THE FUTURE Agghh! Part 9

Editor's note:
Greetings, READERS; from time to time, the editorial staff of this historicon will create a "4 Yor In4mation" Section, providing in depth looks at some of FSPUSAC history's most important battles and events. 4 Yor In4mation makes learning kool with brilliantly colored pictures, descriptive and inane violence, and shoddy moralism. And, at end of each special inset, we will make the future history relevant to the present now!
Thank you, and enjoy
The Editers

"4 Yor In4mation!"
The Battle of Snotty Ridge

In 2017, Washington DC* was a bad place to be. The national government had relocated to Salt Lake City, leaving the old capital to be ruled by the stubborn bureaucrats, who would not leave their ancestral home of marble and grandeur for some untried land of salt crystals and inefficient godliness. However, left to their own devices and without orders from a higher authority, the first two years of bureaucratic independence were troubled and vacuous. It was neither a democracy nor an oligarchy nor a monarchy. It was a "reflexocracy." This system is really very simple: a bureaucrat finds a paper with writing on it. He then organizes it into a complex and obscure filing system. The paper, while moving along its prescribed course of lesser bureaucrats, generates further papers, each reporting on the process by which the first paper was organized and filed away. Assuming an accidental paper loss rate of 0.01% and an average paper rate of 200,000 papers per day, 20 papers were lost every day. 12 of these were recovered daily, meaning that the entire government had to be run on a only one dozen paper filing/organization tasks. Over the course of one year, this number continued to fall (paper loss rates plummeted after the discovery of the Robotic PaperFinder 4000). By August 23, 2015 at 4:24 pm, there were no more paper filing tasks.

Panic broke out of the streets. Small, dysfunctional conglomerations of bureaucrats huddled in the streets, filing and cataloging every object they ran into, including human body parts. One tourist from the Empire of Japan noted

QUOTE ("Hiro Matutsuki")

"the streets were red with the blood of misfortunate passerbys who were swallowed up by those things. A man reading a newspaper was seized by a pack of desperate bureaucrats. He was quickly enveloped by them. First a cloud of tiny paper shreddings were expelled into the air and sorted by size and shape. And then a spray of red blood and human organs came forth, and all of it was organized anatomically. All of this, in only 5 seconds."

By the third day, the violence and chaos had subsided. By either an invisible law of science or will of a god, no one knows for sure, but the malfunctioning bureaucratic conglomerations organized into one interconnected sentient being. Its myriad human parts communicated with both bizarre clicking noises and by pinching. It was, in effect, a brain composed of those humans-like-things that we all know as "bureaucrats." One observer, a honey bee drone from Colony 3956-a-Ωψ of the Grand Confederation of American Colonies, noted the similarities between a bee hive and the HIVEMIND! of the bureaucrats.

QUOTE ("Drone 392Eξλ")

The whole thing possesses a distant and low roaring hum, like the sound of a honey bee hive. And, when one of its tendrils (which is composed of hundreds of bureaucrats holding hands in a line) picks up information from a computer screen or a hired informant, each component conveys the information through a series of binary code pinching. And so, the pinching spreads and soon the whole mass ripples with pinching and roars with clicking as it performs its calculations.

The new HIVEMIND! government set about standardizing everything in its domain. It did everything in a completely economical and logical manner. Any yet, it had one flaw; a computer does not operate a task without instructions. The HIVEMIND!, however, had a single misfiring component, a man formerly known as John Edwards who, after being discredited in party politics, turned to his former passion of filing papers. Once incorporated into the HIVEMIND!, however, his true insanity was released. He pinched everyone around him repeatedly with the signal "pinch...pinch.pinch...pinch.pinch...pinch...pinch.pinch...pinch...pinch...pinch," which actually is the Command 45f, colloquially known as conquertheworld.jsp

The HIVEMIND! sent out emissaries across the Eastern Seaboard. Raising armies of local librarians, clerks, receptionists, and archivists (they all knew the sign of Thoxonasz by heart, and so joined the movement without hesitation), the HIVEMIND! empire expanded its influence rapidly throughout the old southern states and the mid-atlantic. It organized all activities according to pure reason and simplicity. Whereas the Soviet Union could never run an economy effectively because of its lack of information, the HIVEMIND! knew all things and could make all calculations instantly; its web of informants and statisticians were the envy of the world; its might and power grew daily. Some resisted, by all were crushed under the weight of its mighty reason.

Life under HIVEMIND! was prosperous, somewhat rewarding, and professional. As a supremely logical entity, HIVEMIND! did not carry out government in any humanly conceivable manner. They had an understanding of human psychology and behavior (information which was transferred to it by Tribal Anthropologists) that resulted in nearly effortless control of the populace. For instance, there was no taxation whatsoever, but all clothing had numerous fuzzy pockets into which people were tempted to deposit their money. The pockets, however, had holes in them. The falling currency did not make sounds upon the new sound-proof pavement, and so legions of "scattered coin collectors" passed through the streets, collecting government revenue.

Government services, too, were strangely yet effectively managed. There was free health care, free gasoline, and free infrastructure. However, many residents would receive fabulous flashing letters in the mail once every month. Surprised and intrigued, they would open the letter to find a beautifully "hand-written" note saying something like: "Congratulations! You have won a FREE chance to participate in PUBLIC SERVICES! You are a winner! You only one of thousands who has the RIGHT to pay for your hospital visits! You are special! Sign here ____________ to WIN! Sincerely yours, HIVEMIND." Flattered and feeling a greater sense of self esteem, the citizen would duly pay the price tag for 39 other citizen's government subsidies. Or, a dark, sad letter would arrive saying "We apologize. It is not our fault. Sorry. We regret to inform you that you will not get to pay taxes this year. I know how it must feel. The crushing gloom pressing in all around you. If you sign here __________, though, you will have a chance to make this right, to pay taxes, to b a good citizen. Thank you, HIVEMIND." Thus, few even noticed HIVEMIND!'s presence; true, many leading intellectuals were absorbed into its ever-growing mass of components; true, massive "nerve chords" of people holding hands stretched across the empire; true, it sort of seemed like everyone was looking and acting like drones. But this was hardly evident to those living within HIVEMIND!. Little did they know, they would all soon be as bees in a hive (or ants in a hive).

By late 2016, the government of Trixie in Salt Lake City recognized the growing threat in the East. It sent Mitt Romney, now a slave to the radical Mormon Feminists, to raise resistance to HIVEMIND!. Starting in his old state of Massachusetts, he had initial success in organizing the disparate city-states to the banner of resistance, but he was soon expelled when the residents discovered his new stance on gay marriage. Meanwhile, the HIVEMIND! Imperium spread north and west. It became entrenched in the Appalachians within great mountain fortresses and secret lairs deep beneath the hills. In the North, the city of New York, which had briefly enjoyed a period of regional dominance over the former New York state and all of New Jersey, was put to a devastating siege. Eventually, the entire Hudson river was diverted into a massive system of hydro-electric dams and defense canals that stretched over the HIVEMIND! empire. With the river out of the way, the city's defenses were shattered; in two months, the city surrendered.

Romney knew that time was of the essence. Moving to New Hamshire, he rallied the local Libertarian movement, emphasizing how the ruthless HIVEMIND! would destroy local freedom and absorb all into the fold of petty bureaucracy. In truth, however, HIVEMIND! brought mostly prosperity to its peoples. It allowed free speech, although those who spoke too loudly were sent away to "Prolonged Speech Chambers," large metal boxes in which they could speech freely while being fed gourmet protein sludge. This, however, did not matter to Romney. He was rechristened "Babar the Brave, the Twelfth of his Name" by his Libertarian followers. Soon, they launched a series of night-time raids against HIVEMIND!. One struck all the way into West Virginia. During these excursions, they collected important intelligence about the HIVEMIND system and military organization. HIVEMIND, meanwhile, sent wave after wave of viscous rodents and cranky foxes into the North. There, the animals damaged private property and became an intolerable nuisance.

With the stakes raised, Babar decided to start a more serious campaign. Calling it "operation Mawkaw," he and his freedom-loving friends set out to sweep clean the Appalachians from HIVEMIND! control. In November 34** 2017, the Libertarian armies, having swept all scattered resistance before them, were camped on the Panchusset Mountain when a massive HIVEMIND! army was spotted in the distance. One small-town simple country farmer in the Libertarian army said,

QUOTE ("Taber Shibly")

It was as though the entire valley was a sea glistening in the morning light. The vast expanse was covered in shining hypo-metalic sulfuric acid guns, and, in the East, the orange of the sun shone eerily across the heavens, as though the HIVEMIND could influence the weather itself

Indeed, the HIVEMIND! could control the weather to a limited extent. Earlier, it sprinkled Silver Nitrate crystals into several large clouds in the region, hoping to unleash a devastating rainstorm upon Babar and his men. Unfortunately, the cloud was just a ploy, and it exploded into harmless mist, making the morning sky appear orange. However, during that year, a disease known a "Yukki Nose" spread through the US; it causes snot and other nasal secretions to appear orange and was spread by Eskimo kissing. Thus, when the combatants saw that characteristic orange light on the horizon, they immediately declared the event "The Battle of Snotty Ridge."

In the end, the battle was a draw, but it set in motion five years of bloody war between bureaucrat and libertarian, white collar and blue collar, intellectual and imbecile. The nature of these "Liberterio-Bureaucrat" wars will be described in further detail at a later date.

*Note: DC was briefly renamed "Olde Pride" by the Radical Nostalgia Party," which demanded mandatory sentimentalization of history in schools
**Note: In 2015, a powerful faction of Mormons demanded the annihilation of March, because such a change would allow their prediction of the day of Armageddon to fall of a Sunday. Thus, the other eleven months gained between two and five new days. February was finally normalized.

(OP: Ben, August 31 2008)