The Story About Social Structure

A Story by von Froszt

Part One
Street

I have heard that once it used to be much worse than it is now. I have been told that before Social Equality, people lived on streets. Not all people, but people who could not afford to buy or rent a home lived instead on streets, in parks, in temporary dwellings. They relied on handouts and theft to survive. They had no jobs, no money, no reason to live. And they didn't have The Lease.

If it is true what they say about the people of the past, I feel more akin to these distant ancestors than I do to my own kindred in my own time. I am the primitive street dweller. It is true, I have a home provided. I get all my meals provided. But I am second class. We, the people of this time, live by Social Equality, but those who govern live by individually motivated capitalism. In theory, neither system should touch. Social Equality is a collectivized program that ensures basic rights to all people. Food, shelter, health care, all provided. Capitalism in our time is a voluntary system that introduces chance and personal motivation to the game. Indeed, it is somewhat of a game of wealth management and trade. In practice however, capitalism is the trade of the commodity of people and Social Equality ensures efficiency and obedience.

In truth the capitalist system, the wealth management game, controls the human resource. The population is high in this time so there is no labour shortage. All positions are staffed all the time but there are more people than jobs to do. This leaves many of us with nothing to do. No jobs, no money, no reason to live. That is me, dead for being alive. Nothing to do but sign The Lease.

I live in a small state-provided apartment in a city-state in what used to be Canada but is now part of a superstate known as The Union. Nation states have little jurisdiction these days other than to play host to many smaller but immediately more powerful city states. All aspects of economy seem to work best in a small collective such as a farm or small city. Each city is its own separate economic unit but all contribute a portion of their products to a redistribution fund which ensures cities are uniform in their resource use and production. Cities provide food for their citizens at public cafés and eateries. All are welcome, all are served and there are no limits. Consequently, there is little waste and little want. Gluttony, I am told, was a common affliction of the past, when resources were controlled and disparate and money could buy whatever the appetite desired, even if the appetite conspired against the health of a person.

I used to have a job. I was a lucky one who went to foreman after I finished my youth studies. Foremen oversaw various occupations and their job was to coordinate labour and direct the flow of resources and products. An older mind might call them managers. My foreman, an older gent who looked like he had worked in every trade he oversaw, spoke to me in short bursts that were devoid of character or multisyllabic words. His questions were terse and to the point. He was sizing me up.

I was sent to a field. I would be a plowman. In reality, I did no work. I used a controller to navigate an unmanned plow through the field, doing 180 degree turns at the end of each row, tilling the soil, mixing in the fallow as mulch for the coming seed.

I worked the fields every day for a year, moving to a new field sometimes twice in a day. The genetically modified crops grow quickly so after two weeks I could find myself in a field I had already plowed, starting the cycle again. I worked the fields for a year. I became proficient with the drone controller, worked out effective algorithms in my mind to enhance my efficiency and eventually worked it down to a science, a formula by which I lived and thrived and contributed to the greater good. Until I was replaced.

If I had been replaced by a peer, I might not have cared much. Friend or not, we who work contribute to the well being of all. A peer replacing me would be insignificant as I have previously worked for his welfare and he is now reciprocating. If that had only been the case. I was replaced by an automation, a scripted program that distilled my careful algorithms into pure math, a numbers game the human mind just cannot do with such speed. As the population climbs, the jobs grow more scarce, but not from lack of jobs for so many people to do. Not that so much as the insistence on automating every job someone gets too good at. They are after a streamlined society where no one wants for anything because computers anticipate all our needs.

Being replaced is no great matter. A foreman usually has other projects, other shifts to work. This time however the foreman had been replaced. The new computer foreman told me all the jobs in this sector were being replaced by computers. I attempted to ask the computer intelligence why jobs were being given to computers when there were increasing numbers of people with nothing to do. The rhetorical question fell on the deaf ears of plastic and metal, glass and electricity as I myself struggled to figure the answer to such a question.

Behind my dumbfounded line of questioning, I began to understand the grave position I found myself in. Without a job I was now subject to The Laws. An ever-expanding list of legal restrictions, The Laws govern all parts of the lives of the unemployed. The relaxed nature of The Laws means most people have nothing to fear in the short term. But with new laws drafted daily, the list of offenses grew ever larger and soon anyone could be guilty of a crime simply by existing. If apprehended, the sentencing is swift and the penalty is death. Unless the accused signs The Lease.

The Lease does nothing at all to alleviate the symptoms of death. It merely staves off death temporarily. Make no mistake, the only 'crime' any of us commit is the felony offense of being alive. For that infraction death is the only appropriate penalty. But since we have entrenched human rights in our time we cannot just go about killing the misfits. It has to be socially sanctioned. Hence, The Lease.

I have heard that in times past, in certain areas, if a person was convicted of a crime he could choose between jail or active military duty. We have little use for the concept of jail or even militaries nowadays, but we have certainly adopted a similar policy. Die now or die later. Death is the only way out of this prison. Whether it happens sooner or later depend on The Lease.

Part Two
Lease

Having no occupation and seeing no prospect of finding a job a computer was not doing, I had begun to resign myself to rhe inevitability of certain death. I wasn't marked, not yet. I was still a free man but I spent my time looking over both shoulders, paranoid that the Police would be targetting me soon enough.

There was no way to avoid it. One could live his life the exact same way for 30 years and one day the same action he had performed the same way for so long would be enough to get him arrested. It was never quite clear exactly why the action was illegal. It was as if the law restricting the behaviour had been drafted, tabled, read and passed all at once the previous day.

A common defense, though it was well known to be futile, was to do nothing. Some people simply gave up on life after losing their jobs, forgetting or neglecting to be social, only leaving their homes to eat and returning home immediately afterward. No matter how well they hid, they always were arrested eventually. It was usually these ones who accepted death straightaway. To prolong it any more, for these types, surely meant more anguish than was necessary. A lease on life could do nothing to curb the rampant paranoia felt by these shell shocked individuals. Death was far nobler.

Suicide was impossible by this point. Razor blades, knives, broken glass, guns, indeed all weapons, had been indirectly negated as a result of the increasing automations. Windows had been replaced with artificial sun machines that showed colours instead of a view out the window. Anyone who tried suicide was promptly arrested and tried immediately. Of course, as a punishment, suicides were not given the option to die. They had to stay alive and work endless menial jobs that computers could not do, kept alive artificially until such time as their bodies gave out from overuse.

I awaited death, feeling much like a program that has been scheduled for deletion but remains at the end of the file system, in the whitespace waiting to be overwritten. Not knowing when I was scheduled made it difficult to live a normal life. The dilemma I faced was whether I would choose immediate death or take out a new lease on life? Die now or die later?

I went about my business as usual, wondering what it would be that caused my arrest. This got me wondering about the nature of the whole system: the police, the arrests, the deaths, the Lease. We all knew there were police but no one knew who were police until they showed up to arrest someone. They wore no uniforms, only carried an ID card identifying them as what they were. And whenever they were seen, police looked just as paranoid and apprehensive as anyone waiting to be arrested. Did they have the Lease too?

Life began to become very regular. I had come this far, so what I had been doing was obviously not illegal yet. There seemed to be no reason to do things differently now, no reason to change the pattern and get myself killed before I needed to. Death waited for me, somewhere, hiding, silent. I would eventually succumb to it but not yet. I had to figure out the reason I hadn't been arrested and continue that pattern. I had to cheat death.

The mark of death, my arrest, happened well after I expected it would. Apparently I was so far back in whitespace that I had been scheduled for deletion at a date I could not predict so I had become comfortable in my anxious paranoia, neglecting for too long to look over my shoulders every fifty paces, to assume anyone was police.

It was much less violent than I had been given to believe. If expectations truly shape reality then my reality machine must have malfunctioned, forgetting its programming and interpretting the opposite reality from my expectations. Every arrest I had seen had ended in a struggle, the accused dragged away, shouting curses and screaming innocence, begging for one more day. I had truly expected the arrest all along but had forgotten I expected it. It was no surprise to me and so I did not struggle. I went quietly, hands bound, walking behind the Police who had arrested me as he led me to the waiting van.

I was taken to another city. I had never left my own city before this and I recall being bothered knowing that it was under these circumstances that I had finally done so. The van stopped in front of a tall building built in the style of old business towers. I had seen ruins of skyscrapers in my own city but this stricture appeared diminuitive and decidedly less majestic than the primitive monuments to oppressive ancient capitalism.

The outside walls of the building were made of a black plastic concrete compound. The false windows were worn by the building like belts of glass holding up the black plastic trousers of the edifice. A single door stood at the bottom of the façade. As we passed through it, I wondered if I would ever come back the other way. I strongly suspected this was a one way trip to an interrogation room followed by a bloody end in a basement with my brains carelessly spattered on the walls while I bled casually onto a cheap department store tarpaulin.

I was led to a room and the door clicked onomatopoetically behind me, denoting a mechanism engaging a lock. I was now trapped, no way to escape my impending fate. The room had nothing in it save for a stool, on which I sat, and a small table. The walls were coloured a brilliant blinding yellow light and I could hear a rhythmic whirring sound that seemed to come from somewhere just beyond the chamber but permeated every part of the chamber, seeming to penetrate into my very cells. The blinding fluourescence made me alert and aware while the whirring simultaneously lulled me into an unatrainable pre-sleep trance. I would find myself falling slightly asleep only to be blinded by an automatic adjustment to the fluourescence of the walls.

After an indeterminate period of relentless torture, the walls suddenly turned pitch black and the whirrkng noise clicked off. The sensory deprivation I was suddenly subjected to caused extreme disorientation and it caused me to wretch as if with motion sickness. I was terrified though for what I do not know. I knew I would die regardless of the outcome. Was this it? Sudden death? Was the lease a lie to give us false hope? For the first time I hoped so. I wished that I would be killed in this room, quickly and painlessly.

A small device descended mechanically frlm the ceiling. A speaker. The speaker sat itself neatly on the table and began to speak. The voice was electronic, tinny and lifeless. I was told the charges against me. I was found guilty of living without purpose. Since I had no reason to be alive, I had no right to continue doing so. I could be repuurposed or I could die. Despite having wished so intensely for death only moments before, I chose to sign the Lease.

Early deatb was tok easy. It left tok many questions unanswered, unasked even. I had to know the answers or at least have time to discover the questions. The cold lifeless voice of the speaker spoke once more, to wish me good fortune. I wondered whether the machine even understood fortune or if it was simply programmed to say that. The door opened and I was led from this room into another. My Lease on life had been renewed, though I knew not for what purpose.

Part Three
New Life

I live my life as if tomorrow might be the day I am terminated. I am free to do whatever I want, free from the Laws. But I know, still, that death walks behind me. I have gotten used to it, stopped looking over my shoulder and made my job my life.

I am Police. I have a computer for a partner, one who tells me who else is Police, how long they have been Police and which ones to terminate. I don't do the arresting. That's a different team. I just find the veterans and destroy them. Soon I wi be destroyed too. It is how we control the population and how population control regulates itself. We cannot kill everyone at once, but we can do it at a regular enough rate that the population thins itself out and the world balances itself. I will be killed one day by a member of my own team. Thats the price we pay to buy another day. Sign the lease, join the police. You know what they say: if you can't beat death, join the death squad.