” he said. He had given us a new press release.

          “I should release the pull on my trigger.” I said. “Your head would explode. Haven't we been over this?”

          He broke down, “Please for the love of God, just let me go.” The meta-filter came through. Unintelligible. His code broke down. This was the most human he would ever become. Squash. Sever. Snap.

          “You're free,” I said, and jumped back into the chopper. We were on the roof of the largest gov-zone facility in the state. Below us was the storm, blowing the building so that it would absorb the pressure and sway. The chopper-pilot spiraled us upwards, chopping at the thin air, and like rescued mountain-climbers we freaked down the side of the building.

          “Mountain-climbers, huh?” The chopper-pilot could read my mind when I allowed him to, for safety.

          It wasn't that we weren't becoming machines ourselves. We wouldn't survive without the new techs. Psych features of computer chips and mind-activated bazookas; those were the techs we used. Never IQ boosters or redundancy-calcs. Plenty of new terms to learn for the new Architect. The fact is, the general public knew very little of these technologies. It was military weaponry I had designed, to combat the gov-zone fed-men. The Architects were everything but gov-zoners.

          I uploaded the press release and began cycling through translations. The most accurate filter was “agricultural propaganda,” the filter for interpreting messages about our wonderful poisoned food supply. Some bullshit about running out of adequate soil, and at the very end, a hidden message about my weaponry. The point was, my guns were pulling nutrients out of the Earth. This was the subliminal message that the general public would absorb, and anyone who read it would get a strong feeling that I wasn't green enough. It was ironic that even the interpreted messages didn't make any sense.

          “We're being fed with lies, bub,” I said to my assistant.

          “Yes, Ms. Agency.”

          “Not what the farmers grow.” I said.

          “Yes, Ms. Agency.”

          “And my weapons don't pull nutrients out of the soil. The pull soil out of the ground, yes. But it's just like plowing a field,” I said.

          “Thank you. I'll send the message along the darknet,” my assistant said. Some members of the public, not Architects, were subscribed to my press releases. They paid well, but viewed it as entertainment. They couldn't actually learn that they were being brainwashed and hypnotized. The knowledge had been clued out of them and that required a certain amount of specialty techs to undo.

          When we landed at our complex, designed by me, I told the assistant to meet me in my flat after a one hour lunch. The chopper-pilor lifted back off to perform other duties or refuel. I began logging in to the system and called several other Architects to join us after lunch. Fresh sake would be delivered as well, and I prepared myself for a pre-war broadcast. Our version.

          I downloaded my Answer to my tech fore-brain for transmission and extruded some noodles for lunch. Fresh salad, straight from real farmers who thought the world of me, and thought the world had let them down, and knew�"or would know when they got the gov-zone broadcast�"that I hadn't really been sucking nutrients out of the soil. These men were few and far between. I supplied them with individuation techs. Like therapy for a hypnotized mind, the users of the individuation techs claim it's like coming out of a waking dream. Some freak out. Some kill themselves. It's pretty brutal tech and we don't just hand it out to anyone.

          I ran the Answer through my mind. It was a form of hypnosis, as well. The message wouldn't have to be decoded, however. It was straightforward enough.

          “Magic is real. You are dead. Come with the Architects to heaven.”

          Of course it was hilarious to me that I had to say such things. I didn't believe it, none of the architects did. But we ran the simulations. This was the most likely way to get through to enmasked minds, and free the people of the country who were open to broadcasts on the public channel. We'd disguise it as an advertisement for an antique LCD supplier or a street-cleaner jingle, and people would show up at our door completely devoted.

          I snapped into a magical paradigm for the transmission, and my assistant arrived, and the other Architects I had invited to help broadcast began to show up. We encircled out bodies, tapped into the radio-transceiver, and hijacked a commercial broadcast.

          It wouldn't take long for the gov-zone to find out what we had done, so we began broadcasting.

          “Magic is real.” We could feel the minds focusing on our message, in dream-like states, somewhat registering the shift in energy.

          “You are dead.” This was the most energetic response. It was the sound of minds who remembered our previous message, and were in the process of awakening.

          “Come with the Architects to heaven.” This was the code for finding our complex. We held on for as long as possible to all the minds we had reached, and repeated the message slowly, and slowly each one of us was banned from the channel.

          “Enough,” I said.

          “Thank you, Ms. Agency,” the Architects said and quietly left, one by one.

          Only my assistant remained in my flat. He said, “You killed three gov-zone fed-men today.”       

          “Collateral damage,” I said. “They were trying to hack the weaponry. If that happens, we have to redesign completely new software. And for most of the Architects, the software is designed to match their magical spectrum; any other software wouldn't work and if the gov-zoners got ahold of the information, they could be killed.”

          “Do you ever wonder how precariously our Architects balance the risk and rewards of the tech?”

          “Yes, it's a necessary evil. I wish we could go sixteen magic, too. Zero tech. But the gov-zoner's weapons simply rip through flesh, and their armors have psychic batteries which keep us from using magic without a battery ourselves. They can't use magic, of course. It's illegal. So they upgrade their weapon's power, and it shreds right through us,” I said. “I need your help with the sleep system. The Architects have been reporting gov-zone dreams.”

          “I'll look into it,” he said. I dismissed him and put away the sake.

          The world belonged to the gov-zoners. I faced my weapon, and cocked it to the bottom of the barrel. Charged, I unsnapped out of the broadcast paradigm and snapped into the combat paradigm. One, two, three, four. The dummy took the heat. I turned my stress into a spell and flipped it to the dummy, but the dummy simply bounced backward then forward into place. The stress jumped back into me.

          This world was too difficult. We are creating a new world underground. The architects are growing in number, and as we expand the complex, our fantasy is becoming a reality. We can't free everyone, only ourselves. I take the gun and bust open a hole in the soil. Nutrient-sucking, be damned. My new room was bare and fresh, and the soil I had lifted merely jumped out onto the surface of the earth. I had created a prison. For myself, or for the gov-zoners, I didn't know. The anthill caverns and thread-track hallways held a few gov-zone fed-men, but several hundred Architects. We were using psych-tech more than ever.

          I asked myself if I was becoming one of them.

          I was sharing my thoughts with the chopper pilot.

          He responded, “You're the Architect. How could you be?”

          When he landed, we went straight up, and through the storm, and on to the next battlefield.

          

Author's Note

First draft