Law Enforcement

2033 February 28 05:33 UT
Test Year 6, Day 67, 6:00 MST
Tau, MIT, Office of Julian Marriner

Even with the lack of violence and the slow and orderly progression of life, there were of course serious problems to plague the two ad hoc Techer governments. The basement of one building at MIT had been turned into a drug den. Organic chemistry was a science well advanced among the Techers, and long ago a room in Caltech’s Lloyd House had been the source of half the LSD in the western United States until the residents had fled to Mexico. But here the drugs were simply for domestic consumption. There were synthetic opiates and meth cooked up with liberated medical equipment and refined hallucinogenics from various vegetable sources. It was a distressingly popular recreation for a fraction of Techers. Townsend had had to aid in the establishment of an AA group to help deal with former customers, or rather former users, since the den had no central operator and did not conduct any negotiations in smoots.

For over a year after the end of the Failure War, Townsend and Marriner had not done much to actively prevent or stop the drug lab. They had focused on stopping alcohol abuse, and also on motivating the population. When they were starving and at the point of a gun, everyone had worked as hard as they were able. But when the Failures had been removed from power, and almost all of them were either dead or penitent, and after the first set of crops had come in, laziness and slacking off had started to have appeal again for a significant fraction of the population – again, almost entirely among those who had no children.

Most worked as hard as they were able, but about ten percent worked as dead weight. They did the minimum necessary to get their stipend and spent the rest of their time within a small, usually male, circle of friends that spoke in a closed dialect. These circles indulged in their favored recreations, be those alcohol, the old pornography that lurked on certain hard drives, playing Starcraft II ad infinitum, or in a number of cases, playing with neurochemistry. All of the people needed to be motivated again, without putting them through even more trauma or applying any form of coercion. And so, since there were so few users relative to other addictions, the drug den sat there, and a number of Techers did permanent damage to their bodies and brains.

Then there was a death. A child tasted the tablets that resembled candy in a dish in the room of a fictive uncle and overdosed on barbiturate. Delbert launched a Revere Company raid on the den, attendance at the AA group greatly increased, and any remaining experimental pharmacology was conducted very quietly and out of view.

Now Townsend and Hildenstoy had joined Julian and the captain in the first oligarch’s conference in several months. They all still carried varying amounts of guilt and blame for what they had done before and in the Failure War. Will was on the conference circuit. The Star Chamber was meeting again.

Delbert had lost patience with the oligarchs and their careful influencing of the Techer population, and justified his intervention against the drug den hotly. “Would you prefer that I institute military rule? Your little council chamber can’t handle the job of government. You failed with Chao. I think this meets all the requirements for a state of emergency, and the US legal code lets me impose military rule until I’m satisfied that it has passed.”

“We’re going to need a government – a civilian government.” Julian spoke quietly and calmly, indicating that he’d thought all this through. Noticing the beginning of a smile on Townsend’s face, “Skip the Battlestar Galactica jokes. But I’m serious here: we need something more formal than this superposition of student councils, military cadets, and alien-educated masters of all trades. We probably should have set up such a thing far sooner, but the chaos of the first year, the war, the daily burdens of the populace asking for the trained’s help … Never mind.” He caught himself before lapsing into self-pity and continued.

“There needs to be transparency, cooperation, some level of executive authority that is counterbalanced by accountability. I grant that Adam has legitimate authority as a member-in-training of the United States military, but he was a cadet, not a general. So make him the chief of police or whatever, but we need an executive. And it has to be a global government, or there may come a time when Caltech has their own version of Chao.”

“Are we to be citizens of the United States, then? It seems a little foolish – they’re twelve lightyears away. I certainly won’t be filing a tax return. The IRS can come up here and get the money. Besides, I’ve got no income in an established currency. We’ve all been legally dead for an awfully long time.” Kathryn gave the impression of readiness even as she leaned back on a sofa and anticipated Delbert’s proposal.

Marriner kept his train of thought. “I wasn’t suggesting that we declare ourselves Americans, although we do all meet the requirements for citizenship. It wouldn’t make any sense for us to declare ourselves the fifty-first state of the union, anymore than it makes sense for us to become an autonomous region of the People’s Republic. But the cadets, most of them anyway, aren’t going to give up their service, at least not now. So they’ll act like military or police anyway.

“But for the rest of us, I don’t see too much of an alternative to something like representative democracy. Just as long as everyone has a voice. So, who gets to be in charge, how are they accountable, and how long do they have the job?”

He had seen clearly. The oligarchs argued for many hours, but by the end of the meeting the Star Chamber had disbanded itself. Its last product was the plan for a global Techer government. With trained persuasiveness, they would change the ad hoc government into something more stable. It would mean political parties and campaigning, but that beat the fallibility and small groupthink of the oligarchs, as skilled as they might be.