From:

The Testimonies of an Enumerator …….

Ring a ring of roses
All fall down
One down, two down
All onto our noses.

Theme refrain for Corinth Starr the elder’s
Media campaign

[The random reader is reminded that this episode is part of a 19 part series, leading into 200 part series. It is a faithful interpretation of a series of textual documents discovered by a geological survey party who were prospecting for Olivine on the planet Urdos, in the !Kung region of the multiverse. The text is produced faithfully with comment where appropriate for clarification purposes. The reader is also reminded that information about Urdos is limited, for until the discovery of the “Testimonies of an enumerator” and a number of other associated texts including the book of Koz, it was believed that the planet was dead and that all incarnate beings thereon had vanished or more importantly had never existed.

The reader is also reminded that the Testimonies” which set out a series of “legends of auld Azania” seem to deal with a culminating event known as the Apocalypse, and what happened afterwards. Information, derived mainly from the book of Koz, will be provided to supplement the story where appropriate.]


…………………
Our story continues….

No one knows for certain what took place on that 23/11 moment. The idea of dominoes dominated the thinking of the world up until that point; and so it is widely believed that the suicidal struggle between the forces of unreason that had become uppermost in the polities of both the Grimmderians and the Grabbastanians “ set the bell ringing”. According to a popular song at the time, appropriated (with suitable compensation) by Corinth Starr the elder for her post electoral victory campaign, a campaign aimed at mobilising the entire part of the electorate that supported her, to move at full speed towards achieving the transformational objectives of her mandate, it was.

“Ring a ring of roses, all fall down, one down, two down, all onto our noses´.

What is known is that on 23/11 a culminating set of events took place: an island blew up to the northwest of the main bulge on the Azanian mainland sending powerful waves, the height of small hills, sweeping across the ocean towards the Firmian mainland.

Firmia was at the time experiencing its worst winter on record: snowfall and blizzards had disrupted communications that in those days were still heavily dependent on fragile infrastructures: and those infrastructures had also been neglected over time. When the wave hit the famous city of New York where the 9/11 incidents had taken place they were still higher than 30 peeple standing on each other’s shoulders and what they didn’t level on their way in they dragged out on their way back to their more usual habitat.

Coinciding with this, it seems, the entire western coastline of Firmia or the region south of Firmia fell into the ocean. How this happened is unclear since it was not supposed to be able to happen. It was speculated by peeple, known as ‘experts’, that the ‘ringing of the bell’ had been resounding, since the war between the Grimmdeers and the Grabbastanians and that this had triggered off what was known as “The Jeriko effect”. It is possible that the ringing accelerated a series of natural settling processes as the planet cooled and ebbed.

Therefore within days of the first disaster another struck Firmia.
One of the Firmian powerhouse regions on the western side of Firmia was reduced to nothing. The effect of this was as cataclysmic as the earlier island explosion had been; save that the wave was higher and the distance it travelled was not far enough to bring down that height to any great extent. A so-called 70-metre wave swept across the island of Keiiretsu and devastated the mainland beyond.

According to a headline at that time it was a day that: “the earth stopped”. .

Fortunately for Corinth Starr she had just borrowed an immense sum from the Keiiretsu, to finance the digital infrastructural requirements for the implementation of the Basic Pay system. Even more importantly, due to the extremely complex nature of the software infrastructure, that would be needed, she had imported some two thousand top-level technical specialists. These were specialists in advanced robotics, quantum physics and binary programming, amongst other things, to facilitate at an immense conference, organised to clarify how the program would be constructed and would function and to set up the basic processing structures to enable the whole system to be coordinated into the lives of the citizen..

It was the most complex neurologically structured Binary programmed model that had ever been conceived at that time and had the purpose of facilitating the complete monitoring of all citizens at all times.

“Big Brother looms” ran one major headline of the time.

Because of the threat to civil rights proposed by any monitoring system, this one was designed with multiple failsafe mechanisms built-in. These took the form of legally structured barriers in the form of procedural requirements, to protect at all times the civil rights of all citizens. The purpose of the neural programming was to enable the entire system to be self- managed and regulated with the end purpose being to have no human* intervention at all.

The prophets of unreason proclaimed loudly that her scheme was inspired by those who would enslave peeple and introduce 1000 years of terror into the lives of citizen. They proclamed that the number 666 was going to be stamped on everyone’s foreheads and so some enterprising person patented the number conmbination and the prophets of unreason had to pay a fee everytime they used the number. There was huge litigation with many claiming that the number was already copyright protected through being referenced in a fabled book of wisdom. Others countered that the copyright had expired and the number was now open game.

Whatever.In response she ordered that the news media companies reveal the hell that peeple already lived under…”Is this the truth that you would sooner have than the space that comes from mature control”, she demanded. The prophets of unreason proclaimed the world to be in its ‘end days” and mounted increasing pressure against her.

Corinth Starr was close to reaching the end of her tether. She had been in power for two and a half years and her campaign on the rape front had been amazingly successful, especially her use of the Virtuality game. Paranoia about the virtual;ity game was the stuff of urban legend.*[*Urban legend: we do not understand the meaning of this term. we assume it to imply uncertainty about some subject matter. Contributor.]

However civil right activists were hounding her. There was a drawn out legal issue pending at the Constitutional court that sought to forbid the use of the Virtuality game for criminal control. The grounds were that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. As a populist she knew that the people considered tearing rapists apart, limb from limb, may just about constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Compared to that the Virtuality game was an emotional holiday. Her case was ready but she nonetheless sought by every means to deflect it and somehow had managed to keep it at the low end of the Court lists.It was a mandatory political strategy perfected by her predecessors*.[*We have no comprehensive information on her predecessors and Koz refers to such insinuations as being possibly unfounded allegations. Contributor.]

Nonetheless while people were reasonably placated by the arrest of thousands of alleged rapists the fact that they were only allegations, and that the Basic Pay issue was still an unfulfilled promise was putting her under immense pressure. So she had set January 2013 as the day the Basic Pay programme would launch, with intention to encompass every citizen by late 2014 [in time for the next election, which she duly won with an enhanced majority.] .

We shall launch “come hell or high water” she announced, little realising how prophetic those words were.

She had her team in place and was handling the more recalcitrant and, obviously about to be sidelined, existing bureaucrat class, with what a peeple at the time called “Ball ripping malevolence.” [? Contr:]The conference was scheduled for the week before a traditional feast period, which she had decided to forgo in the interests of launching the entire package by her, self-proclaimed, deadline some two weeks later at the start of the New Year*. [ New Year: Refers to an infinitely repetitive, iterative, numerator defining the passage of universe and all its inhabitants. The Multiverse as you would know refers to a multi – time passage.] of The urgency with which her teams were working was unprecedented and there were many who said later that she must have known what was going to happen.

For instance she had imported a similar block of multi-national genius level technicians into Zone One, six months before her election victory, to implement a scheme to run the Virtuality shows. It was her intention to commercialise the Virtuality games in order to preempt the accusation that the game constituted cruel and unusual punishment by making it a popular sport.

This was how she intended to solve the various difficulties associated with the plagues, these were Starr’s answer to the “Feelies” conceptualised by a philosophic writer called Huxley* ages earlier. [* We have no information about this person… Contributor.]

An unprecedented battering of storms and bad weather throughout the northern part of the planet had prevented most of the Outlanders from returning to their respective homes, after the conference ended, and so most were still in Zone One in Southern Azania when the island of Keiiretsu was almost entirely destroyed. One of the survivors was the Keiiretsun Prime Minister and what he did next changed the existing world forever.

The Firmians were bankrupted. That was what happened next. The Prime Minister of Keiiretsu called up his markers and the Firmians who had been debt financing their economy for more than half a lifetime were unable to sustain the run on their currency, especially when the CHI-nans panicked and cashed in their massive bankroll. Their economy collapsed and together with the loss of a major part of their modern infrastructure the country ground to a halt for a number of years. Firmia closed itself off to the world and the world effectively closed down.

It ground to a halt, with massive declines in trade and travel, and huge amounts of resources going into recovery. The world that emerged from that chaos was different to any world that had ever existed before.

Meanwhile Corinth Starr the elder found her debt rescinded by the grateful Keiiretsuns and she was able to focus her total attention on dealing with Southern Azania’s own difficulties. She took the credits she had acquired almost by mischance, converted them to one-century bonds and issued them as low interest investment instruments and trebled the amount of cash she needed to implement her plan. The media made a huge fuss of her coup and it provided a bright moment in an otherwise scary world scenario.

And scary was an understatement. The crisis was immense. Joblessness affected half of all potentially employable citizens. Considerable numbers were affected by the plagues that had become more virulent over the intervening time since the era of the dispossession. There were certain places where violent and lawless behaviour had the upper hand and there were places where it didn’t. As mentioned previously the violent assault upon the bodies of peeple, called rape, which had been at pandemic proportions was still barely under control. The decline of rural life had accelerated, great urban presences in the form of so-called ‘informal dwellings’ congregated alongside the major linking toll roads. All other road connections returned to the primitive and at times were impassable. Poverty and drunkenness were endemic. The collapse in trade rendered workless many more swathes of peeple.

The vast estates of earlier times that had produced huge amounts of food had largely disappeared and been replaced with micro holdings which barely supported the holding itself and an aggravating factor was growing soil exhaustion. Further north in the land of the Rumbabweans attempts were made to reconstitute the former large-scale holdings under the more fragmented ownership patterns prevailing following forcible redistribution of the land at the turn of the century.

Experimental production methods with multiple owners attempting to produce genetically modified foods were not successful and thus the entire region had become chronically food dependant on food from external, mainly of Firmian origin. After the catastrophe of 23/11 this food delivery stopped and many peeple were unable to get food and this accelerated the movement towards urban solutions. Millions died of starvation and the violence associated with desperate poverty.

The most successful solutions were the so-called ‘five towers’ in northwest Zone one, the first of which had been built almost in ridicule by Starr’s construction company in the years prior to her accession to power. The Towers solution gave Zone one an edge and was why Southern Azania held then, and later why Zone one held when the world came close to dying after 10/1.

What were the positives? Knowledge, controlled water resources, the solar towers, a stable state, a soundly based and diversified economy and a policing system that at core became highly effective, even if it creaked badly under the strain of dealing with an excessively unruly society.

When you start some series of actions it is often best to open the way you intend to proceed. Those who would force others to adhere to their views, no matter how arcane may choose to open with violence. Those who seek to lead others with a gentler bit toward to a different grazing place may choose to open with negotiation.

Corinth Starr the elder took the view that the coupling of peeple into the lascivious contorted entanglements necessary often to ensure either congenial mutually satisfying penetration was an inherently threatening circumstance, fraught with the potential for violence

As a pragmatist supreme she acknowledged that this coupling was the basic drive that kept peeple motivated to do the tasks that beset them in their daily lives. It was also the source of the plague.

In the days of her young impressionable studenthood she had read the great novels of her time and had been particularly intrigued by some contrivance invented by the writer Aldous Huxley, called the ‘Feelies’. It seemed that the ‘Feelies’ were places that allowed for the more recreational aspects of the coupling process and separated it from the purely reproductive.

In her later pre-political years working as a construction cost analyst she had facilitated the development of virtual reality building models. She would use these to enable her and her workers to quantify the use of materials more effectively in order to maintain a profitable route to the success of her construction mission. As a result she had created one of Azania’s most formidable rising construction companies and had been responsible for many roads and bridges not to mention sky-scraping buildings of enormous height, such as the ‘five towers’ project.. She had also learned how to rattle her competition and stay one step ahead of the ‘rat pack’ as she called them.

Somewhere along the way she had been raped and had had to suffer the rage and horror of taking brutally primitive anti-plague measures to ward off what she had seen as a terroristic assault on her, and her threatening ability. Plus she had to deal with the rage at the assault itself.

Her experience changed her and sent her plunging into a world of confrontational activism only to find herself the subject of polite condescension and not a little fear. She prepared for the future with care and hired persons to develop virtual reality models that would act as ‘paralysing’ agents; nullifying the overwhelming drive to engage in recreational coupling through provision of a solo experience of such apparent reality that it became better than the real thing could ever be. And then she was going to lock bad people into it for life. This was the genesis of the “Virtuality Game©”.

Dealing with this issue involved charging into the most delicately problematic zone of peeple’s behaviour. Satisfying the urge to couple or treble or engage in larger multiples of interconnectedness was the drive that saturated the entire ethos of those places that were more successful at satisfying the wants and needs of peeple generally.

Those regions of the planet that were controlled by ideological philosophies derived from contrarian attitudes, to the coupling process, had huge problems accepting that ‘such things’ relevant to inter-penetrative behaviour occurred naturally and focused their citizen’s attention on the less salubrious elements of the actions. They placed terrible and almost insurmountable barriers into the imaginations of their subjects against enthusiastic coupling and created mental distortions that were ultimately bad for general societal well being.

It was not a subject that could be discussed politely at all, since any discussion always carried sub-textual implications of either: desire to couple, or rejection of coupling desire, and no one ever knew where they were, with consequent misunderstanding and unhappiness. It was frequently observed that “in the absence of truth, people read between the lines and since no one acknowledged the lines the result was always misunderstanding.”

It was such a misunderstanding that had been the cause of her own rape and she formulated the view that it was the absence of clarity regarding the subtext that was the problem, rather than the act itself, which while violent and abusive had nonetheless caused her body to betray her, by triggering off responses she would normally have felt only under conditions of far greater pleasure. This had compounded her rage.

She had felt violated by her own body, and subsequently by the system with which she had had to deal after the event, and which had at every stage carried with it the implications that she had somehow “asked for it”. She resolved that something about the process of so-called ‘courtship behaviour’ had to change if all citizens were to achieve happiness, That No had to mean No unless expressly revoked. A world in which No could be made to mean anything was intolerable and oppressive.

Now that she had achieved power through the combination of Basic Pay and the Gender Agenda she knew that were she to achieve anything positive she had to move with breathtaking speed and structured terror. There was no other way. The preferred process of negotiation and respect for the ‘process’, as the endless rounds of nugatory ineffectual negotiations was called, caused delays that were proving fatal. The planet was increasingly beset by violence and rage, inflicted by sub-sets of citizens with unmet aspirations and agendas, many of which involved destroying the material basis on which society’s well being rested: mindless acts predicated on the belief that “if I can’t have it no one can”.

Starr’s vision involved the idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number and if that meant cutting a few corners, then she would have to do it she decided. She knew that she had a brief window before the nullifying, numbing batterings of democratic negotiation would set in and compromise her vision until all those vested interests most threatened by her success would bring their inexorable pressure to bear and corrupt her ‘missionaries’ positions.

She had a limited tolerance for the weaknesses of her subordinates, and in her construction company had developed ranges of criteria, against which to evaluate the entire costing processes of her activities, in order to weed out corrupt practices and attempts to use influence to enrich the unworthy.

She figured that she had at best six months, maybe four before the ‘honeymoon’ would be over as it were and the dagger’s she had so brutally experienced before would be out and plunged well into her exposed positions.

So her first move was the Rape Genocide declaration and the acceptance of this measure by unanimous consent…in the words of some commentators: with indulgence, from those who thought her a hormonally imbalanced person. She realised that her will could only be achieved by the supplementary facilitation provided by her proposed Contractual Relations Act.

Then she announced almost, casually, after passage of the successful negotiation of the Rape Genocide decision, that investigations of “rape’ cases would be carried out under the provisions of the Terrorism act, which up until then had been rarely evoked. It now became a wholesale mandate and those who were arrested found themselves plunged underground into a reality that was pure horror in its deprivation and virtual reality pleasure, in its use of technology to nullify the will….

To be continued….