Deviation Actions
Description
An excerpt.
The flat was a subterranean hollow, walls bedecked with music posters and neo-Marxist propaganda illumined by orange shafts from a basement window, -occasionally shadowed with the footsteps of midnight vagrants and patrolling DPD- and the pale electric wash of a robust computer. A tin of rattling fans and electric breedle, the lightning patter of fingers across a wide keyboard and the intermittent thrum of distant traffic. In the middle, surrounded by H0WLER energy drinks and old Chinese takeout, the bijou Chemel was neatly folded in her large office chair.
Her vivid eyes were on the screen, darting from code to neon green code fretfully. Fundamentally she knew she was safe, her security contingencies were impenetrable even to Shor's Algorithm. But the anxiety that a DPD might turn down her flat’s halls and break down her door was omnipresent as she scoured the quantum backlinks of the Iqbal Towers Ltd servers.
They used a lot of quantum keys, which wasn’t necessarily problematic but tedious to hack. One couldn’t generally breach a quantum key without being detected as the photon stream that the relevant information was secured on would detect any ‘noise’ where errors (or breaches) in the stream occurred. Some errors were inevitable, structurally, reducing one noise may expose another. Making a single stream 100% secure in a general operating system would be expensive and impractical, and so it was these errors that Chemel would exploit. She recognised the brand and structure of this system, and estimated a noisiness of some 15%, quite high for a modern quantum computer. Iqbal Towers Ltd obviously favoured their wallet over their security. If the breach constituted a noise below that 15% threshold, the servers wouldn’t be notified in anything but a general report whenever that was requisitioned.
She closed the window for a moment to look at her browser, some map from the Ministry for fish and boat people -or whatever it was called- beaming brightly. In the sidebar Dawud was yammering about yesterday’s protests and had been for 12 hours. Despite herself (hammer and sickle helix piercing, W.E.B Du Bois poster hanging above her, her cat named Xiaoping) she was not so enthused, and told him to take his pills and go to bed.
When Chemel returned to her work it was a fairly simple task of identifying the relevant photon stream, which proved easy as their keys were quite blatantly listed, likely by a lazy technician; folder:itlbp.imgs, itlbp.sec, itlbp.sec.cams. Thereafter she surged an interrelated system, that controlling the guest list, with a bundle of spam. The spam would be stopped at the gate, so to speak, but the disrupted stream would be rerouted through the same path as the itlbp.sec.cams stream for a nanosecond. She’d attached a net of low energy photons that would hopefully intercept the key, which passed by without consequence in the form of an # action:qptptpn:_. She tensed and waited. # action:qptptpn:retrieved. A sigh escaped her, an erstwhile stream of code appearing in her cipher that could be transliterated into a schematic later on.
She extended her long, pale legs and stood. She grabbed a can she’d almost forgotten and downed the remaining H0WLER, before turning away from the glare of her computer system and strolling towards the lumpy mess of her sheets. Upon it, a small phone barely visible in the dim bedroom. Chemel collected it, switched it on, and rang a number.
“Hey Owen, glad you’re still up. I got those schematics you wanted… yeah she was a bitch to crack, aha,” she slowly rotated as he replied, hand on hip, habitually surveying the indistinct shelves, posters and strewn clothes about the place. “Nah, just boring. I’ll tell you about it when you come over… yeah, tomorrow, after work? I’ll be here. Thanks man.” She hung up, and fell back onto her bed. Time for rest, the satisfying transmission of the retrieved data lulling her to sleep.
~
Though officially known as the 'Special Administrative Extraterritorial Division of Dayī of the Republic of Indonesia'(印尼共和大一特域外行政部), Dayī has long existed in a vacuum of international law. Whilst technically an island on lease from Indonesia to a coalition of interested nations headed by China[1], the Great Flummox of the 2040s[2] saw this coalition dissipate and the stakes of the lease pass to parties within the territory itself. As the lease is indefinite so long as repayments are constant, Dayī is for all intents and purposes independent[3].
Today, Dayī is a sprawling megacity of some (official) 16 million, 13.6 million of which are Citizens[4] and 2.4 million of which are Permanent Residents. This however, doesn't account for the swollen, illegal population centered on the southern side of Bridgehead, with some estimates putting their number as high as 3 million. Ruled by the Special Administrative Executive Diet, the legislative body constituted by the Dayī Treaty, governance is effectively corporatocratic in nature. As the state was devised as a haven of growth and innovation it seemed pertinent to give a voice to the businesses and institutions that would be operating within the city astride its residents, similar to the City of London. Companies have a set number of votes based on their net-worth and employment figures, and exist as a corollary to citizen votes. This means they wield a disproportionate level of influence over the Diet, with some 19 million votes against a population of 13.4 million eligible voters[5].
Herein the National Unity Coalition, a collection of business interests and consensus driven conservative citizens, have dominated the Diet since its inception. Their 75 MDs (Members of the Diet), together with the two-MD Professional Commons, form a government of over two thirds of the Diet's seats. Their leader, Xuang Gang, is a Machiavellian figure that has sat atop the ladder of Dayī politics for over a decade, and who is known for his personal asceticism and 'dark energy'[6]. Not so for the rest of the state's effective oligarchy, who venture from their Queenslanders in the wealthy suburb of Capricorn nestled in the valley between two of Mount Daik's peaks aboard personal quadrotors for masquerades, parties, and the odd super-rich orgy. A myriad bunch of Arab and Anglo investors, Chinese bureaucrats, East African private mariners and a berth of magnates; their unofficial face and darling of high society is Andrew Sieto, the eccentric CEO of the domineering SalCo, a recycling company that has forced domestic manufacturers and wholesalers through restrictive preferential tariffs to employ recycled goods at inflated prices[7].
A plurality of the state is composed of Chinese, closely followed by Malays, Anglos and Indonesians, with important minorities of Filipinos and Iranians. In the urban centres like Dayī, Portage and Equatoria these ethnicities are not so distinct and feature myriad other ethnicities such as Koreans and Dutch[8], however there are several circumscribed ethnic communities such as Chengmǎlai and Tebing (Malay and Indonesian, in those specific cases).
Religion is surprisingly prevalent across the city-state, with the largest religion, Islam, holding just shy of a majority at 48%. This is followed by Christianity (first Catholicism and then what is generally accepted as a combined Anglo-Lutheranism), irreligion, Buddhism and Chinese folk religions, with smaller numbers of Hindus, Zoroastrians, Afro and Asian native faiths. There are also a variety of cults, some technological in nature and others more base or pagan. Notable such faiths include the Cult of the Tenth Dimensional Church, the Cult of the Qomi Godhead, the Revelationists and the morbid Cult of the Partitioned Bull, the latter of which has been involved in numerous terrorist activities and thus outlawed.
The largest industry is information technology and telecommunications, although this can be hard to accurately surmise as almost every industry has an integrated component of IT. Modern statisticians have found statistics for tertiary education of particular use in estimating the number of what may be described as IT specialists, and herein the number of students within Dayī commencing a bachelor’s degree within the information technology and telecommunications sector is as high as 15.4%. This is followed by business, commerce and law at a combined 13.3%. As may be inferred, a majority of Dayī’s population is employed in the financial sector and thereafter the health service, bureaucracy, education, construction and media industries. Of note is the surprisingly large number of independent manufactories and engineering firms, with an estimated 260,000 firms in this sector based within Dayī. With the advent of modular and advanced manufacturing technologies, and the balkanization of personal electronic suppliers[9], among other developments, small scale manufactories have proliferated in subterranean workshops and cooperatives, and are a distinct feature of Dayī’s economic landscape, so much so that Shi Qū’s Zhongshanlù Street is famed for its conspicuous, open workshops full of phone-jackers and 3D printers.
There is also a surprisingly strong agri/aquacultural industry, due to vertical farming, meat cultivators (known locally as ‘breweries’), fisheries and industrial coral and algal blooms, among other things. This is a deliberate policy aimed at self-reliance, although Dayī still imports over 60% of all foodstuffs[10].
As a concession toward Indonesia, the Dayī Treaty explicitly outlaws the state from possessing an independent military. They do however possess a police force, the Dayī Police Department, the Customs Authority, the Internal Affairs Bureau, and various essential security forces under the purview of the Ministry for Civic Affairs and Border Protection. Despite the ban on a military, private contractors are not, per a judgment handed down by the Dayī Supreme Court in 2038[11]. Therefore, PMCs have flourished, particularly in a maritime capacity where a conglomerate of East African maritime security companies (Collectively known as Nenaunir Company) secured a 30-year monopoly on maritime security in Dayī’s territorial waters, and are headed by the charismatic Fadhili Ndegwa[12]. On land there is less use for them as the DPD has several armoured and exoskeletal[13] divisions, among other paramilitary units, but there is still a reserved unit, the Black Turtle Company, for land based operations. They’ve seen some deployment against the aforementioned Cult of the Partitioned Bull, particularly against their people smuggling operations.
Although there is an overarching ‘urban and neon’ theme to the city as independent development overtook that of the original benefactors, as it was originally subject to so many contracting parties Dayī is quite demonstrative of a variety of architectural styles. Predominating, particularly in those areas built by Beijing, is a dense and domineering skyline much like Hong Kong. Built as a commuter city, roads are sparse and most travel is done on foot or by train and tram, or by quadrotor for the upper and middle classes[14]. As such ‘Chinese Dayī’ is a sort of warren of tunnels, malls and super skyscrapers and is incredibly vertical, one could walk a mile in central Dayī without ever touching the ground. As such it is the goal of many young people much as New York was in decades past to live in one of these central tower complexes, the tallest of which is the 2-kilometre-tall Tiānshangti (Or ‘Heavenly Ladder’ 天上扶梯) Tower in what many consider the heart of Dayī.
Thereafter, in suburbs such as Fitzroy and Swan, Australian aesthetics win out. They too emphasize sustainable mass transport but less so the density, and there are many more boulevards, plazas, parks and indeed roads in those built by Melbournians and Brisbanites[15]. They also utilise a lot more wood, in this instance cross laminated timber, leading to a more pleasant and natural visage. Many middle and upper-class families live in these regions as a result. The richest live in the suburb of Capricorn, where some land within the valley between two of Daik Mountain’s three peaks was set aside. Covered in native trees and jungle, the forested hills are intermittently stamped with wide estates crowned with enormous Asian-fusion[16] Queenslanders.
Malaysian and Singaporean architecture is somewhere between the two, with enormous and dense structures made of CLT and greenery, Polak’s hanging gardens (662 metres to be specific) are famous for looking like a forest aloft the clouds.
Indonesia, as the primary initial benefactor, was as such assigned marginal districts to develop such as the east end of the island. They build quite similarly to China itself, but made a show of integrating canals into the superstructures of their tower blocks. For it Tebing is occasionally known as ‘Kanalkota’.
Finally, those areas developed by the UAE, Iran and Qatar are the lowest lying of skylines, such as Al-Nilam and Karaj, with an emphasis on public spaces, clean designs and gardens. However, many neighbourhoods are quite dense, with very wide (albeit flat) residential blocks occasionally punctuated with spiralling skyscrapers. Arguably the most artistically designed districts, although much of this has been dispirited as new developers build atop the older structures.
~
[1] - The coalition also included Australia, Korea, Indonesia itself, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Ceylon, the UAE, Qatar and Iran.
[2] - Worse than the GFC, better than the Great Depression, the Great Flummox is so named due to the mismanagement of China's FDI stock value. As global macroeconomic growth slowed from the boom of the 20s and 30s, folks started to wonder exactly how the value of Beijing's FDI stocks was to be maintained. When Ethiopia contracted there was a domino effect, a flight on that stock not helped by Beijing's own attempts to repossess the FDI in question on the misguided belief that they could manage it better then the market, and suddenly a whole lot of other economies recessed and China lost a lot of clout. Unfortunately for those same countries, this would only exacerbate existing problems with China's influence as in that flight China did in fact repossess many of the concerned assets, which included everything from dams to hospitals to government institutions.
[3] - This might seem like a bad deal for Indonesia due to the law of diminishing returns, repayments come in at ; but there had to be some kind of arrangement that gave the interested parties security against Indonesian repossession the moment the city became profitable. They didn't want a Hong Kong situation.
[4] - Technically all citizens are just permanent residents with voting rights and possess right of return to their respective countries by virtue of the Dayī Treaty that founded the place. Interestingly, former citizens of states that haven't signed the Treaty that don't permit dual citizenship are technically stateless.
[5] - The system is inherently unfair so long as corporations exist in Dayī, as the Electoral Commission begins their distribution with a flat count of all the businesses' employees that are residents of the state (so that a business of 40 people would have 40 votes, per se), before then adding atop that a number of votes based on the net worth of the business. I'm unsure how much it should be per vote so I'll need to do some research.
[6] - Visually, imagine Zhao Leji. I find his state to be arresting.
[7] - Being the bastard I am, I'm trying to subvert the optimism of recycling and environmentalism. Visually, this chipper guy seems appropriate.
[8] – Dutch are the new Kurds. Although they’re technically independent as the island of Amsterdam and the Netherlands’ Caribbean holdings have held out against the rising tide, there’s no way these collective territories could house all the 13 million or so refugees produced by rising flood waters. So they scattered, and many ended up in Asia.
[9] – Both thematic (can’t be copyright struck for a fictional company) and an actual prediction. I don’t think the big phone companies will have an oligopoly forever, particularly if any of them are nationalized in which case nations specifically opposed to the nationalizing state will emphasize domestic production. Herein, there was for a brief time a team working on modular electronics until they were bought out and dismantled by Apple. Wonder why that would be? >_>
[10] – Including organic meat, especially from Australia. Concerns over monoculture and GMOs, and resistance from countries that favour organic farming means that livestock is still a healthy industry, although is becoming increasingly rarefied and expensive so much so that the average impoverished Dayīnese will not have tasted organic meat. A cheeseburger would be a luxury.
[11] – Seen as a guarantor of business-friendly policies, the Dayī Supreme Court is surprisingly powerful although still subject to Parliamentary sovereignty. They’re a hybridized common-civil system; the common law wins out in overall structure -in that it is adversarial in nature- but the Courts may draw upon established civil codes and Judges are more powerful, being able to independently issue subpoenas and warrants on an evidentiary basis. Lawyers also draw on more academia than in other common law systems, meaning that a case may not necessarily be decided on the basis of precedent, although that remains persuasive.
[12] – Nenaunir Company is also one of the few bodies of government that are almost universally liked by the Dayīnese public, largely because they don’t have anything to do with beating up protesters, possess a great PR campaign, and are stringently disciplined to avoid controversies, which could see their contract renegged.
[13] – Exoskeletons are common in several industries, including construction and security, and as one might excitedly expect proto-mechs are on the rise(Including an illicit fighting ring). They’re strictly regulated, though, so possession of a mech is usually for commercial or governmental reasons.
[14] – Technological and infrastructural advances aside, this is why so many people can live in such a small area. That and the fact skyscrapers are now regularly breaching the 800-metre mark, with the tallest building in the world at just shy of 3.3 kilometres. (But I’ll let you imagine where that might be located)
[15] – I don’t believe Chinese people are inherently adjusted to denser living spaces, however ITTL China really wanted to be the biggest ethnicity in the state for political reasons and so championed dense conurbations to house millions of people.
[16] – White people.
