SpunkySkunk347
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2006
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I wrote this book with the intention of saving hundreds of millions of lives! harm reduction indeed.
You're welcome; hope you enjoy the read; all in the interest of harm reduction.
Synopsis:
A new computer is invented that can see back in time! Meanwhile, a presidential candidate is promising to end all the leading causes of death while government agencies race to track down the last murderers and kidnappers.
ILLEGAL AS WELL
By Michael Berg
Chapters
1 - Death and Evil Approach an End – p. 3
2 - Illegal As Well – p. 15
3 - The Zenith City – p. 19
4 - Ghosts from the Past – p. 27
5 - The West Virginian – p. 37
6 - Hide and Seek at the Widow's Market – p. 51
7 - An Island with Only the Devil On It – p. 56
8 – Christmas – p. 67
9 - Funeral Partners – p. 72
10 - Wrong Family – p.85
11 - The Wizard and the Sorceror – p. 89
12 - Healing the Heart – p. 102
Chapter 1: Death and Evil Approach an End
A new presidential candidate promises to end all the leading causes of death in the United States.
"To end the first leading cause of death, which is heart disease, resources used to make excessive junkfood will be used to make fuel for cars and industry instead, using tax cuts to get everyone on board.
To end the second leading cause of death, lung cancer, land used for growing tobacco will be used for growing vegetables instead, or perhaps cannabis, but hopefully healthy vegetables. The best way for this to happen seamlessly is by constitutional ammendment: Tobacco is not allowed to be grown, harvested, sold, or imported in the United States of America, effective February.
To end the third leading cause of death, medical errors, doctors and medical workers will have to pair or triple up for each patient by law: two doctors per patient, per visit, in the same room at the same time - thus drastically reducing the probability of injuring the patient. Some medical workers will also be incentivized from now on by having their earnings double every few years they go without killing any patients, and not by just ignoring them
These three things alone would end the majority of all deaths. The remaining causes of death thereafter could then be focused on, with our efforts then freed up to do so. In the future, it will hopefully be that the only cause of death is dying peacefully in one's sleep, which science is now showing is actually possible and common, in their late 80s, 90s, or 100s+"
The bills were simple, profitable for everyone, and no one yet has come up with a reason to oppose them. Although there is fear that there must be something at work planning sabotage, as has always been the case when something so altruistically pure and sensible tries to happen, and it just seems too good of a thing for the wicked world to let happen. But who? No one would be losing any money from the changes proposed, so there is no financial motivation for any opponent. Wholly and objectively good, who would try to stop it? The devil himself? No more deaths - a promise that proves to us it will work in its simplicity. Nothing to lose and everything to gain. Profitable for everyone. Thus far, both parties have been showing overwhelming support for the candidate. 'Is there any way we can get him in office ahead of time?' spoke another candidate. The public and the government have become extremely protective over him already- our hero.
Rejoice was taking place in the streets: parades, parties, food, drink, fireworks.. But everything still seemed eerie; why had it taken the world so long? Why though? Why? Wasn't all of it illegal already?
In a motel room in Arkansas, a man wearing an eyepatch and a Boston t-shirt was staring at the television, thinking of loose ends. No more deaths meant something for him: it meant the end of his career. Rumors had been going around about a new type of investigation technology that can record from any point in a room remotely and perpetually, prompting him and many others to stay one step ahead of themselves - a final spree of run-arounds, or 'fastists'. People owed him, and for some reason the fact that other people couldn't die anymore meant that they couldn't pay him. He got into the side pod of his motorcycle, and his goon of a cousin-uncle wearing a spinny-propeller cap was already on the bike with it started ready for orders. "We gotta go to Kansas to stab somebody! I'll give you half a dilly!", the eyepatch wearing man said. The tires squeaked from him saying this, and they sped off. He sometimes gave him half-lorb tabs to humiliate him, but the acetaminophen in those was about to kill the eyepatch-wearing man's liver from acetaminophen poisoning just 10 hours (yes, 10 hours) into his addiction to pain meds, so they switched to dillies, which had no acetaminophen and wouldn't rapidly kill their livers. Death by liver failure was a slow and painful death, guaranteed, with agony and pain going on for several days while other organs are rotting because the liver can't filter out toxins that build up no matter what that the liver must process.
In the middle of a courtroom elsewhere, a man in a black suit, sunglasses, and a creepy clear coiling tube that came out of his ear for some reason, walked up to a blonde red vested attorney and whispered to her with his hand held up, "I think someone is running around killing people" in a sort of dutyish, half-worried tone. The female attorney, who had been speaking before the court, turned and looked at him. "Ech.." she replied while shrugging a little bit, while her hands were out explaining things. Soon-to-be-Banned products were now selling by the crate in a hurry and she had become an auctioneer mid-trial. They declared a county health inspector guilty of treason and perjury 20 times before fining them $200,000 dollars and then selling the debt on the internet to Saudi Arabia. The trial/auction finished with hoo-hah and barfing noises, and people left the courthouse to go to the bar across the street. Armed guards with M16s (yes, M16s) stood outside the bar while people were walking in talking mad shit about one another. The ATF arrived soon and pointed guns at people, who needed to know things about land and where the crates came from. "Why am I selling bad drugs?" the red-vested attorney cried aloud, genuinely confused and frustrated. She was hand-cuffed but the DA freed her while interrupting the same sentence she was arrested in. She then freed herself by announcing that outloud and shaking fingers at the DA like that 'was her job'. The ATF, not wanting to end the raid empty-handed, turned instead and began battering other people at random. A man with a Brooklyn accent began lecturing everybody, "Fucking poison! NONE of you have ever done shit about all this stuff that's been killing millions of people: tobacco, poisonous medicine, bad food - it should have all been gone 50 years ago by now! Yet all of you your entire life have just been ignoring it and watching sickeningly as more of those naive continue to fall victim." The ATF stopped beating people for a second and looked at him like what he just said required biblical analysis.
The man with the eyepatch and his sidekick goon were riding through the night. No stars were visible for some reason. The eyepatch man picked a worm out of his ear and smiled at it and the idea that he was somehow merging with some unified micromachine radio consciousness as a result, and wondered if his rank in such a system would allow him to turn off advertisements and dysphoria that 'noobs' were subjected to.
The man wearing an eyepatch pulled into a gas station parking lot. This gas station was of a different chain brand that did not sell products which killed people - in place of tobacco products were trading card packs, handheld video games, movies, music albums, kids toys, and action figures; instead of junkfood, they had vegetables and guacamole. It made a fortune, but hadn't taken off yet across the country. "...I can barely move!" shouted the man in the eyepatch, "I don't know what it is, I can't move right now! We need to leave! Why do I feel like this..." A picture of Jesus on a movie poster stared down at him disapprovingly. "You win," the eyepatch man said between coughing, "you win.." The eyepatch man's goon started the bike again and they drove off, confused and nervous. "I'm still getting my money down there. I get it no matter what. That's all that matters. I'm getting that no matter what."
Out in the woods, federal agent Clark was having his final battle with the hitmen's drones still after him. He had fashioned a rail gun, which immediately fired at anything interrupting an empty sky - if the telescope lens had something in it, an amplified image of it changed capacitance in a series of capacitors which, if capacitance changed, flipped a transistor when at a voltage slightly greater than the capacitors' from an empty sky, and this would then trigger the rail gun. He disconnected it briefly if a plane was flying overhead.
A drone showed up making an eerie and ominous noise; the drone was disintegrated by the rail gun, which was satisfying to watch and Clark had a lot of fun doing it. "The power company finally accomplished something," he stated.
The next day as Clark got back into town, a guy in a white doctor's coat with burns in his face was running around in public blasting a geneva-gun. People had managed to get far enough away from him where he was only hurting himself. Clark began to devise a plot to sharpen a spear quick and impale him, but moments later a mail carrier swerved off with his truck and flattened the asshole. Clark was inspired by this, and thought about all the stylish ways mail carriers utilized various mob-style weapons for self defense. As the guy in doctor's scrubs started to get back up, the mailman blew into a flabby rubber mouthpiece and a steel dart shot out of a hose, defeating the bad man who fell back down onto the pavement. The last of the murderers disguised as doctors were occasionally popping up in public having little freakouts.
When Clark got back into the office, a few people stood up and began clapping for him. "We don't have to worry anymore Clark - the military has this place protected like a fortress right now. We won the chess match. Your friend from earlier found most of the rest of them for us too, and the money that was crowd-pooled was announced seized. We did it; they're all gone. Every last one is dead... There's nothing to do now... We're bored. Anyways, the election is coming up soon, it's almost Halloween, and we're to have NOTHING to do with our future president AT ALL. We attract too many terrible people. We're going to try doing something new and exciting; we're going to find the bad guys and kill them! How fun!" A few people listening began nodding with casual approval. "As I'm sure you've all heard, the new pres is going to end all common causes of death for all time, and we'll all look stupid for not thinking of that earlier. Why didn't any of you think of that? What are you even trying for? Anyways, since the public doesn't care about surveillance being 'like sonar' and the fact that we can see literally everything, we're going to use it to find the remaining baddies. Kidnappers and murderers take priority, we kill those. Drugs don't matter, and neither does most everything else, like jaywalking and parking tickets; unpaid taxes is for the IRS to figure out later, and 'no namers' should have their privacy protected- rule of thumb is 'why aren't you finding a murderer or missing person right now'."
The building director went on, "We're also starting a higher clearance level operation. Something new entirely," he looked back and forth seriously, seeing whose attention he had caught. "There's a new computer that can see back in time. We're going to get them all. Every single cold case will be busted this next year, as fast as possible, before anyone can figure out what we have. What, don't believe me? Mark, you set a restaurant on fire when you were three because you were too bored to sit there any longer, and didn't tell anybody it was you; Lisa you stepped on a frog when you were six, what a terrible person you are; James is the one who ate all the chocolate when no one was looking at a picnic when he was 10; and Eric you stole a samurai sword then destroyed someone's house with it when you were 12, you should have known better by that age, shame on you. Please raise your hand if all that was true and we'll move on." They shamelessly raised their hands one by one except for Mark and Eric; much of the room still didn't quite understand what he was saying. "So bust these cold cases. I found four missing persons just messing around with the computer this morning. Top 5 lifesavers each get five hundred thousand dollars. Don't fake one or you're disqualified from that, but do work fast if you can. The equipment that takes the measurements is mobile, and later on we'll probably do some measurements on foot. If its too difficult to arrest one, just get rid of them."
"...What were you saying earlier about cold cases?" "You can look back in time! Literally! I told you about a bunch of horrible things you did when you were younger so you'd believe me! This isn't a trick or a joke. You can now view footage of anything that's ever happened, and we're going to use that technology to bust cold cases. Particle resonance is how it works; quantum microarchitecture is how we read that. They found a unique signature in the measurements from four seasons which were divisible by 365 days and nights which was also apparent, in particle resonance. We put a date and time to it then, and later on figured out how to pull audio and imaging off it. Before the bad guys or the public learn that we have it, we're going to take the opportunity to bust all the cold cases. No more questions - the program runs the same as the 4d viewer that's 'like sonar'. Get to work." The office lazily turned back in their chairs to their computers.
"Clark," the building director walked over to him, "Go do something else." Clark was taken back with disappointment for a moment, then realized the strategic importance of him leaving the building in case bad guys tried finding him again someday soon.
As Clark turned to walk back out the door, the director quickly added, "Oh wait! Take one of these with you, here." The director handed him a strange looking stick with buttons, dials, a little screen, and a cone on the front. "These are the new particle resonance readers I was talking about! You know, the ones that let you see back in time!" Clark looked amazed and eager, "Here, just press this button to get it ready, cycle through the material types with these arrow buttons, and turn the dial until the imaging isn't blurry anymore. This dial selects how many minutes in the past you want to look at, then push it in once for hours or again for months. Hold the cone over the surface of what you're reading, now look around with it to see the imaging from back then. Press this button if you want to pause, then here's fast foreward and rewind. Here, look, here's you walking in earlier." Clark watched in disbelief. "Now point it over here and see me." Clark turned around, and saw the director giving the speech he just gave. Now here's here 68 years ago before I could have recorded any of it. Wow, look how different town is! Older buildings. Anyways, verify any detail from back then however small and you'll eventually begin to find ways of proving to yourself that it's genuine. Okay, now go find people who are kidnapped and rescue them and bust bad guys with it! We don't know what's faster yet, doing this all by drone or on foot, so try and race us and we'll get a good idea what the best way to do it is! Anything you read gets saved, so don't worry about that, but add time-stamps with this button when you've found something important. Then you can add notes out loud too or write them on the touch screen. Isn't that cool? It gets in the way a little bit right now though, and the only way to close out of it is to add another timestamp. We can and are going to see everything you see, so no looking at people naked, just saying that to everyone once more, no looking at people naked! We can see you doing it!!" the director shouted to the rest of the office. "Since you're the most familiar there, go to your home town with this first and find out what happened to that girl who got abducted when you were a kid. We can also figure out if any bad guys still after you are trying to find you there! Now go - start saving lives with that thing. When you get close, don't let the bad guys know what it is either."
Chapter 2:
Illegal As Well
In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maine, and western and northern parts of New York, an older man had built a TV transmitter into the back of his van and would park it at the end of a block in a neighborhood, using it to overpower the signal of local television stations with his own broadcast. Usually while programming for a younger audience was playing, his broadcast would come on and his face would appear, accompannied by a creepy but memorable and melodic jingle. He'd instruct children to do various chores around the house, in a silly announcement tone of voice, and in the process add household cleaners to unknowingly poison food and beverages before giving it to their parents.
When the man was caught, he was arrested for homicide. However, debate actually began over whether or not what he was doing illegal. "Why were children even allowed to be anywhere near such dangerous products?", "They wouldn't have done it if the color of the liquid wasn't meant to look like juice or candy", "They shouldn't be able to open the container even" - he started winning the federal government over to his side. The public at the time, for those who caught the very brief mentioning of the case in a single issue of a newspaper, claimed that whatever form of hypnosis he had used on children he was now using on agents of the federal government; the victims' family members believed the same rumor to be true. Because of this, the second victim's husband shot the man before he stood trial.
The feds woke up. No one had ever come up with such a terrifying way to commit homicide before. How did he manage to make his own broadcast, and have it appear instead on a channel over what else was showing? Could other people do this? Who else knew how? To prevent others from copying whatever it is that he did, the federal government kept anyone from publicizing the case. Time forgot it, nearly - which is what was planned to happen.
Doesn't history repeat itself though? The fear of history not learning its lesson and something similar happening again was disregarded, mostly due to the fear of fake transmissions driving many government workers nuts.
The concern about children accidentally poisoning themselves or others was overlooked, although he mentioned that as his motive, "I'll show you what I did and exactly how I did it; I did it for an important reason: so you could protect children." Many of the federal agents who had similar opinions never shared them for fear of being typified the same as someone who was homicidal. It was as if it all happened for no reason and meant nothing.
After the case had been smudged from the public, the victims' families had to fight to keep their children out of hospital or state custody. This continued for years. Many were strongly medicated, even reporting torture. No one knew what happened, and no one cared when they'd try explaining it again. Their record only said they had poisoned someone, and maybe it was an accident.
The case was eventually brought up again to help try to clear the names of the children, decades after it had been forgotten about. It almost seemed like it was about to happen again, being stuck in hospitals or labelled mentally unstable, and having to fight to gain any legal foothold. Luckily, something amazing happened: the case became widely publicized; it took off, whether those few federal agents early on wanted it to or not. Their story was talked about far and wide, and for the first time in their lives people gave them something in regards to it all: support. Lawyers offered to form a legal team for them, for free, and in their interest entirely, which was whatever they chose it to be.
Upon requesting compensation, the court found the federal commission liable, and ordered that the government pay the kids, now adults mostly in their 40s. It wasn't much, and according to most of them, it wasn't worth it, as they once again tried to make publicity of the case disappear. It didn't work; other countries even took copies of the various details and testimonies, and in multiple languages. The same simple stubborness never again resulted successfully in the total undermining of the issue and neglect of the victims, and it looks hopefully like it can't and never will.
Although time moves on, it is usually the case that nothing changes when there is no one there to change it. There's still poisonous cleaning products accessible to kids, and they're still colored like juice or candy, and no one is going to typify you as a serial killer if you want things to be different. That man, the one who convinced children to unknowingly poison people with household cleaners, was evil. He took an issue that most people acknowledge and recognize as one of society's terrible and simple problems, and used it to try justifying homicide. If his point was that it would be malice to get someone to drink it, he proved that he himself was malicious.
Chapter 3: The Zenith City
In the 1920s, Duluth had a population which consisted of more millionaires than anywhere else on Earth, due to a geographical tendency of a choice made by those who had made their wealth in Chicago and were moving: only millionaires could afford to move up north to Duluth - which was in the thick northern Minnesotan woods, on the easternmost point of Lake Superior. The city had everything it needed for natural resources, moreso than Chicago even, and seemed like it was going to become the next big metropolis, waiting to be set up by those who could make it happpen.
With millions of dollars, and the ability to set up any type of industry one was willing to, numerous inventors emerged. For a few years around the Duluth harbor at night, you could see fantastic colors being showcased from newly invented types of artificial lighting for the very first time. New York City didn't even compare to it, because that you couldn't see all in one night. Around the Duluth harbor, you could see new gas lanterns, neon signs, and even arcing, which looked like lightning.
The light show lasted only a few years however, as the millionaire inventors and business owners soon realized that much of it was quite hazardous to people's health, especially when being cleaned. Nothing was at a standard yet, and soot built up that was toxic to come in contact with. There was a notable visit by Tesla, who put on one of his touring demonstrations for the aristocratic upper class, during which many of the audience members felt unsafe being so close to the arcing of electricity being displayed, becoming mentally ill even; Tesla had drawn Faraday lines on stage for the safe spots for himself to stand in, but hadn't bothered to find any 'safe spots' for his audience - and the millionaire society of Duluth would never forget it. The desire to be enchanted by magic and fantastic colors turned into a demonstration instead of the dangers of ignoring energy equivalence laws, that the power of electricity when changed to a different medium by strange forces is still as powerful, even if that new medium is now the air in a room full of people. Tesla hadn't reserved an auditorium in Duluth large enough, as the only large auditoriums in town at that time were likely already booked, and thus, his audience was stood dangerously close to the arcing being demonstrated, resulting in disaster. After the night of that tragic performance, it could be said that the Zenith City had officially began to shut down its light show.
At the end of it, the millionaires had mostly left or started to move, leaving behind a museum piece of success, triumph, and finally a humble tragedy, like a person who grew old and gray way too early. The city has long since lost most of its Zenith antiques, but retains its 1920s aesthetic - painted by time with last century's tragic truth that beauty ultimately becomes toxic for material objects.
Duluth was also home to some of the creators of the very first computers ever made - the ones the government basically had no choice but to purchase, as no one else knew how they even made them. The ones they don't usually let people know about. Our public imagination of the first computer being a giant calculator made in the 1950s with a room full of scientists standing inside of it turning dials and flipping switches is a cleverly placed lie. The first modern computer could be said to have been made in the late 1800s for processing telegrams between Chicago and New York City. And it was geniously simple to make. A grid of copper wire running vertically, foreward and backward, and side to side, was set up with a junction of transistors between intersections of wires. The same type of computer was also used to run those cities' electrical transformer grid sometimes, although not as early on. The Duluthian communications computer on the other hand consisted of intersecting rows of rectangular metal columns, molded all from one piece. Waves were then sent through certain rows between the columns on different sides, computing a resulting wave pattern after waves entering had interfered with one another, cancelling each other out or deflecting off at different angles interfering with itself such that output of a certain type arrived before or after previous output. As they got better at it, these computers were used to process analog signals for television and radio. They could also make advanced calculations for not just things like exponents and logarithms, but integrals and derivatives. It seems as though someone had the idea to invent this for a transmissions standard ahead of time, as if they already knew the dangers of stronger and simpler means of broadcasting with amplified signals and high voltage direct current.
The wave computer didn't take off in popularity for a while, as people barely knew how to explain what it even was. The inventor remained humble when bigger government greatly overlooked his invention, but later into the 1920s and 30s, they came back running.
Other types of transmission methods, not requiring computers often, were being set up by inventors around the country - often high voltage analog signals which might be described as not even needing a TV to be able to see, if it were a different frequency. Even when the signal strength itself could be withstood without adverse health effects, the amplification of the signal, and mismatching of different generations of equipment, had catastrophic consequences. Rooms full of people were found knocked unconscious by their television sets - entire neighborhoods even, who were attempting to rescue one another. If the electrons were leaking, seizures and burning would occur, especially with children laying on the carpet in front of it. Nausea, headache, dizziness, and deep hypnotic states were more frequently reported. The flicker of the screen itself could cause seizures, and no one yet understood why.
The people who later became the first agents of the Federal Communications Commission were many of those who had taken it upon themselves to race across the country checking signal standards, and/or warning communities what to do should high power interference knock groups of people unconscious (you should turn off the power at the fuse box, and if its the tower signal strength itself that is too strong, you should run and go get the military). Broadcasters at that time period typically liked the proto-FCC communications and safety workers - who were appointed by mayors, county or city vote, neighborhoods, or just their ability to explain things. You might think that a few broadcasters early on would have already been power drunk with the ability to knock the entire town unconscious, but in such a case they usually had already inadvertently damaged themselves - and that is where the need to make the safety workers' early uniform first came to be: a lead or rock suit covering the entire body, which was enormously heavy but preferrable to damage from high voltage electromagnetic fields and radiation. The design was styled after the equipment worn by engineers during the first World War.
Those periods in history and the lessons learned during them were innevitably forgotten, as the dangers inherent in such technology led the government to make awareness of them non-public - a story rarely told - and perhaps forgotten even by the FCC itself.
The invention of a televised video display did not happen in Duluth, Chicago, or New York City, but what history that has faded into urban legend perpetuates as somewhere in Pennsylvania, or near Philadelphia (during a World Fair in some variations of the telling) in the very late 19th or very early 20th Century. A community fair and circus was taking place in a town/city park; among the strange attractions was an inventor who had managed to use light, electricity, and likely trapped gases in clear glass containers, to show moving pictures. He had even managed to make a lens for showing the audience an enlarged image of him and themselves. According to the urban legend, the fair ended catastrophically when the electricity began to hit people in the park with sparks and loose streams of ions, after the glass containers of gases exploded or caught fire. The fire department according to legend desperately attempted to stop the disaster with hosed water, until a wisened member of the crowd from earlier who knew some of the science behind the exhibit's equipment explained to them that water was making it worse; the famous expression by the firefighters from the legend being "It's on fire!" while people were screaming and asking what was going on. The military was sent for to try ending it with cannonfire, but someone with a sense of bravery above danger worked up the courage to disconnect it, not knowing if it would electrocute him/her. The conscious survivors (most survived) then explained to the military what had happened, who decided that firing cannons would be safer than trying to disconnect it, should a similar thing happen in the future.
In modern times, broadcast signals become moving images after a receiving unit distinguishes the signal from others present in the air, either by the angles of deflection throughout a series of corridors where only a specifically curved wave produces a signal at the end's detection capacitor/transistor, or a branching network of wires has substantial alternating current produced in it from a series of signalled waves coming in contact with the metal of multiple wire branches simultaneously, coinciding with spikes in signal strength at predicted intervals - which must consist of voltage from all metal wire antennae branches simultaenously for a transistor to switch, ensuring that only the intended signal and not stray airwaves are received. Both of these rapidly switch transistors producing an image on an XY grid of rows and columns of lights.
Chapter 4: Ghosts from the Past
Clark dug into the ground while mourning, at the tree where the particle resonance reader showed the body was buried at. He was having bouts of denial more frequently that the particle resonance reader couldn't possibly be actually working, and that it was just some way of training him while there was no other work to be done, or to give him courage by making him think events happening in the present day had happened a long time ago. But none of that was true. He had tested that it was genuine by comparing it to memory of his home town, checking places he had been when he was younger. It was a nightmare. Things, places, and people that were no longer around - what his town looked like before it had become older and more abandoned. That was when the reality hit him that he was racing toward a skeleton. There was no way to stop or change any of it; it could only end in disappointment. Over and over. Finding her alive was all he wanted, but already knew that was unlikely. The trail to justice was still long ahead of him after his mission ended in failure. They couldn't yet pull dentals off the particle resonance reader; the only way to find the murderer was to follow him all the way back to the present day.
Clark eventually tracked him back to outside a town nearby where the murderer was living in a shed off in the woods. Clark was getting better at finding the same person again across months or years. He had been contemplating along the chase whether he should shoot with a service pistol or not the monster who killed the little girl.
"Clark, this is the first time anyone has ever done this. Coders are setting up dental reading capabilities on your devices later today, it needs a computer hardware update a drone will do for you later today. You can't kill him. Why? This is the first time anyone has ever done this. You can't set a bad example. What do you think we should do? You know him pretty well at this point and we want your opinion." Clark replied sounding exhausted, "I dont know. I don't know what we should do to him." The guy on the other end came back over the radio,"You know what? We have a credit card from the military that says 'fucking kill em incorporated' on the front of it, fuck it, bomb them, why is this taking so long? Spreadsheet guys already worked out his location because you were too slow. This is the way it works now, probably. But because our displays might get hacked, we'll check it every once and a while the old fashioned way. Unless this all gets hacked by lasers which can't happen, good wins and evil loses. With the dental parameters and whatnot, we found most of them on television sets in like an hour. A few television sets had computers attached to them, and those guys were thrown in our detainment facilities. I don't even know why we sent you out earlier really, other than to see it work. Hurry up and catch up to him Clark; when he blows up into little pieces, you can verify for us all that you saw it."
Clark got to the shed where the murderer was residing. "Alright Clark, see his face for us?" Clark checked his face on the particle resonance reading for the shed, which looked like him. Then Clark pulled out his binoculars and started waiting for him to go near the window. "Clark we can't be here all day, go up and knock on the window." Clark ran up and tapped on the window, prompting a man on the ground in a sleeping bag to roll over and look up. After a few seconds of eye contact, Clark spoke up "Nevermind, sorry to bother you," then Clark walked back out to the woods nearby and put on some goggles and a debris mask. "That's him." Clark radioed.
About 20 seconds later, a rocket sped down and the shed exploded. "Well, good job Clark, how easy was that? The rest were already verified earlier, and they're about to blow up too, tell me if you feel the Earth shake." Clark stood there for a moment, with a sense of hope for the future for the first time in days.
"Well, there it was Clark. What a fucking relief. All the murderers who kidnapped, raped, or tortured somebody are gone. People who murdered someone for no reason are mostly gone. The rest are getting worked out in time. I doubt there's a bulk of them we missed, I got to look at the numbers myself. Once nearly all of the miscellaneous killers are worked out, which shouldn't take more than a month, we can tell the public all about this. What a fucking day."
Back at the office, a Halloween party was happening, and everyone was wearing costumes as part of a bad joke. "Why?" Clark asked. "Some of the miscellaneous killers are still out there. It's just in case they get ahold of one of our new readers," a man dressed as a giant spotted dog replied. "There's not really a need to worry," the director started saying, "There's like 2800 or so of those left and most of them are already in detainment centers. They were obvious at some point. The last thing to work out actually is gangs firing machine guns at each other. The ones that killed someone of a different gang for little or no reason will probably have to just go to prison, because we can't be siding with this gang or that gang. Other than that, there's a few in a gray area, and that's just going to take a while. If we tell the public right now, we're concerned it will inspire a new generation of miscellaneous-only killings, or that people will work out in their head then when they'd actually still kill somebody, and that might inspire them to do so. We also don't need a bunch of other people getting these particle resonance readers and thinking there's still murders when there isn't, because the display will probably get hacked then and it could cause a cascade of people killing each other. Right now we're the only ones who have them, and we're going to look into who to give them to in other countries where they won't be misused. If analysis comes back that we missed a large number of them, we'll be glad we didn't tell the public. It's still something we want to do some day soon, we just don't think we should right now. We're going to sample a town and see what happens when we tell them, then one at a time as long as they handle it well we'll tell more and more people. I'm sure there's things we don't understand yet about how people will handle this, so maybe just 1 out of 20 people will be told about it, or more or less if that would work better. If some day an enemy tries to wipe out all the people with these readers, we're going to set up ways ahead of time for stopping them first. We're all in this together now, we can not fail. We need work to continue to get done in this building for another few years; I've thought about it. It will work and no it won't come back to us, the trail gets too long. Clark took a long way back, and none of our dentals leave this building. Clark, you're an asshole, now get out! Go out the same way you came in, and swim out in the woods for a while. You'll get a bunch of money. Hide some. Don't come back here. When you get done swimming, go into town but somewhere away from here so your last spot isn't here, use the restroom, then go back to swimming. Do exactly all of that, we'll figure out how to get you lunch. Now go!"
Clark did exactly as he was instructed to do. Sitting on a little island out on a lake while wondering how his food would show up, several fish splashed up out of the water at his feet, a bag of stuff started floating up and over to near where he was on the beach. A pack of matches and with a note where to pick up money were written on it, including a note saying "stash a bill in this bag in town under a rock, then find new bag in town and stash on this island, this ink isn't real, look like it though?" "Yeah" Clark said outloud. The ink rearranged "3 letters are in ink that fades, the rest are lasers to your eyes and brain. Memorize the 3 letters quick. Goodbye." Clark was pissed they were using something like that on him without his permission, even once. The letters were H, I, and L. He decided that meant he should avoid hills for a while, or something.
After doing all that, he went and bought a scooter with refreshed money from buyer's remorse for 3 shotguns and 2 pistols.. Then drove a hundred or so miles away, and ditched the scooter by a dumpster and began looking for another scooter he could buy, but there weren't any. He really wanted to find a second scooter, so he got back on the first one and drove to another town to look for one, then left it near a dumpster again. He finally found another scooter and gave someone refreshed money for it. He then went around placing bills under rocks in plastic bags, every so often, when it didn't look too obvious from the last time. When he got bored of doing that he went to a job bank where a bunch of other federal investigators who had been working on catching murderers were at, "Did you hear that they all blew up?" they kept saying to one another nodding and laughing with approval. "Careful about talking about that right now," Clark said "Think about it for a long long time and you'll get it, it'll be there." Clark tried looking stern, and they took what he said slightly more seriously. The job bank told most of them to go do dumb shit for a while. Clark's coupon however said "go to back room", so he went to the back room. In the backroom some guy there told him to go to another room further back. In there was a note that said "wait for package". After about 45 minutes, a package dropped on the table from a hole in the ceiling, and inside was a new model particle resonance reader. The note attached said "fight crime with it, we want to see if that works. Nothing big. Don't use near electronics." He turned it on, and the screen said "put back in box, go outside". Outside, after walking away while pushing his scooter, another package plopped out from the woods on the road up ahead. Inside was another particle resonance reader, this time with a note that said "fight crime with it, we want to see if that works. Nothing big. Don't use near electronics". He turned on the screen and it only showed a video of where to find another package. He got the idea now. He went to the frickin third package opened it up, and put the fake particle resonance reader in there next to the new one and then juggled them around with his hands for a bit. He turned one on, it was the one with the video again. He watched it in its entirety, then turned it off, and picked up the other one. He considered that good enough, and got the hell out of there before more bullshit happened.
He went to town to a used car lot and asked for the car owned previously by the worst person they knew of. "This guy left the car super trashed after 4 months of paying for it on time but exactly 50 dollars below the agreed upon amount per month. Only got asked for a car like that once before, can I see if you have a badge even?" Clark took out his surrogate cop badge and the guy smiled and gave him the keys.
Clark still couldn't think of what to do yet with the new reader. He figured he'd try to bust kidnappings. The drones with the readers on them from earlier had already found a bunch, and they were just getting enough local cops ready to grab the kidnappers while they were knocked out by sedatives. If he could get a list of one nearby, he could maybe start saving a few early. He called the request line. The operator replied, "That literally just went down about an hour ago. We're just hoping they followed our instructions and put them all in separated cells so they can't talk about how they got caught. What the hell have you been doing? Go for people who were severely beaten and see if there was a reason for it or not, then go find whoever did it to them. There's one at the hospital nearby right now. Go talk to him. Or hey, wait, want to get an old lady back her purse? There's one of those nearby too." "I guess I'll try to get both." Clark responded.
Clark was distraught, stuck on something he had been repeatedly forcing into his memory earlier over and over: that to save a life is above all else the greatest endeavour - but the device he wielded could only offer realization that he had already failed that endeavour, as he was set in the past where following the trail directly would never bring one to the present. For the flow of time to be faster was asking the impossible; only while they rested did he get closer, but then proximity must make him weaker and wearier. This creeping lack of confidence was as though it were some dark ritual meant to trap him in a trance. Instead of chasing a ghost, he needed to be able to look forward and find them alive. Sherlock holmes style deduction might work, but most effective would be the use of modern mass surveillance computers to locate the villain. And that was it. Without modern supercomputers, it was folly. And trying to solve an unsolved crime had always been as terrible, as even with an image of the past where you can see what happened and where they went next, it was still extraordinarily difficult to catch them. The number of ghosts to follow must be innumerable.
Chapter 5: The West Virginian
Surrounding the West Virginian as he drove through town was emptiness. The twisted winding roads through the hills lead only to abandoned buildings and properties, except places which he and one other local resident had maintained, such as the power and water plants, and other vital town infrastructure. They basically ran the place, and no title had ever been properly defined for what exactly his position was. Town constable would have been an insult given all the other work he did for the town, so when he talked to the state government, those that new him simply referred to him as the mayor, or sherriff, or shopkeep, or whatever role in town he most resembled given the present nature of the conversation.
The town had collapsed over the early and mid 2000s, and no matter what he would never forget the chain of events behind the collapse, as it all traced back to identity theft as the primary cause. As soon as one person integral to the town's functioning left, especially in the mountains, the rest of the town was shortly to fall apart thereafter. "We could all just stay here and do our jobs like we're doing them, each of us perform our roles, and the town can still survive!" he tried encouraging them, "We don't need money; it's imaginary! We'll keep everything working the same as it is right now without money!" Innevitably they all left. As soon as the grocery store went under, the remaining crowd in town that was still trying had to part their separate ways. "We can hunt! We can fish! And one of us can travel somewhere else in the state to get fruits and vegetables for the rest of us!" It was no use. The town was leaving and as it got toward the end of it. He didn't blame them - it only hurt himself.
Identity thieves. Fucking identity thieves was what caused it all. They blamed it on a few of the kids in town too, on computer viruses they caught. A dozen or so families lost all of their savings and moved. No one was managing one of the vital jobs at the town's water plant, and after a week of rising pressures and leaking pipes in people's basements, a main water line exploded, causing yet even more people to move. Most of the town now relied on people in town who had wells if they were lucky enough, which they complained about the taste, or bottled water. The grocery store running out of bottled water and the cost of having to ship more than one truck up at a time, along with having lost many of its customers, caused the grocery store to fall into the red. The owner sold the property, and the new owner had yet to reveal himself. How would the town get groceries? No other building could function as a grocery store. While it was being proposed to just use the same store and not tell anybody, and pooling together money from food stamps to order pallets of food in whatever way they had been ordered before, more people left the town, as that just sounded ridiculous and criminal.
Even with the food stamp money they wielded, the price per pallet meant that those remaining had to choose 4 different food items to eat for that entire month, but stocking them up at least with extras for the next month. If anyone else left, they couldn't even get 4 pallets and had to pick 3 food items each month. The West Virginian's biggest mistake finally was telling everyone at a meeting, to try calming someone down, that he didn't hold it against any of them if they should leave at any time for any reason, and that he wouldn't fault them and still thought they were good people. Two pallets is all they could afford to order the second month: cereal for its vitamins, even though there was plenty of cereal still but kinds that no one liked, and canned stew. The canned hashbrowns from the first order was almost gone, and the canned stew grossed everyone out like effin 9 year olds, and that, yes that, was the reason they left for! No one was even eating any canned peaches or mixed vegetables! Ordered since there NEEDED to be some form of vegetable, so why not all of them? Breakfast cereal doesn't have all the vitamins; you have to get them from vegetables! Vitamins A, E, K, etc.. well, vitamin A is in some cereals - yeah! F-load of cereal! GOT IT! But you still need some kind of vegetable! So first month again: a pallet of cereal got ordered which people got sick of having to eat without milk right away; a pallet of canned hashbrowns which was devoured; canned peaches were occassionally being eaten; and no one eating any effing vegetables! Turning the townspeople onto canned hashbrowns for the very first time and telling them all about how great it was got them to try it and kept them totally satisfied until they were sick of it the next day - however the hashbrowns were all the rage for a minute; can you imagine eating hashbrowns for the first time? It almost seemed like the town was going to pull through! But it didn't swallow right the next day, and they up and fuckin left. Then the second month, of the remaining 9 people, 7 of them detested the canned stew, and decided to leave as well. The last remaining other person was quite content downing can after can of stew and hashbrowns and peaches, and agreed to stay.
They both got jobs for the government, and would make trips every month to buy a truckload of groceries after hitting up bars and stripclubs. They'd turn off everything in town before they'd leave, and turn it all back on when they got back. The water pipe that burst they never were able to fix, but managed to seal off water going to that side of town so that they could keep water running on the other half. Electricity came from a dam and a couple windmills. They spent a lot of time on the internet, and were in charge of running and maintaining that too.
As the years went by, he thought more and more about the cause of it all, prompting him to learn more and more about computers in an attempt to find out who was initially responsible. He learned that the identity thieves using the type of computer virus the kids had been blamed with catching were actually not viruses at all, but was actually due to their parents filling out forms on fake or malicious websites disguised as pornography, online gambling, and deals for things too good to be true.
But he didn't just become good with computers, he became very good with computers, and since managing the town's power and water only had to be checked twice a day taking up only 5-10 minutes each time after they figured out to just leave video cameras on all the pressure valves and make sure they weren't getting too high or low, and making sure voltage on the turbine didn't get too high and need to be turned off which rarely happened, they each took jobs with homeland security and the NSA that they heard were available for them as they needed someone in the area. After getting good with the permissions they allowed and learning whose shoulder was safe to rub, he set up ways of luring out identity thieves, or busting them outright after checking servers to find out where they were and using backdoors on their computers to verify it was them. His work along with others doing similar were putting an end to future economic crisis before it even happened. It was a hobby of his.
He was eventually told by his superiors that he was wasting his time doing things one thing at a time like that, and that if he was good with computers he'd be thinking bigger when it comes to stopping problems. He worked on a program which took spreadsheet analytics and worked out the data into simplified groups for the flow of currency from racketeering or laundering across large accounts on the internet and elsewhere, revealing the single group or branch of affiliated individuals behind money being sent around confusingly in circles. Identity thieves account juggling were one type of illegitimate commerce, but his program also revealed several others, notably one that focused on stealing retirement money from the old and elderly. That type had struck in the late 2000s, and some of the individuals who got away with it appeared to be starting on new accounts, but the West Virginian had yet to figure out what for.
The trillions of dollars of bailout money from the late 2000s and early 2010s had become tied up in numerous accounts that some of which were bankrupting from becoming stuck with the task of paying the money back, while other accounts currently with the money were far enough away down the sequence of accounts to spend the money freely before becoming stuck with the debt of having to pay it back later. The new racketeering plan was to keep a steady stream of these new recipient accounts coming, abandoning them before they were indebted, and ultimately as the government caught on to send the money to other continents and play the international stock market with it, crashing American companies then buying them back with other companies they now owned which the government had yet to catch up to.
Buying the companies from them finally, when they felt like the world had had enough, were wealthy affiliates with legitimate non-bailout money that the cronies could disappear with; their wealthy affiliates would buy the company stock at a reasonable price of one third its former value. The wealthy affiliates would eventually have the zero interest bailout money fall onto them, which they would return to the government, but while having gained ownership of a company whose stock would surely rebound. Their plan would leave millions jobless and homeless; their next venture included buying up homes in America after the housing market crashed again, forcing people to pay them as landlords in homes they could monitor the inside of with a security system company they also owned.
By chance, the West Virginian had caught on to it early and learned of a board meeting between many of the individuals responsible and the wealthy affiliates they were planning to trade off to in the end. There was no other way for them to all be on the same page at once comfortably other than in person together. You might think that they'd distance apart from such a meeting, but if they were all to become legitimate affiliates after finalizing accounts with one another they had nothing to fear from being in person together. The wealthy affiliates would end the chase by the government by taking accountability for the loaned bailout money and simply giving it back at that point, being satisfied with their newly acquired company they purchased for 1/3rd of its value, paid to the crooks who were responsible for it all who could now finally get away freely with billions of dollars they didn't have to pay back. The stock would rebound, and the wealthy affiliates would triple their money if it went back to normal.
The West Virginian knew that his evidence wasn't accessible to the courts, and they couldn't be stopped early by the law. Some he had pointed it out to even favored their plan, saying that someone has to eventually pay back the bailout money, and they figured out a way to do that. The West Virginian tried explaining that their plan involved destroying American companies while owning chunks of them in accounts here and overseas, crashing them by getting the market to panic by selling low to themselves, or increase in value by selling high to themselves. The trail would become so long at that point, they'd hope, that by the time the government realized what they were doing their wealthy affiliates would have already repaid the loaned bailout money. Ultimately, the changes in stocks of the involved companies could be blamed on difficulties in managing companies and resources back and forth overseas, and any investigation into that would be slowed down by the language barrier.
When someone in the West Virginian's shoes encountered a problem that no one else was able to fix, if it was important enough they'd have to fix it themselves and suffer the consequences of breaking the rules. The rules would dictate that he be imprisoned for manslaughter, as his target hadn't done anything terroristic... If he was caught, that is. 'Use the backdoor to their computer and forge documents in a hidden folder describing something like blowing up a skyscraper, then save it to your surveillance computer while viewing theirs as evidence; you'll be glad you did. Cover your trail as best you can. Hmm, but what should it say?' the West Virginian thought to himself, then began typing up the fake threats:
"FUckin hell cant deal this anymore, feds r on to me man BIG TIME. Cant pay back the FAWKIN money cause I dont FAWKIN have it no more.. im cornered and the last of its gone! Gonna have to blow uip the tower to get rid of all the FAWKIN evidence.. yah, then stab a hobo in an alley and run around with a chainsaw on mah yacht while d0in l00ds, sail ta sw33den and get cash out ma s\/\/izz benk acct b4 i come back 2 blow up moar buildings, yah gonna do that for sure, sounded like g00d idea ever since i chatted up osama bin laden on the enternet and h00ked him up with them plain tickets"
'They'll think of that as a taunting and that maybe our response was a little overzealous when they find out he got blown to pieces.. Maybe it'll be just the thing we need publicized so we can stop taking phony threats seriously. Well, I mean that's local police doing all that, but people think it's us, but maybe if a story is newsworthy it'll get police to quit overreacting and even deter people from making them, hmm,' the West Virginian thought to himself.
"Can you manage town for a few days? I got called off to some seminar thing in DC," the West Virginian asked. "Yeah shouldn't be any problems here," his friend and only neighbor replied while sipping a beer. After carrying a bunch of tools out to his truck several times, the West Virginian got in and started off down the road.
He listened to that song about a nameless horse and the one about being a passenger on a ride while going lalalalala over and over again on repeat until he got there. He only stopped on his way at a place a little north of Chattanooga that had antique weapons from the World Wars, wheeling a gaitling gun out the front door after getting the old man who owned the place to go back and look for a very specific coin in his coin collection. He ran it up into the back of his truck on a wooden ramp and drove out of there, then pulled over down the road and threw a black tarp over it quick before gunning it toward and on to the freeway down the near vertical slopes amidst holiday traffic.
A cop saw he had something under a tarp and hit his lights but it didn't matter; traffic was moving wall to wall at 90 miles an hour down the vertical slopes of the Smokey Mountains, and there wouldn't be a spot to pull over until Georgia. The cop didn't see his plate unless aerial checked for it and it'd show clearance for government work to not be interrupted. Atlanta metal detectors for guns would think it's on its way to a museum or an auction. But one was reported stolen in Tennessee earlier? That would be interesting enough to go over radio. He'd have to try clearing up the matter on his phone while driving, which was dangerous. He tried searching for what exits to take to dodge the metal detectors but there weren't any. He'd have to work quickly.
He drove straight into Atlanta to the window cleaning platform he scheduled. There were people using it, so he called their phone number pretending to be their boss, telling them to go to a different window cleaning job in a different part of town to get them to leave. They tried locking the platform up high and carrying a ladder away with him, but he flew his drone up to unlock and lower it. He slid the gaitlin gun down to the ground on the flat board of wood he used for a ramp earlier, with the tarp over the gaitling gun. He got it up onto the window cleaning platform, and began securing it and attaching the belt feed in from a black bucket. His swivel apparatus moved the barrels back and forth by attaching to a tow strap on the platform meant for raising or lowering buckets of tools up to or down from the ground, which he wired to make remote operated along with the firing of the gaitling gun and raising or lowering of the platform. A phone on the platform cable above the platform livestreamed video to his phone at street level showing him that he was correctly in position.
They were all entering the board room now according to footage on the camera in the hallway, making slight small talk about their favorite type of veal. Some looked suspicious at the platform cables momentarily, but didn't think anything of it. They had switched board rooms actually earlier in the day at the last minute, requiring him to order the window cleaning platform in a hurry for the new boardroom.
He waited for a rough headcount of 30, then started the show. The gaitling gun's barrels started rotating for a moment or two before opening fire, shredding the tarp apart like it was never there and ripping through the window panes (which were meant to be bullet and shatterproof) after half a second of bullets digging into it while forming big round white cracks. The pathetic window pane started to come off in chunks after that, as the gun swung side to side on the swivel. A trail of bulletholes snaked throughout the board room and through the group of weaselish shits who still had no clue what was going on, as such a foe had not been anticipated this many squares in advance or even expected to appear on this type of playing board entirely. When they realized in those mere seconds that they had been found out early, and that the only parties capable of retaliating in this way weren't playing by their rules and there was nothing they could do about it, they frowned like they were mad their suit got wet from someone activating the sprinkler system, and tried turning to run irritatingly out of the door. For those that made it back out into the hallway, it didn't matter, as the material that was supposed to form a wall between the boardroom and the hallway was disintegrating apart and offered no cover or avenue of escape. Miraculously, a group of half a dozen or so who managed to only have one or two of their limbs snap in half, and/or just get peppered in their gut now hanging out, scrambled to the elevator at the end of the hall, while those reduced to attempting to crawl along the floor behind them continuted to get ripped apart each time the trail of bullets happened to sweep over them every couple seconds. They frantically pressed the elevator buttons to no avail, trapped waiting for it to rise up a psychologically dissociating number of floors. Each time they heard the guttural noises made by the bodies being ripped apart behind them, they held their eyes tightly shut while gritting their teeth; their own grunting completely silent below the sound of the torrential gunfire that roared behind them.
Chapter 6: Hide and Seek at the Widow's Market
When Clark was 17 years old, after his father's funeral and the repossession of his father's house by the bank, Clark was tasked with moving all of his father's old furniture and belongings to a building nearby where they sold things previously owned by the deceased, called a 'widow's market'.
When he went inside the widows' market, Clark was taken in by how vast the place was; it was too dark to see the walls at the end of the building, and seemed to just be a big endless room of old furniture. The grim aesthetic of the place drew Clark in, who began wandering around.
With no where else to go, Clark came up with the idea of just staying somewhere in the widow's market until some of his dad's furniture sold. At night, after all the lights had been turned off in the building, Clark waited in hiding off to the far side of the room to turn an old lamp on he found an outlet for. The first night, he took tremendous care in making sure not to bump into anything in the dark as he made his way to the front of the building to look out the window and make sure the owner's car was gone.
Clark built an elaborate furniture fort to hide in. He hid under an old table up against the far wall of the building inbetween several wardrobes and an entertainment center. Facing the wall was a couch, with the table he hid under inbetween the couch and the wall. The couch had several tall wardrobes against the back of it, allowing him to remain out of sight while sitting or laying on it. If he heard someone start moving stuff out of the way, he got down under the table and went out the other way. He hadn't had to find a replacement piece of furniture yet for his fort's barrier walls over the weeks he had been living there.
You're welcome; hope you enjoy the read; all in the interest of harm reduction.
Synopsis:
A new computer is invented that can see back in time! Meanwhile, a presidential candidate is promising to end all the leading causes of death while government agencies race to track down the last murderers and kidnappers.
ILLEGAL AS WELL
By Michael Berg
Chapters
1 - Death and Evil Approach an End – p. 3
2 - Illegal As Well – p. 15
3 - The Zenith City – p. 19
4 - Ghosts from the Past – p. 27
5 - The West Virginian – p. 37
6 - Hide and Seek at the Widow's Market – p. 51
7 - An Island with Only the Devil On It – p. 56
8 – Christmas – p. 67
9 - Funeral Partners – p. 72
10 - Wrong Family – p.85
11 - The Wizard and the Sorceror – p. 89
12 - Healing the Heart – p. 102
Chapter 1: Death and Evil Approach an End
A new presidential candidate promises to end all the leading causes of death in the United States.
"To end the first leading cause of death, which is heart disease, resources used to make excessive junkfood will be used to make fuel for cars and industry instead, using tax cuts to get everyone on board.
To end the second leading cause of death, lung cancer, land used for growing tobacco will be used for growing vegetables instead, or perhaps cannabis, but hopefully healthy vegetables. The best way for this to happen seamlessly is by constitutional ammendment: Tobacco is not allowed to be grown, harvested, sold, or imported in the United States of America, effective February.
To end the third leading cause of death, medical errors, doctors and medical workers will have to pair or triple up for each patient by law: two doctors per patient, per visit, in the same room at the same time - thus drastically reducing the probability of injuring the patient. Some medical workers will also be incentivized from now on by having their earnings double every few years they go without killing any patients, and not by just ignoring them
These three things alone would end the majority of all deaths. The remaining causes of death thereafter could then be focused on, with our efforts then freed up to do so. In the future, it will hopefully be that the only cause of death is dying peacefully in one's sleep, which science is now showing is actually possible and common, in their late 80s, 90s, or 100s+"
The bills were simple, profitable for everyone, and no one yet has come up with a reason to oppose them. Although there is fear that there must be something at work planning sabotage, as has always been the case when something so altruistically pure and sensible tries to happen, and it just seems too good of a thing for the wicked world to let happen. But who? No one would be losing any money from the changes proposed, so there is no financial motivation for any opponent. Wholly and objectively good, who would try to stop it? The devil himself? No more deaths - a promise that proves to us it will work in its simplicity. Nothing to lose and everything to gain. Profitable for everyone. Thus far, both parties have been showing overwhelming support for the candidate. 'Is there any way we can get him in office ahead of time?' spoke another candidate. The public and the government have become extremely protective over him already- our hero.
Rejoice was taking place in the streets: parades, parties, food, drink, fireworks.. But everything still seemed eerie; why had it taken the world so long? Why though? Why? Wasn't all of it illegal already?
In a motel room in Arkansas, a man wearing an eyepatch and a Boston t-shirt was staring at the television, thinking of loose ends. No more deaths meant something for him: it meant the end of his career. Rumors had been going around about a new type of investigation technology that can record from any point in a room remotely and perpetually, prompting him and many others to stay one step ahead of themselves - a final spree of run-arounds, or 'fastists'. People owed him, and for some reason the fact that other people couldn't die anymore meant that they couldn't pay him. He got into the side pod of his motorcycle, and his goon of a cousin-uncle wearing a spinny-propeller cap was already on the bike with it started ready for orders. "We gotta go to Kansas to stab somebody! I'll give you half a dilly!", the eyepatch wearing man said. The tires squeaked from him saying this, and they sped off. He sometimes gave him half-lorb tabs to humiliate him, but the acetaminophen in those was about to kill the eyepatch-wearing man's liver from acetaminophen poisoning just 10 hours (yes, 10 hours) into his addiction to pain meds, so they switched to dillies, which had no acetaminophen and wouldn't rapidly kill their livers. Death by liver failure was a slow and painful death, guaranteed, with agony and pain going on for several days while other organs are rotting because the liver can't filter out toxins that build up no matter what that the liver must process.
In the middle of a courtroom elsewhere, a man in a black suit, sunglasses, and a creepy clear coiling tube that came out of his ear for some reason, walked up to a blonde red vested attorney and whispered to her with his hand held up, "I think someone is running around killing people" in a sort of dutyish, half-worried tone. The female attorney, who had been speaking before the court, turned and looked at him. "Ech.." she replied while shrugging a little bit, while her hands were out explaining things. Soon-to-be-Banned products were now selling by the crate in a hurry and she had become an auctioneer mid-trial. They declared a county health inspector guilty of treason and perjury 20 times before fining them $200,000 dollars and then selling the debt on the internet to Saudi Arabia. The trial/auction finished with hoo-hah and barfing noises, and people left the courthouse to go to the bar across the street. Armed guards with M16s (yes, M16s) stood outside the bar while people were walking in talking mad shit about one another. The ATF arrived soon and pointed guns at people, who needed to know things about land and where the crates came from. "Why am I selling bad drugs?" the red-vested attorney cried aloud, genuinely confused and frustrated. She was hand-cuffed but the DA freed her while interrupting the same sentence she was arrested in. She then freed herself by announcing that outloud and shaking fingers at the DA like that 'was her job'. The ATF, not wanting to end the raid empty-handed, turned instead and began battering other people at random. A man with a Brooklyn accent began lecturing everybody, "Fucking poison! NONE of you have ever done shit about all this stuff that's been killing millions of people: tobacco, poisonous medicine, bad food - it should have all been gone 50 years ago by now! Yet all of you your entire life have just been ignoring it and watching sickeningly as more of those naive continue to fall victim." The ATF stopped beating people for a second and looked at him like what he just said required biblical analysis.
The man with the eyepatch and his sidekick goon were riding through the night. No stars were visible for some reason. The eyepatch man picked a worm out of his ear and smiled at it and the idea that he was somehow merging with some unified micromachine radio consciousness as a result, and wondered if his rank in such a system would allow him to turn off advertisements and dysphoria that 'noobs' were subjected to.
The man wearing an eyepatch pulled into a gas station parking lot. This gas station was of a different chain brand that did not sell products which killed people - in place of tobacco products were trading card packs, handheld video games, movies, music albums, kids toys, and action figures; instead of junkfood, they had vegetables and guacamole. It made a fortune, but hadn't taken off yet across the country. "...I can barely move!" shouted the man in the eyepatch, "I don't know what it is, I can't move right now! We need to leave! Why do I feel like this..." A picture of Jesus on a movie poster stared down at him disapprovingly. "You win," the eyepatch man said between coughing, "you win.." The eyepatch man's goon started the bike again and they drove off, confused and nervous. "I'm still getting my money down there. I get it no matter what. That's all that matters. I'm getting that no matter what."
Out in the woods, federal agent Clark was having his final battle with the hitmen's drones still after him. He had fashioned a rail gun, which immediately fired at anything interrupting an empty sky - if the telescope lens had something in it, an amplified image of it changed capacitance in a series of capacitors which, if capacitance changed, flipped a transistor when at a voltage slightly greater than the capacitors' from an empty sky, and this would then trigger the rail gun. He disconnected it briefly if a plane was flying overhead.
A drone showed up making an eerie and ominous noise; the drone was disintegrated by the rail gun, which was satisfying to watch and Clark had a lot of fun doing it. "The power company finally accomplished something," he stated.
The next day as Clark got back into town, a guy in a white doctor's coat with burns in his face was running around in public blasting a geneva-gun. People had managed to get far enough away from him where he was only hurting himself. Clark began to devise a plot to sharpen a spear quick and impale him, but moments later a mail carrier swerved off with his truck and flattened the asshole. Clark was inspired by this, and thought about all the stylish ways mail carriers utilized various mob-style weapons for self defense. As the guy in doctor's scrubs started to get back up, the mailman blew into a flabby rubber mouthpiece and a steel dart shot out of a hose, defeating the bad man who fell back down onto the pavement. The last of the murderers disguised as doctors were occasionally popping up in public having little freakouts.
When Clark got back into the office, a few people stood up and began clapping for him. "We don't have to worry anymore Clark - the military has this place protected like a fortress right now. We won the chess match. Your friend from earlier found most of the rest of them for us too, and the money that was crowd-pooled was announced seized. We did it; they're all gone. Every last one is dead... There's nothing to do now... We're bored. Anyways, the election is coming up soon, it's almost Halloween, and we're to have NOTHING to do with our future president AT ALL. We attract too many terrible people. We're going to try doing something new and exciting; we're going to find the bad guys and kill them! How fun!" A few people listening began nodding with casual approval. "As I'm sure you've all heard, the new pres is going to end all common causes of death for all time, and we'll all look stupid for not thinking of that earlier. Why didn't any of you think of that? What are you even trying for? Anyways, since the public doesn't care about surveillance being 'like sonar' and the fact that we can see literally everything, we're going to use it to find the remaining baddies. Kidnappers and murderers take priority, we kill those. Drugs don't matter, and neither does most everything else, like jaywalking and parking tickets; unpaid taxes is for the IRS to figure out later, and 'no namers' should have their privacy protected- rule of thumb is 'why aren't you finding a murderer or missing person right now'."
The building director went on, "We're also starting a higher clearance level operation. Something new entirely," he looked back and forth seriously, seeing whose attention he had caught. "There's a new computer that can see back in time. We're going to get them all. Every single cold case will be busted this next year, as fast as possible, before anyone can figure out what we have. What, don't believe me? Mark, you set a restaurant on fire when you were three because you were too bored to sit there any longer, and didn't tell anybody it was you; Lisa you stepped on a frog when you were six, what a terrible person you are; James is the one who ate all the chocolate when no one was looking at a picnic when he was 10; and Eric you stole a samurai sword then destroyed someone's house with it when you were 12, you should have known better by that age, shame on you. Please raise your hand if all that was true and we'll move on." They shamelessly raised their hands one by one except for Mark and Eric; much of the room still didn't quite understand what he was saying. "So bust these cold cases. I found four missing persons just messing around with the computer this morning. Top 5 lifesavers each get five hundred thousand dollars. Don't fake one or you're disqualified from that, but do work fast if you can. The equipment that takes the measurements is mobile, and later on we'll probably do some measurements on foot. If its too difficult to arrest one, just get rid of them."
"...What were you saying earlier about cold cases?" "You can look back in time! Literally! I told you about a bunch of horrible things you did when you were younger so you'd believe me! This isn't a trick or a joke. You can now view footage of anything that's ever happened, and we're going to use that technology to bust cold cases. Particle resonance is how it works; quantum microarchitecture is how we read that. They found a unique signature in the measurements from four seasons which were divisible by 365 days and nights which was also apparent, in particle resonance. We put a date and time to it then, and later on figured out how to pull audio and imaging off it. Before the bad guys or the public learn that we have it, we're going to take the opportunity to bust all the cold cases. No more questions - the program runs the same as the 4d viewer that's 'like sonar'. Get to work." The office lazily turned back in their chairs to their computers.
"Clark," the building director walked over to him, "Go do something else." Clark was taken back with disappointment for a moment, then realized the strategic importance of him leaving the building in case bad guys tried finding him again someday soon.
As Clark turned to walk back out the door, the director quickly added, "Oh wait! Take one of these with you, here." The director handed him a strange looking stick with buttons, dials, a little screen, and a cone on the front. "These are the new particle resonance readers I was talking about! You know, the ones that let you see back in time!" Clark looked amazed and eager, "Here, just press this button to get it ready, cycle through the material types with these arrow buttons, and turn the dial until the imaging isn't blurry anymore. This dial selects how many minutes in the past you want to look at, then push it in once for hours or again for months. Hold the cone over the surface of what you're reading, now look around with it to see the imaging from back then. Press this button if you want to pause, then here's fast foreward and rewind. Here, look, here's you walking in earlier." Clark watched in disbelief. "Now point it over here and see me." Clark turned around, and saw the director giving the speech he just gave. Now here's here 68 years ago before I could have recorded any of it. Wow, look how different town is! Older buildings. Anyways, verify any detail from back then however small and you'll eventually begin to find ways of proving to yourself that it's genuine. Okay, now go find people who are kidnapped and rescue them and bust bad guys with it! We don't know what's faster yet, doing this all by drone or on foot, so try and race us and we'll get a good idea what the best way to do it is! Anything you read gets saved, so don't worry about that, but add time-stamps with this button when you've found something important. Then you can add notes out loud too or write them on the touch screen. Isn't that cool? It gets in the way a little bit right now though, and the only way to close out of it is to add another timestamp. We can and are going to see everything you see, so no looking at people naked, just saying that to everyone once more, no looking at people naked! We can see you doing it!!" the director shouted to the rest of the office. "Since you're the most familiar there, go to your home town with this first and find out what happened to that girl who got abducted when you were a kid. We can also figure out if any bad guys still after you are trying to find you there! Now go - start saving lives with that thing. When you get close, don't let the bad guys know what it is either."
Chapter 2:
Illegal As Well
In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maine, and western and northern parts of New York, an older man had built a TV transmitter into the back of his van and would park it at the end of a block in a neighborhood, using it to overpower the signal of local television stations with his own broadcast. Usually while programming for a younger audience was playing, his broadcast would come on and his face would appear, accompannied by a creepy but memorable and melodic jingle. He'd instruct children to do various chores around the house, in a silly announcement tone of voice, and in the process add household cleaners to unknowingly poison food and beverages before giving it to their parents.
When the man was caught, he was arrested for homicide. However, debate actually began over whether or not what he was doing illegal. "Why were children even allowed to be anywhere near such dangerous products?", "They wouldn't have done it if the color of the liquid wasn't meant to look like juice or candy", "They shouldn't be able to open the container even" - he started winning the federal government over to his side. The public at the time, for those who caught the very brief mentioning of the case in a single issue of a newspaper, claimed that whatever form of hypnosis he had used on children he was now using on agents of the federal government; the victims' family members believed the same rumor to be true. Because of this, the second victim's husband shot the man before he stood trial.
The feds woke up. No one had ever come up with such a terrifying way to commit homicide before. How did he manage to make his own broadcast, and have it appear instead on a channel over what else was showing? Could other people do this? Who else knew how? To prevent others from copying whatever it is that he did, the federal government kept anyone from publicizing the case. Time forgot it, nearly - which is what was planned to happen.
Doesn't history repeat itself though? The fear of history not learning its lesson and something similar happening again was disregarded, mostly due to the fear of fake transmissions driving many government workers nuts.
The concern about children accidentally poisoning themselves or others was overlooked, although he mentioned that as his motive, "I'll show you what I did and exactly how I did it; I did it for an important reason: so you could protect children." Many of the federal agents who had similar opinions never shared them for fear of being typified the same as someone who was homicidal. It was as if it all happened for no reason and meant nothing.
After the case had been smudged from the public, the victims' families had to fight to keep their children out of hospital or state custody. This continued for years. Many were strongly medicated, even reporting torture. No one knew what happened, and no one cared when they'd try explaining it again. Their record only said they had poisoned someone, and maybe it was an accident.
The case was eventually brought up again to help try to clear the names of the children, decades after it had been forgotten about. It almost seemed like it was about to happen again, being stuck in hospitals or labelled mentally unstable, and having to fight to gain any legal foothold. Luckily, something amazing happened: the case became widely publicized; it took off, whether those few federal agents early on wanted it to or not. Their story was talked about far and wide, and for the first time in their lives people gave them something in regards to it all: support. Lawyers offered to form a legal team for them, for free, and in their interest entirely, which was whatever they chose it to be.
Upon requesting compensation, the court found the federal commission liable, and ordered that the government pay the kids, now adults mostly in their 40s. It wasn't much, and according to most of them, it wasn't worth it, as they once again tried to make publicity of the case disappear. It didn't work; other countries even took copies of the various details and testimonies, and in multiple languages. The same simple stubborness never again resulted successfully in the total undermining of the issue and neglect of the victims, and it looks hopefully like it can't and never will.
Although time moves on, it is usually the case that nothing changes when there is no one there to change it. There's still poisonous cleaning products accessible to kids, and they're still colored like juice or candy, and no one is going to typify you as a serial killer if you want things to be different. That man, the one who convinced children to unknowingly poison people with household cleaners, was evil. He took an issue that most people acknowledge and recognize as one of society's terrible and simple problems, and used it to try justifying homicide. If his point was that it would be malice to get someone to drink it, he proved that he himself was malicious.
Chapter 3: The Zenith City
In the 1920s, Duluth had a population which consisted of more millionaires than anywhere else on Earth, due to a geographical tendency of a choice made by those who had made their wealth in Chicago and were moving: only millionaires could afford to move up north to Duluth - which was in the thick northern Minnesotan woods, on the easternmost point of Lake Superior. The city had everything it needed for natural resources, moreso than Chicago even, and seemed like it was going to become the next big metropolis, waiting to be set up by those who could make it happpen.
With millions of dollars, and the ability to set up any type of industry one was willing to, numerous inventors emerged. For a few years around the Duluth harbor at night, you could see fantastic colors being showcased from newly invented types of artificial lighting for the very first time. New York City didn't even compare to it, because that you couldn't see all in one night. Around the Duluth harbor, you could see new gas lanterns, neon signs, and even arcing, which looked like lightning.
The light show lasted only a few years however, as the millionaire inventors and business owners soon realized that much of it was quite hazardous to people's health, especially when being cleaned. Nothing was at a standard yet, and soot built up that was toxic to come in contact with. There was a notable visit by Tesla, who put on one of his touring demonstrations for the aristocratic upper class, during which many of the audience members felt unsafe being so close to the arcing of electricity being displayed, becoming mentally ill even; Tesla had drawn Faraday lines on stage for the safe spots for himself to stand in, but hadn't bothered to find any 'safe spots' for his audience - and the millionaire society of Duluth would never forget it. The desire to be enchanted by magic and fantastic colors turned into a demonstration instead of the dangers of ignoring energy equivalence laws, that the power of electricity when changed to a different medium by strange forces is still as powerful, even if that new medium is now the air in a room full of people. Tesla hadn't reserved an auditorium in Duluth large enough, as the only large auditoriums in town at that time were likely already booked, and thus, his audience was stood dangerously close to the arcing being demonstrated, resulting in disaster. After the night of that tragic performance, it could be said that the Zenith City had officially began to shut down its light show.
At the end of it, the millionaires had mostly left or started to move, leaving behind a museum piece of success, triumph, and finally a humble tragedy, like a person who grew old and gray way too early. The city has long since lost most of its Zenith antiques, but retains its 1920s aesthetic - painted by time with last century's tragic truth that beauty ultimately becomes toxic for material objects.
Duluth was also home to some of the creators of the very first computers ever made - the ones the government basically had no choice but to purchase, as no one else knew how they even made them. The ones they don't usually let people know about. Our public imagination of the first computer being a giant calculator made in the 1950s with a room full of scientists standing inside of it turning dials and flipping switches is a cleverly placed lie. The first modern computer could be said to have been made in the late 1800s for processing telegrams between Chicago and New York City. And it was geniously simple to make. A grid of copper wire running vertically, foreward and backward, and side to side, was set up with a junction of transistors between intersections of wires. The same type of computer was also used to run those cities' electrical transformer grid sometimes, although not as early on. The Duluthian communications computer on the other hand consisted of intersecting rows of rectangular metal columns, molded all from one piece. Waves were then sent through certain rows between the columns on different sides, computing a resulting wave pattern after waves entering had interfered with one another, cancelling each other out or deflecting off at different angles interfering with itself such that output of a certain type arrived before or after previous output. As they got better at it, these computers were used to process analog signals for television and radio. They could also make advanced calculations for not just things like exponents and logarithms, but integrals and derivatives. It seems as though someone had the idea to invent this for a transmissions standard ahead of time, as if they already knew the dangers of stronger and simpler means of broadcasting with amplified signals and high voltage direct current.
The wave computer didn't take off in popularity for a while, as people barely knew how to explain what it even was. The inventor remained humble when bigger government greatly overlooked his invention, but later into the 1920s and 30s, they came back running.
Other types of transmission methods, not requiring computers often, were being set up by inventors around the country - often high voltage analog signals which might be described as not even needing a TV to be able to see, if it were a different frequency. Even when the signal strength itself could be withstood without adverse health effects, the amplification of the signal, and mismatching of different generations of equipment, had catastrophic consequences. Rooms full of people were found knocked unconscious by their television sets - entire neighborhoods even, who were attempting to rescue one another. If the electrons were leaking, seizures and burning would occur, especially with children laying on the carpet in front of it. Nausea, headache, dizziness, and deep hypnotic states were more frequently reported. The flicker of the screen itself could cause seizures, and no one yet understood why.
The people who later became the first agents of the Federal Communications Commission were many of those who had taken it upon themselves to race across the country checking signal standards, and/or warning communities what to do should high power interference knock groups of people unconscious (you should turn off the power at the fuse box, and if its the tower signal strength itself that is too strong, you should run and go get the military). Broadcasters at that time period typically liked the proto-FCC communications and safety workers - who were appointed by mayors, county or city vote, neighborhoods, or just their ability to explain things. You might think that a few broadcasters early on would have already been power drunk with the ability to knock the entire town unconscious, but in such a case they usually had already inadvertently damaged themselves - and that is where the need to make the safety workers' early uniform first came to be: a lead or rock suit covering the entire body, which was enormously heavy but preferrable to damage from high voltage electromagnetic fields and radiation. The design was styled after the equipment worn by engineers during the first World War.
Those periods in history and the lessons learned during them were innevitably forgotten, as the dangers inherent in such technology led the government to make awareness of them non-public - a story rarely told - and perhaps forgotten even by the FCC itself.
The invention of a televised video display did not happen in Duluth, Chicago, or New York City, but what history that has faded into urban legend perpetuates as somewhere in Pennsylvania, or near Philadelphia (during a World Fair in some variations of the telling) in the very late 19th or very early 20th Century. A community fair and circus was taking place in a town/city park; among the strange attractions was an inventor who had managed to use light, electricity, and likely trapped gases in clear glass containers, to show moving pictures. He had even managed to make a lens for showing the audience an enlarged image of him and themselves. According to the urban legend, the fair ended catastrophically when the electricity began to hit people in the park with sparks and loose streams of ions, after the glass containers of gases exploded or caught fire. The fire department according to legend desperately attempted to stop the disaster with hosed water, until a wisened member of the crowd from earlier who knew some of the science behind the exhibit's equipment explained to them that water was making it worse; the famous expression by the firefighters from the legend being "It's on fire!" while people were screaming and asking what was going on. The military was sent for to try ending it with cannonfire, but someone with a sense of bravery above danger worked up the courage to disconnect it, not knowing if it would electrocute him/her. The conscious survivors (most survived) then explained to the military what had happened, who decided that firing cannons would be safer than trying to disconnect it, should a similar thing happen in the future.
In modern times, broadcast signals become moving images after a receiving unit distinguishes the signal from others present in the air, either by the angles of deflection throughout a series of corridors where only a specifically curved wave produces a signal at the end's detection capacitor/transistor, or a branching network of wires has substantial alternating current produced in it from a series of signalled waves coming in contact with the metal of multiple wire branches simultaneously, coinciding with spikes in signal strength at predicted intervals - which must consist of voltage from all metal wire antennae branches simultaenously for a transistor to switch, ensuring that only the intended signal and not stray airwaves are received. Both of these rapidly switch transistors producing an image on an XY grid of rows and columns of lights.
Chapter 4: Ghosts from the Past
Clark dug into the ground while mourning, at the tree where the particle resonance reader showed the body was buried at. He was having bouts of denial more frequently that the particle resonance reader couldn't possibly be actually working, and that it was just some way of training him while there was no other work to be done, or to give him courage by making him think events happening in the present day had happened a long time ago. But none of that was true. He had tested that it was genuine by comparing it to memory of his home town, checking places he had been when he was younger. It was a nightmare. Things, places, and people that were no longer around - what his town looked like before it had become older and more abandoned. That was when the reality hit him that he was racing toward a skeleton. There was no way to stop or change any of it; it could only end in disappointment. Over and over. Finding her alive was all he wanted, but already knew that was unlikely. The trail to justice was still long ahead of him after his mission ended in failure. They couldn't yet pull dentals off the particle resonance reader; the only way to find the murderer was to follow him all the way back to the present day.
Clark eventually tracked him back to outside a town nearby where the murderer was living in a shed off in the woods. Clark was getting better at finding the same person again across months or years. He had been contemplating along the chase whether he should shoot with a service pistol or not the monster who killed the little girl.
"Clark, this is the first time anyone has ever done this. Coders are setting up dental reading capabilities on your devices later today, it needs a computer hardware update a drone will do for you later today. You can't kill him. Why? This is the first time anyone has ever done this. You can't set a bad example. What do you think we should do? You know him pretty well at this point and we want your opinion." Clark replied sounding exhausted, "I dont know. I don't know what we should do to him." The guy on the other end came back over the radio,"You know what? We have a credit card from the military that says 'fucking kill em incorporated' on the front of it, fuck it, bomb them, why is this taking so long? Spreadsheet guys already worked out his location because you were too slow. This is the way it works now, probably. But because our displays might get hacked, we'll check it every once and a while the old fashioned way. Unless this all gets hacked by lasers which can't happen, good wins and evil loses. With the dental parameters and whatnot, we found most of them on television sets in like an hour. A few television sets had computers attached to them, and those guys were thrown in our detainment facilities. I don't even know why we sent you out earlier really, other than to see it work. Hurry up and catch up to him Clark; when he blows up into little pieces, you can verify for us all that you saw it."
Clark got to the shed where the murderer was residing. "Alright Clark, see his face for us?" Clark checked his face on the particle resonance reading for the shed, which looked like him. Then Clark pulled out his binoculars and started waiting for him to go near the window. "Clark we can't be here all day, go up and knock on the window." Clark ran up and tapped on the window, prompting a man on the ground in a sleeping bag to roll over and look up. After a few seconds of eye contact, Clark spoke up "Nevermind, sorry to bother you," then Clark walked back out to the woods nearby and put on some goggles and a debris mask. "That's him." Clark radioed.
About 20 seconds later, a rocket sped down and the shed exploded. "Well, good job Clark, how easy was that? The rest were already verified earlier, and they're about to blow up too, tell me if you feel the Earth shake." Clark stood there for a moment, with a sense of hope for the future for the first time in days.
"Well, there it was Clark. What a fucking relief. All the murderers who kidnapped, raped, or tortured somebody are gone. People who murdered someone for no reason are mostly gone. The rest are getting worked out in time. I doubt there's a bulk of them we missed, I got to look at the numbers myself. Once nearly all of the miscellaneous killers are worked out, which shouldn't take more than a month, we can tell the public all about this. What a fucking day."
Back at the office, a Halloween party was happening, and everyone was wearing costumes as part of a bad joke. "Why?" Clark asked. "Some of the miscellaneous killers are still out there. It's just in case they get ahold of one of our new readers," a man dressed as a giant spotted dog replied. "There's not really a need to worry," the director started saying, "There's like 2800 or so of those left and most of them are already in detainment centers. They were obvious at some point. The last thing to work out actually is gangs firing machine guns at each other. The ones that killed someone of a different gang for little or no reason will probably have to just go to prison, because we can't be siding with this gang or that gang. Other than that, there's a few in a gray area, and that's just going to take a while. If we tell the public right now, we're concerned it will inspire a new generation of miscellaneous-only killings, or that people will work out in their head then when they'd actually still kill somebody, and that might inspire them to do so. We also don't need a bunch of other people getting these particle resonance readers and thinking there's still murders when there isn't, because the display will probably get hacked then and it could cause a cascade of people killing each other. Right now we're the only ones who have them, and we're going to look into who to give them to in other countries where they won't be misused. If analysis comes back that we missed a large number of them, we'll be glad we didn't tell the public. It's still something we want to do some day soon, we just don't think we should right now. We're going to sample a town and see what happens when we tell them, then one at a time as long as they handle it well we'll tell more and more people. I'm sure there's things we don't understand yet about how people will handle this, so maybe just 1 out of 20 people will be told about it, or more or less if that would work better. If some day an enemy tries to wipe out all the people with these readers, we're going to set up ways ahead of time for stopping them first. We're all in this together now, we can not fail. We need work to continue to get done in this building for another few years; I've thought about it. It will work and no it won't come back to us, the trail gets too long. Clark took a long way back, and none of our dentals leave this building. Clark, you're an asshole, now get out! Go out the same way you came in, and swim out in the woods for a while. You'll get a bunch of money. Hide some. Don't come back here. When you get done swimming, go into town but somewhere away from here so your last spot isn't here, use the restroom, then go back to swimming. Do exactly all of that, we'll figure out how to get you lunch. Now go!"
Clark did exactly as he was instructed to do. Sitting on a little island out on a lake while wondering how his food would show up, several fish splashed up out of the water at his feet, a bag of stuff started floating up and over to near where he was on the beach. A pack of matches and with a note where to pick up money were written on it, including a note saying "stash a bill in this bag in town under a rock, then find new bag in town and stash on this island, this ink isn't real, look like it though?" "Yeah" Clark said outloud. The ink rearranged "3 letters are in ink that fades, the rest are lasers to your eyes and brain. Memorize the 3 letters quick. Goodbye." Clark was pissed they were using something like that on him without his permission, even once. The letters were H, I, and L. He decided that meant he should avoid hills for a while, or something.
After doing all that, he went and bought a scooter with refreshed money from buyer's remorse for 3 shotguns and 2 pistols.. Then drove a hundred or so miles away, and ditched the scooter by a dumpster and began looking for another scooter he could buy, but there weren't any. He really wanted to find a second scooter, so he got back on the first one and drove to another town to look for one, then left it near a dumpster again. He finally found another scooter and gave someone refreshed money for it. He then went around placing bills under rocks in plastic bags, every so often, when it didn't look too obvious from the last time. When he got bored of doing that he went to a job bank where a bunch of other federal investigators who had been working on catching murderers were at, "Did you hear that they all blew up?" they kept saying to one another nodding and laughing with approval. "Careful about talking about that right now," Clark said "Think about it for a long long time and you'll get it, it'll be there." Clark tried looking stern, and they took what he said slightly more seriously. The job bank told most of them to go do dumb shit for a while. Clark's coupon however said "go to back room", so he went to the back room. In the backroom some guy there told him to go to another room further back. In there was a note that said "wait for package". After about 45 minutes, a package dropped on the table from a hole in the ceiling, and inside was a new model particle resonance reader. The note attached said "fight crime with it, we want to see if that works. Nothing big. Don't use near electronics." He turned it on, and the screen said "put back in box, go outside". Outside, after walking away while pushing his scooter, another package plopped out from the woods on the road up ahead. Inside was another particle resonance reader, this time with a note that said "fight crime with it, we want to see if that works. Nothing big. Don't use near electronics". He turned on the screen and it only showed a video of where to find another package. He got the idea now. He went to the frickin third package opened it up, and put the fake particle resonance reader in there next to the new one and then juggled them around with his hands for a bit. He turned one on, it was the one with the video again. He watched it in its entirety, then turned it off, and picked up the other one. He considered that good enough, and got the hell out of there before more bullshit happened.
He went to town to a used car lot and asked for the car owned previously by the worst person they knew of. "This guy left the car super trashed after 4 months of paying for it on time but exactly 50 dollars below the agreed upon amount per month. Only got asked for a car like that once before, can I see if you have a badge even?" Clark took out his surrogate cop badge and the guy smiled and gave him the keys.
Clark still couldn't think of what to do yet with the new reader. He figured he'd try to bust kidnappings. The drones with the readers on them from earlier had already found a bunch, and they were just getting enough local cops ready to grab the kidnappers while they were knocked out by sedatives. If he could get a list of one nearby, he could maybe start saving a few early. He called the request line. The operator replied, "That literally just went down about an hour ago. We're just hoping they followed our instructions and put them all in separated cells so they can't talk about how they got caught. What the hell have you been doing? Go for people who were severely beaten and see if there was a reason for it or not, then go find whoever did it to them. There's one at the hospital nearby right now. Go talk to him. Or hey, wait, want to get an old lady back her purse? There's one of those nearby too." "I guess I'll try to get both." Clark responded.
Clark was distraught, stuck on something he had been repeatedly forcing into his memory earlier over and over: that to save a life is above all else the greatest endeavour - but the device he wielded could only offer realization that he had already failed that endeavour, as he was set in the past where following the trail directly would never bring one to the present. For the flow of time to be faster was asking the impossible; only while they rested did he get closer, but then proximity must make him weaker and wearier. This creeping lack of confidence was as though it were some dark ritual meant to trap him in a trance. Instead of chasing a ghost, he needed to be able to look forward and find them alive. Sherlock holmes style deduction might work, but most effective would be the use of modern mass surveillance computers to locate the villain. And that was it. Without modern supercomputers, it was folly. And trying to solve an unsolved crime had always been as terrible, as even with an image of the past where you can see what happened and where they went next, it was still extraordinarily difficult to catch them. The number of ghosts to follow must be innumerable.
Chapter 5: The West Virginian
Surrounding the West Virginian as he drove through town was emptiness. The twisted winding roads through the hills lead only to abandoned buildings and properties, except places which he and one other local resident had maintained, such as the power and water plants, and other vital town infrastructure. They basically ran the place, and no title had ever been properly defined for what exactly his position was. Town constable would have been an insult given all the other work he did for the town, so when he talked to the state government, those that new him simply referred to him as the mayor, or sherriff, or shopkeep, or whatever role in town he most resembled given the present nature of the conversation.
The town had collapsed over the early and mid 2000s, and no matter what he would never forget the chain of events behind the collapse, as it all traced back to identity theft as the primary cause. As soon as one person integral to the town's functioning left, especially in the mountains, the rest of the town was shortly to fall apart thereafter. "We could all just stay here and do our jobs like we're doing them, each of us perform our roles, and the town can still survive!" he tried encouraging them, "We don't need money; it's imaginary! We'll keep everything working the same as it is right now without money!" Innevitably they all left. As soon as the grocery store went under, the remaining crowd in town that was still trying had to part their separate ways. "We can hunt! We can fish! And one of us can travel somewhere else in the state to get fruits and vegetables for the rest of us!" It was no use. The town was leaving and as it got toward the end of it. He didn't blame them - it only hurt himself.
Identity thieves. Fucking identity thieves was what caused it all. They blamed it on a few of the kids in town too, on computer viruses they caught. A dozen or so families lost all of their savings and moved. No one was managing one of the vital jobs at the town's water plant, and after a week of rising pressures and leaking pipes in people's basements, a main water line exploded, causing yet even more people to move. Most of the town now relied on people in town who had wells if they were lucky enough, which they complained about the taste, or bottled water. The grocery store running out of bottled water and the cost of having to ship more than one truck up at a time, along with having lost many of its customers, caused the grocery store to fall into the red. The owner sold the property, and the new owner had yet to reveal himself. How would the town get groceries? No other building could function as a grocery store. While it was being proposed to just use the same store and not tell anybody, and pooling together money from food stamps to order pallets of food in whatever way they had been ordered before, more people left the town, as that just sounded ridiculous and criminal.
Even with the food stamp money they wielded, the price per pallet meant that those remaining had to choose 4 different food items to eat for that entire month, but stocking them up at least with extras for the next month. If anyone else left, they couldn't even get 4 pallets and had to pick 3 food items each month. The West Virginian's biggest mistake finally was telling everyone at a meeting, to try calming someone down, that he didn't hold it against any of them if they should leave at any time for any reason, and that he wouldn't fault them and still thought they were good people. Two pallets is all they could afford to order the second month: cereal for its vitamins, even though there was plenty of cereal still but kinds that no one liked, and canned stew. The canned hashbrowns from the first order was almost gone, and the canned stew grossed everyone out like effin 9 year olds, and that, yes that, was the reason they left for! No one was even eating any canned peaches or mixed vegetables! Ordered since there NEEDED to be some form of vegetable, so why not all of them? Breakfast cereal doesn't have all the vitamins; you have to get them from vegetables! Vitamins A, E, K, etc.. well, vitamin A is in some cereals - yeah! F-load of cereal! GOT IT! But you still need some kind of vegetable! So first month again: a pallet of cereal got ordered which people got sick of having to eat without milk right away; a pallet of canned hashbrowns which was devoured; canned peaches were occassionally being eaten; and no one eating any effing vegetables! Turning the townspeople onto canned hashbrowns for the very first time and telling them all about how great it was got them to try it and kept them totally satisfied until they were sick of it the next day - however the hashbrowns were all the rage for a minute; can you imagine eating hashbrowns for the first time? It almost seemed like the town was going to pull through! But it didn't swallow right the next day, and they up and fuckin left. Then the second month, of the remaining 9 people, 7 of them detested the canned stew, and decided to leave as well. The last remaining other person was quite content downing can after can of stew and hashbrowns and peaches, and agreed to stay.
They both got jobs for the government, and would make trips every month to buy a truckload of groceries after hitting up bars and stripclubs. They'd turn off everything in town before they'd leave, and turn it all back on when they got back. The water pipe that burst they never were able to fix, but managed to seal off water going to that side of town so that they could keep water running on the other half. Electricity came from a dam and a couple windmills. They spent a lot of time on the internet, and were in charge of running and maintaining that too.
As the years went by, he thought more and more about the cause of it all, prompting him to learn more and more about computers in an attempt to find out who was initially responsible. He learned that the identity thieves using the type of computer virus the kids had been blamed with catching were actually not viruses at all, but was actually due to their parents filling out forms on fake or malicious websites disguised as pornography, online gambling, and deals for things too good to be true.
But he didn't just become good with computers, he became very good with computers, and since managing the town's power and water only had to be checked twice a day taking up only 5-10 minutes each time after they figured out to just leave video cameras on all the pressure valves and make sure they weren't getting too high or low, and making sure voltage on the turbine didn't get too high and need to be turned off which rarely happened, they each took jobs with homeland security and the NSA that they heard were available for them as they needed someone in the area. After getting good with the permissions they allowed and learning whose shoulder was safe to rub, he set up ways of luring out identity thieves, or busting them outright after checking servers to find out where they were and using backdoors on their computers to verify it was them. His work along with others doing similar were putting an end to future economic crisis before it even happened. It was a hobby of his.
He was eventually told by his superiors that he was wasting his time doing things one thing at a time like that, and that if he was good with computers he'd be thinking bigger when it comes to stopping problems. He worked on a program which took spreadsheet analytics and worked out the data into simplified groups for the flow of currency from racketeering or laundering across large accounts on the internet and elsewhere, revealing the single group or branch of affiliated individuals behind money being sent around confusingly in circles. Identity thieves account juggling were one type of illegitimate commerce, but his program also revealed several others, notably one that focused on stealing retirement money from the old and elderly. That type had struck in the late 2000s, and some of the individuals who got away with it appeared to be starting on new accounts, but the West Virginian had yet to figure out what for.
The trillions of dollars of bailout money from the late 2000s and early 2010s had become tied up in numerous accounts that some of which were bankrupting from becoming stuck with the task of paying the money back, while other accounts currently with the money were far enough away down the sequence of accounts to spend the money freely before becoming stuck with the debt of having to pay it back later. The new racketeering plan was to keep a steady stream of these new recipient accounts coming, abandoning them before they were indebted, and ultimately as the government caught on to send the money to other continents and play the international stock market with it, crashing American companies then buying them back with other companies they now owned which the government had yet to catch up to.
Buying the companies from them finally, when they felt like the world had had enough, were wealthy affiliates with legitimate non-bailout money that the cronies could disappear with; their wealthy affiliates would buy the company stock at a reasonable price of one third its former value. The wealthy affiliates would eventually have the zero interest bailout money fall onto them, which they would return to the government, but while having gained ownership of a company whose stock would surely rebound. Their plan would leave millions jobless and homeless; their next venture included buying up homes in America after the housing market crashed again, forcing people to pay them as landlords in homes they could monitor the inside of with a security system company they also owned.
By chance, the West Virginian had caught on to it early and learned of a board meeting between many of the individuals responsible and the wealthy affiliates they were planning to trade off to in the end. There was no other way for them to all be on the same page at once comfortably other than in person together. You might think that they'd distance apart from such a meeting, but if they were all to become legitimate affiliates after finalizing accounts with one another they had nothing to fear from being in person together. The wealthy affiliates would end the chase by the government by taking accountability for the loaned bailout money and simply giving it back at that point, being satisfied with their newly acquired company they purchased for 1/3rd of its value, paid to the crooks who were responsible for it all who could now finally get away freely with billions of dollars they didn't have to pay back. The stock would rebound, and the wealthy affiliates would triple their money if it went back to normal.
The West Virginian knew that his evidence wasn't accessible to the courts, and they couldn't be stopped early by the law. Some he had pointed it out to even favored their plan, saying that someone has to eventually pay back the bailout money, and they figured out a way to do that. The West Virginian tried explaining that their plan involved destroying American companies while owning chunks of them in accounts here and overseas, crashing them by getting the market to panic by selling low to themselves, or increase in value by selling high to themselves. The trail would become so long at that point, they'd hope, that by the time the government realized what they were doing their wealthy affiliates would have already repaid the loaned bailout money. Ultimately, the changes in stocks of the involved companies could be blamed on difficulties in managing companies and resources back and forth overseas, and any investigation into that would be slowed down by the language barrier.
When someone in the West Virginian's shoes encountered a problem that no one else was able to fix, if it was important enough they'd have to fix it themselves and suffer the consequences of breaking the rules. The rules would dictate that he be imprisoned for manslaughter, as his target hadn't done anything terroristic... If he was caught, that is. 'Use the backdoor to their computer and forge documents in a hidden folder describing something like blowing up a skyscraper, then save it to your surveillance computer while viewing theirs as evidence; you'll be glad you did. Cover your trail as best you can. Hmm, but what should it say?' the West Virginian thought to himself, then began typing up the fake threats:
"FUckin hell cant deal this anymore, feds r on to me man BIG TIME. Cant pay back the FAWKIN money cause I dont FAWKIN have it no more.. im cornered and the last of its gone! Gonna have to blow uip the tower to get rid of all the FAWKIN evidence.. yah, then stab a hobo in an alley and run around with a chainsaw on mah yacht while d0in l00ds, sail ta sw33den and get cash out ma s\/\/izz benk acct b4 i come back 2 blow up moar buildings, yah gonna do that for sure, sounded like g00d idea ever since i chatted up osama bin laden on the enternet and h00ked him up with them plain tickets"
'They'll think of that as a taunting and that maybe our response was a little overzealous when they find out he got blown to pieces.. Maybe it'll be just the thing we need publicized so we can stop taking phony threats seriously. Well, I mean that's local police doing all that, but people think it's us, but maybe if a story is newsworthy it'll get police to quit overreacting and even deter people from making them, hmm,' the West Virginian thought to himself.
"Can you manage town for a few days? I got called off to some seminar thing in DC," the West Virginian asked. "Yeah shouldn't be any problems here," his friend and only neighbor replied while sipping a beer. After carrying a bunch of tools out to his truck several times, the West Virginian got in and started off down the road.
He listened to that song about a nameless horse and the one about being a passenger on a ride while going lalalalala over and over again on repeat until he got there. He only stopped on his way at a place a little north of Chattanooga that had antique weapons from the World Wars, wheeling a gaitling gun out the front door after getting the old man who owned the place to go back and look for a very specific coin in his coin collection. He ran it up into the back of his truck on a wooden ramp and drove out of there, then pulled over down the road and threw a black tarp over it quick before gunning it toward and on to the freeway down the near vertical slopes amidst holiday traffic.
A cop saw he had something under a tarp and hit his lights but it didn't matter; traffic was moving wall to wall at 90 miles an hour down the vertical slopes of the Smokey Mountains, and there wouldn't be a spot to pull over until Georgia. The cop didn't see his plate unless aerial checked for it and it'd show clearance for government work to not be interrupted. Atlanta metal detectors for guns would think it's on its way to a museum or an auction. But one was reported stolen in Tennessee earlier? That would be interesting enough to go over radio. He'd have to try clearing up the matter on his phone while driving, which was dangerous. He tried searching for what exits to take to dodge the metal detectors but there weren't any. He'd have to work quickly.
He drove straight into Atlanta to the window cleaning platform he scheduled. There were people using it, so he called their phone number pretending to be their boss, telling them to go to a different window cleaning job in a different part of town to get them to leave. They tried locking the platform up high and carrying a ladder away with him, but he flew his drone up to unlock and lower it. He slid the gaitlin gun down to the ground on the flat board of wood he used for a ramp earlier, with the tarp over the gaitling gun. He got it up onto the window cleaning platform, and began securing it and attaching the belt feed in from a black bucket. His swivel apparatus moved the barrels back and forth by attaching to a tow strap on the platform meant for raising or lowering buckets of tools up to or down from the ground, which he wired to make remote operated along with the firing of the gaitling gun and raising or lowering of the platform. A phone on the platform cable above the platform livestreamed video to his phone at street level showing him that he was correctly in position.
They were all entering the board room now according to footage on the camera in the hallway, making slight small talk about their favorite type of veal. Some looked suspicious at the platform cables momentarily, but didn't think anything of it. They had switched board rooms actually earlier in the day at the last minute, requiring him to order the window cleaning platform in a hurry for the new boardroom.
He waited for a rough headcount of 30, then started the show. The gaitling gun's barrels started rotating for a moment or two before opening fire, shredding the tarp apart like it was never there and ripping through the window panes (which were meant to be bullet and shatterproof) after half a second of bullets digging into it while forming big round white cracks. The pathetic window pane started to come off in chunks after that, as the gun swung side to side on the swivel. A trail of bulletholes snaked throughout the board room and through the group of weaselish shits who still had no clue what was going on, as such a foe had not been anticipated this many squares in advance or even expected to appear on this type of playing board entirely. When they realized in those mere seconds that they had been found out early, and that the only parties capable of retaliating in this way weren't playing by their rules and there was nothing they could do about it, they frowned like they were mad their suit got wet from someone activating the sprinkler system, and tried turning to run irritatingly out of the door. For those that made it back out into the hallway, it didn't matter, as the material that was supposed to form a wall between the boardroom and the hallway was disintegrating apart and offered no cover or avenue of escape. Miraculously, a group of half a dozen or so who managed to only have one or two of their limbs snap in half, and/or just get peppered in their gut now hanging out, scrambled to the elevator at the end of the hall, while those reduced to attempting to crawl along the floor behind them continuted to get ripped apart each time the trail of bullets happened to sweep over them every couple seconds. They frantically pressed the elevator buttons to no avail, trapped waiting for it to rise up a psychologically dissociating number of floors. Each time they heard the guttural noises made by the bodies being ripped apart behind them, they held their eyes tightly shut while gritting their teeth; their own grunting completely silent below the sound of the torrential gunfire that roared behind them.
Chapter 6: Hide and Seek at the Widow's Market
When Clark was 17 years old, after his father's funeral and the repossession of his father's house by the bank, Clark was tasked with moving all of his father's old furniture and belongings to a building nearby where they sold things previously owned by the deceased, called a 'widow's market'.
When he went inside the widows' market, Clark was taken in by how vast the place was; it was too dark to see the walls at the end of the building, and seemed to just be a big endless room of old furniture. The grim aesthetic of the place drew Clark in, who began wandering around.
With no where else to go, Clark came up with the idea of just staying somewhere in the widow's market until some of his dad's furniture sold. At night, after all the lights had been turned off in the building, Clark waited in hiding off to the far side of the room to turn an old lamp on he found an outlet for. The first night, he took tremendous care in making sure not to bump into anything in the dark as he made his way to the front of the building to look out the window and make sure the owner's car was gone.
Clark built an elaborate furniture fort to hide in. He hid under an old table up against the far wall of the building inbetween several wardrobes and an entertainment center. Facing the wall was a couch, with the table he hid under inbetween the couch and the wall. The couch had several tall wardrobes against the back of it, allowing him to remain out of sight while sitting or laying on it. If he heard someone start moving stuff out of the way, he got down under the table and went out the other way. He hadn't had to find a replacement piece of furniture yet for his fort's barrier walls over the weeks he had been living there.
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