Singular Muck

The problem isn't going to get fixed until the addiction is fixed, for sure, but I was happy the crime website differentiated between victim of addictive substance vs. asshole who does major violent crimes that include addictive drugs.

The moral complexity of that was an actual topic I'd had to code for so the analysis on the website was fun to read about.

Anyway, about 3 months after this website came out, the voted-on top-ten people on the list, some very bad people indeed, started dying.

Each of them died of a different cause, but all within hours (if not minutes) of each other. None of the ones who died of a heart attack showed any predisposition towards heart problems. One died alone in a car crash where he was driving - crashing off a bridge into the bottom of a deep ravine.

This might not even have triggered any notice, but the dictators of two big countries were on that list. The next few days, more and more deaths were reported from around the world, from prisons and psych wards to houses of parliament.

If you lived through this, you'll know how freaky it was, but if you didn't, all you need to know is, The World Noticed. Lots of people wondered who the company was that set up the PINETREE site.

I read about the speculation, and even watched the news for a while.

The right-wing media-sphere immediately concluded it was a left-wing conspiracy that involved previous political leaders, penguins (of all things), and the tiny nation of Burkina Faso? Wow.

I just laughed at that one.

(And, I was happy I wasn't the leader of Burkina Faso, a 'bad guy' who remained alive).

The oddities started spreading out from the 'bad people' to 'bad organizations'.

A computer virus struck a whole slew of Gazprom natural-gas pumping stations across Russia, from coast to coast, in unconnected systems.

It was, by this time, November, and getting very cold outside in Europe, and even if Russia had mostly been cut off from EU gas sales, Russia itself had trouble keeping people warm and its businesses open.

Instead, people there had to leave their homes and stay in 'warming centers' where they burned wood or even coal that'd been dug up from long-closed mines.

The chaos continued from natural gas to oil.

Oil rigs worldwide started catching fire.

No ready explanation or common thread could tie these fires together.

Soon, oil refineries started blowing up, too.

The world's fossil-fuel-based infrastructure collapsed.

Even the oil tankers with previously-pumped oil went amuck. Boat captains and various crew would be called ashore by emails or texts, then the tankers would spin up their engines and sail away, headed for open ocean. Those with crew still aboard sometimes managed to stop their computer-controlled engines by raw banging-on-shit methods. This either resulted in some computer-controlled subsystems catching fire (sinking the ship), or that another ship or set of ships driving towards the first one and crashing into it.

The oil tankers sank or burned.

The idea that so many boats could catch fire at once with no explanation stumped everyone, but with gasoline (and aviation fuel) in such short supply, those in charge complained they couldn't get investigators to the scene before the boats sank and took their clues with them.

Those supertankers left alone piloted themselves either out to sea and burned, or headed around the world to the Persian Gulf. There, they parked themselves offshore various Iranian and Saudi ports, dropped anchor, and caught fire. The burning oil spewed toxins and smoke over the countries that pumped the oil out of the ground to begin with.

Gas prices at the pump in the USA spiked over $25 a gallon, and then there wasn't a price because you just couldn't buy it.

The Edville police stopped by my apartment and wanted to commandeer my cybertruck, impounding it for parking violations if I didn't agree. I fought back on that and said, sure, you can drive it, but I retain ownership and if I need to go somewhere you're my taxi, free.

The cop went away, the mayor came over and we talked, and by that time I realized I had to add depreciation, so they agreed to a $1/mile usage fee and we shook hands on it.

I had no need to profit from the emergency, but I didn't want to get screwed, either.

Life continued to get weird.

Various political and business leaders in China, Mongolia, Russia, central Asia ('the stans'), North Korea, all over Africa, Europe, and the Americas, just died.

The news said that addiction rates had dropped drastically because fuel was so hard to get, it was really hard to smuggle anymore.

We all waited and watched.

Fishing vessels came into port and couldn't leave - no marine diesel or heavy oil was available.

The news had a hard time covering anything they couldn't name, and a CNN term turned into the default one for the situation: "The Wreckoning".

I still had work because Forbin Project servers were in a government datacenter and thus their power stayed on.

There were blackouts in big US cities, but because we were near some hydroelectric dams, Edville stayed powered up. No one was allowed to use electric space heaters, though, and the city even turned off the street lights at night.

The days were quiet, with no cars or trucks on any city streets. Bicycles made a comeback, though. I saw a lot of those, though people didn't have many places to go because a lot of the businesses in town were just shut - no one had money, so no one had money, and even if they did, there was no useful inventory to sell (useless things were still on sale, including the trinket and figurines store).

Food started getting scarce, until enough backup supplies of diesel came back online for minimal food deliveries (a semi with 4 trailers? I'd thought I'd seen everything). I could buy bread, and cheese, and some meat, packaged pasta marked, "FEMA", and that's about it.

The local Baptist church had evening meals with soup, potatoes, some vegetables, etc., in exchange for a donation, which I happily provided.

In hindsight, the upheaval may seem abstract, but at the time?

Shit was real. Times were frightening.

== Chapter: The Weird Gets Personal ==

I'd started going to the Baptist church for meals in early February. It was cold out, sure, but Edville Februarys still were above freezing most days, and I could walk the mile across town to the church without a fuss.

The evangelical church on the other side of town, with the large congregation and the nicer zip code, packed sack lunches with only minimal food and a heavy-handed 'believe us or else' message. I avoided them anyway.

By contrast, the Baptists in this case were far more mainstream. I didn't agree with them on everything, but I did like the music and I wanted SOME social interaction. My life was Really Really Boring and I needed friends to hang with.

Not two weeks after I started going (and hearing people talk about how they were starving), on February 14th, Valentine's Day, the entire world got a lot richer.

Some countries in Europe had a Universal Basic Income, UBI, that paid enough to keep people out of poverty. They had decided it was easier than having separate programs for food and welfare and rent and unemployment and job training and kids and all that.

The USA had no such ideas. The conservatives complained that if there was a UBI, everyone would quit their jobs.

They had a point. They were almost right - but it wasn't everyone, exactly.

Overnight, that V-Day, everyone in the USA found they suddenly had been transferred a payment of $2000, marked, "Two Weeks UBI CPI-Adj" from "PINETREE/US Treas Dpt."

On seeing this online, I checked and Yes, I had it, too!

Extrapolating out, that was $52k/year, about the average working wage across the United States, $26 an hour.

What same person goes to work for $10/hour when you can sit on your ass and make $26/hour?

The answer is, people who wanted $36 an hour. And, those with debt, and people who really enjoy their jobs.

At the same time this money appeared, an email was sent to almost every email address in the world, from everywhere to everywhere (some kind of virus they said), with a 'PINETREE Manifesto' as the plain-text contents.

It said, "Debt is a tool, useful for future-building, but also a way for the rich to trap the poor."

I won't reproduce this document, it's everywhere, but I'll cite enough parts where it matters to my life story.

"All personal debts are hereby forgiven." This meant mortgages owned by individual people (not businesses), credit card bills, car loans, student loans, collection agency debt, medical debt, everything.

There were limits - it only forgave up to $3m on up to 3 mortgages, 3 cars, 3 boats, etc. There was no limit on the other kinds of debt, that was all just canceled.

The money, according to the manifesto, had come from the top 1% of the world's population, and was a one-time redistribution to allow people to start over.

Further, it said, all countries who didn't have a UBI scheme, now did. The software that set up and printed checks had been automatically altered. Any attempt to stop this scheme would be thwarted.

New laws had been entered, by computer fiat, into the official computers that held official laws, and if any attempt was made to deny the validity of these laws, PINETREE would make life difficult.

County clerks or officials, or judges, who had old printed copies of the law (and used them) found their cars towed or sold, their utilities shut off, their houses sold, movers showing up to take their stuff and disappearing, etc.

The threat against PINETREE's edicts was ENFORCED and enough horror stories came out that people learned fast to Not Fight This.

Some political leaders stood up and shouted, but in the end, they passed ratification laws demanded by PINETREE.

Among these laws (and several constitutional amendments, for all countries) were provisions that Every Person was required to vote in elections or pay a fine of one week of UBI or one week of their salary, whichever was larger.

I knew enough economics to know the world's financial markets were in meltdown-mode.

Many businesses were already bankrupt, whether or not they knew it. Being dependent on shipped goods, when there's no shipping, yeah, that's a bankruptcy.

Like most Americans, I laughed with gleeful joy when we heard that various Ultra-Rich (and sometimes ill-mannered) people were no longer rich, their stocks and possessions sold out from under them over the previous few weeks (and even longer sometimes), liquidated to nothingness.

Their money and possessions were redistributed in huge numbers of transactions with each other and among random people, a massive mess that apparently there was no way to decipher.

Everyone who'd ever signed up to no-longer get paper statements from their banks or utilities suddenly got either emails or paper mail statements backdated sometimes for years showing they no longer owed money to anyone and had paid off their debts long ago.

Most of the world's poor people were no longer poor.

Even in the world's poorest nations, even the most destitute people found they had a bank account and money coming in weekly, in their currency but indexed to their local inflation rate. The central banks were also siphoning off money from the rich people as prepayment on their taxes, which put people into a much closer alignment.

The news covered this with great fervor.

I called my parents. My mother's classes had been canceled and students sent home, but my dad was still working, albeit to prosecute felonies relating to people stealing PINETREE funds from each other, or cops overstepping their bounds, etc. - the same stuff the DOJ did normally, he still had to keep doing.

Dad echoed what was on the news - his Westlaw database had a huge set of revisions to laws that he had zero memory of seeing enacted. New Westlaw books with the new laws were showing up all over, a massive print job that no one specifically ordered.

The new laws were changed in place and backdated to different laws that had been passed long ago, even though those laws weren't really that way.

He'd compared his printed, bound-paper law books with the online versions and the online ones were interestingly different.

The tax laws, for one, suddenly had a catch-all limit on all deductions to 3x the UBI, and a standard progressive tax rate above that. He said he'd be out quite a bit more in taxes the next year, but the UBI almost covered it, and he wasn't one of the rich ones anyway. DOJ doesn't pay as much - government salaries are lower than big law firm ones.

People quit their jobs.

Most colleges and universities had long since canceled classes because the economy was in upheaval and food was short, or electricity was out, or no one could drive to get there.

Most restaurants couldn't get food so they closed, and waitresses and cook-staff were out of work.

All these changes, and _no_ news at all about _who_ PINETREE was. The manifesto had defined the name, though, it was: "Public Interest Next Era Trustee Reorganization Enterprise".

As an acronym, it was dumb. Everyone knew it was dumb. It didn't matter.

PINETREE had functionally taken over every computer system and network on Earth, and leveraged that into a world domination scheme.

It had all the data. It controlled all the banking and financial systems.

There was no way to fight it.

People were going hungry. Things were not all well. Most people weren't starving because of various emergency food distribution - unordered but trucks showed up anyway - but they had no jobs with the economic collapse.

Lots of countries just HATED the USA, since PINETREE was believed to be American (both the manifesto and acronym were in English) but they probably hated the USA anyway. The fact that they were getting richer by the week and paid for by American (and worldwide) billionaires? That helped a little.

With no fuel for fishing boats, no fish came in, so many people were starving for proteins.

The next shoe to drop was the ID cards.

Everyone on the planet started getting ID cards, held in warehouses worldwide and mailed out automatically by computers. On it was both a normal flat photo and a high-quality realistic 3-D hologram of the head and shoulders (VERY unusual!).

Someone on the news described that the haircut was from several months beforehand, but other people said their photos were very recent.

Of course, the biometrics codes included fingerprint data, then the normal height, weight, eye/hair/skin color, distinguishing features, gender, pronouns, and address.

Confusingly, everyone - in Every Country - got a Universal ID card, mailed from the USA.

The space for those people said, "Citizenship" and their own country, but then a "Visa Status" showed a list of counties to which they could live=L or work=W or emigrate=E.

Another field, ExtraInfo, held educational level (degrees etc), skills codes for various professions, and a 'Free Medical' flag that was universally "Full+Meds".

The British 'National Health Act of Britain' was apparently now in force worldwide - in EVERY country - per every country's legal databases (not just in the USA). Letters started arriving that informed every doctor and nurse that they were now employed by their nation's NHS and their salary would be 6x the UBI, but without any malpractice insurance required since the NHS Act covered that.

Many doctors got onto news interviews and shouted in happy amazement that their take-home pay would double since they paid a big chunk of their salary in malpractice insurance.

Of course, there were naysayers talking about how it was horrible that theoretical types of people in theoretical situations would be made to wait and suffer, but no one could provide examples because there weren't any yet.

Where had these cards come from?

Investigations led to large numbers of companies that had contracts to build machines that printed them very quickly (using relatively advanced tech they'd recently acquired) and mailed them in batch-sorted bundles that post offices could process easily.

I got my first UID card about a week after the first news of them, and then got many more duplicate cards over the next few weeks. I probably ended up with 20 of them. My picture was in high resolution on the front, twice, so there's no way it was of any use to anyone else.

Every person's UID was a unique 9 character mix of upper, lower, numeric, and a few special characters. The news said with that length, there were 44^9th, 600 trillion possible combinations, plenty enough for every human to get 100k numbers.

The broad availability (per the cards) to non-US citizens to live and work in the USA just made the political conservatives (read: racists, at the time) scream bloody murder. They didn't like the fact that All Those Brown People could come to work and live in the USA and Take Their Jobs.

To be accurate, there was huge unemployment, but with UBI and no debt, most people didn't care.

I actually liked my UID picture better than the one on my driver's license.

Soon everyone was using the cards for everything they needed to do. The US president tried at first to say the cards were not issued by the USA, that they were a dirty trick, and then that they were wrong, but... everyone already HAD one! It was impossible to deny that the data was right, for anyone you actually asked.

Very fast, they were used, and then demanded for various transactions, worldwide. Countries without ID cards suddenly had them. People in refugee camps who didn't have documents, suddenly did, and they had the right to enter the E.U., the USA, Brazil, wherever, according to the cards.

Refugee camps largely emptied.

Border patrol and customs people, their computer systems plagued with glitches but working perfectly for the new cards (and possibly blackmailed in their personal lives for noncompliance with PINETREE edicts) just gave up and said Okay.

The news covered the fact that people were streaming into the USA from abroad, but a lot of undocumented people stuck in the USA were heading south, too. Suddenly, the ability to go visit relatives was possible given they could return without worry, by transport instead of illegally over a border.

Interviews with happy migrants joyfully meeting up again with long-left-behind relatives were on often enough on the news to make the feel-good stories stick.

I suspected that which news was amplified was chosen by PINETREE instead of naturally selected by click-numbers, or by editors, as had been the case before.

That, and any happy news was much more interesting since hope in the face of so much going wrong was a Good Thing.

== Chapter: The Ides of March ==

I had fun in junior high referring to March 15th as, "The Ides of March!!!!" (after my mom or dad mentioned it). This ides wasn't laden with augers of misfortune, but rather a really mixed bag of good and ill fortune.

It was the first day of the rest of my life, as my dad used to say.

That morning, about 8 am (I'd had the window open because we'd had unusually nice weather), I heard an unusual sound - diesel truck motors.

There just weren't trucks driving anywhere. No one had fuel. Yet - there they were! My ears perked up, and with so little ambient noise in town (I was near city-center), I noticed it straight off from my open windows and porch's sliding door.

That porch/balcony looked out across a park towards the main road through town. I could barely see... school buses?

Odd.

They honked loudly, and kept honking for a few minutes.

I grabbed my breakfast (toast with a tiny amount of some locally-made jam I'd gotten at a farmer's market), and headed out for the square.