Munjez is in the ICU. He’s stable but he had to be moved quickly. Evidently an alarm had come off in the room.

Now she was sure that she had a whole habitat to contend with and the people who were not fully onboard with this were too scared to do anything about it. That’s why Vic had to plot in secret, to be able to deploy the kind of violence that these people had only read about in the history books.

But they had taken her baby and that was a mistake.

She got to the ICU and she tried displaying some violence of her own. She was learning, but not fast enough. The people there didn’t seem too concerned and kept her at bay.

A tall woman they called Dotty (her neuromorphics showed her name as Надежда) came out and told her about what happened, why they had taken Munjez without letting her know, but they were about to…

OK, Dotty. I understand. You are not going to give me Munjez unless Vic tells you to. That’s if he’s even here.

Oh, he's here. Right behind that door.

Right. Sure. Then, what, I’ll go back to my quarters and wait until you tell me it’s visiting hours? Are you sure you won’t have trouble contacting me this time. And with that, she turned around without waiting for the made up response.

When she got back to her quarters, she wasn’t sure what to do, where to start. Kiki was right, she should not have come. Come to think of it, Vic’s no show routine probably was a trap to get her to come with the baby.

Leaving

Sammie decided to go back to the Minor habitat. She had more resources there and would not be under constant surveillance. She hated to leave Munjez behind but she knew that he would be safe. He would miss her, like already missed Kiki, and would be inconsolable for a while but Vic would make sure he is safe. She would not have been so sure before, but the look on Vic’s face when he first saw him told she didn’t have to worry about that.

It didn’t take her long to pack what little she had brought. Then she went straight to the dock. As she got close to it, she saw, what… a guard? He was big but young, around 20 terran years. He intercepted her.

I am going to leave. Are you really going to block me?

The guy looked nervous. Did you decompress?

What… Look, I am not going in a suit, I am leaving in my fully pressurized ship. Are you the dock lead? Why are you outside the dock? What’s going on?

Sorry, but I am afraid you can’t leave.

And why would that be?

Your ship reported it needed repairs. It took us a day to print the parts. We’ll have them ready by morning and it will be repaired then.

While the fellow was talking, she tried to check the logs, but they were blocked or something and she could not get to them. She knew it was a pretty transparent charade to keep her from leaving, but she was so, so pissed off.

Now I can’t get to my ship’s logs. Was that one of the things that was broken, it couldn’t keep logs? If so, how did you find out that it needed repairs, a signal from Alpha Centauri? A flash of light from…

The Boss told us that the ship needed new parts and what they were.

So Vic imposed a blackout on my ship’s log, unilaterally. None of you questioned that, and now…

She had enough. She smiled at the guy and walked away. And as she did, she sent out a habitat-wide message calling for a feedback session, in an hour, in the multipurpose hall. That was just about enough time for her to calm down. By the time she reached the hall, she was centered and ready to get to the bottom of this. Except no one showed.

Not. A. One.

A girl of around 15 showed up a few minutes after the hour and hesitantly told her that Vic would talk to her later, after dinner. And what time would that be? But she was already out.

OK. So she couldn’t leave the habitat and Vic wanted to piss her off. He obviously had control over the one, but she had control over the other.

Later, while she was still eating, Vic reached out to her in Mod space. Sammie kept eating off the Anchortron. Nonetheless, she could hear Vic via her neuromorphics. He was trying to explain what was going on and why they had to do it in secrecy.

Fear is a natural feeling and a little bit of it goes a long way. We’ve developed into a society where fear is feared and that has robbed us of our humanity. We are too comfortable.

She walked on the Anchortron and said, You decided that.

Yes, I did. And a lot of people agreed with me. Well, a lot of Major people. If we were to have these discussions in public, outsiders would not understand and would rush to help root out the ‘oh so evil’ fear. He gesticulated wildly as he said that. He stopped and put on a serious face, By the way, we don’t have feedback sessions anymore and that’s why I sent Adah to warn you that nobody would come. Then he corrected himself, Well, to be precise, not everybody can call a feedback session just like that any more. They are wasteful and steal people of their essence. We have specialists hold centering sessions. And, don’t worry, they are done in triads.

I bet the third person in the triad is one of your specialists-in-training or whatever you call your converts.

In spite of your colorful and melodramatic use of words, yes, the other person in the triad could be somebody who wants to learn how to do it, how to hold these therapeutic sessions. But it could be anybody.

Got it. So the question for you, Vic dear, must be how to scale this process, right? How are you going to instill fear in people outside your personal reach? You are not planning to use the Mods for this, right? She continued to answer her own rhetorical question, No, this is too dependent on Vic’s face-to-face magic touch. And, besides, the whole thing would crumble if you had to explain it to non-believers, what you called outsiders, who would ask real questions. You need people who already have an overabundance of fear, including the fear to reach out to others, and then you convert them one at a time. So your next challenge has to be how to scale your, dare I say, successful experiment and put the fear of the universe into a lot of people at once. Then she smiled and said, Jeez, you are already working on it, aren’t you Vic?

She paused and tilted her head, Vic, I think I should apologize. I didn’t know that my pregnancy was going to upset your body chemistry so much that you were going to go full on narcissist.

Vic smiled, but he was very angry. He hesitated for a second but ‘angry’ won out and he walked out of the space, behind a crypto wall. Go sulk, Vic.

Mean Mood Mod

She had been celebrating her 20th birthday, alone, by hopping from one Mod to another aimlessly, following the wind. She was definitely in a bad mood, a mean bad mood. Vic was intent on not letting her leave the habitat: first, he had kidnapped Munjez and then he had kidnapped her transport which was being repaired. What’s next? she wondered, Is somebody going to tell me that the Galanet stopped working? Ha!

In a sudden panic, she checked. And it had, almost

Her dad’s Mod… disappeared? That was the equivalent of murdering Weber Bellamy! The only thing she could find was the references to his work. Those were all there, but nothing else. His avatar was pretty much generic and his personality, his voice, everything else was gone!

As she was starting to choke up, she had a panicked thought and she looked for her grandfather and… Max Bellamy’s Mod, too, was completely gone. At first she thought it was the part that overlapped her dad’s Mod, but she looked and looked and he was completely gone.

Over the next couple of days she tried the possible places the data could be. She even looked by hand because she didn’t feel she could trust the Worms any more. He was disappeared completely and thoroughly. And it was the equivalent of murder because they had to also take out anything, and anybody, that was adjacent to him.

She wanted to cry, but she didn’t want to give Vic and his minions the satisfaction. No matter, she let go and cried her eyes out. She never expected this level of violence.

When she woke up the next cycle she seemed calm. She went about her usual routine and after finishing breakfast, she wasted her time at the Anchortron.

She went back and forth from one Mod to the next in what seemed like aimless motion, like someone in mourning, grieving. As she whiled away, the Worms reported an interesting cache of flat documents. Did she want to sculpt a Mod out of them? Sure, why not, what else is there to do? The Worms estimated it would take a couple of hours. So Sammie stepped out of the Anchortron and took a limpieza, as the folks of Caribbean heritage jovially called the micro-shower.

She was smiling inside as she took off her night clothes and went for her limpieza. She didn’t have to worry about these Worms because they were armored against interference. They would react like normal Worms, but they would refuse the interference, and, more importantly, they would not report it to anybody except her.

She came back from the limpieza feeling clean in more ways than one. Then she stepped into the Mod and the world stood still for her: those flat documents and the Mod that emerged from them were about her great-great-grandmother. She didn’t realize that she was holding her breath until she had to let go. She knew she didn’t have long before somebody would figure out that she was hearing something that the Mod was not broadcasting.

As she listened to her great-great-grandmother her head filled up with ideas, each crazier than the next. She spent hours talking with her and by the end of it she knew how to turn back this Fiat wave. Unwittingly, they had forced her to take the time to understand it all and as a result she was now ready to cause a commotion.

She had spent her whole life avoiding the hoopla and attention that came with being First of Earth but now she was going to do the opposite. She was going to use it as a loudspeaker.

Hanne Nader

Her Mod of Max Bellamy and the flat data it came from was made useless and there were no traces of who or how it was done. She asked Vic for help, but even he couldn’t figure out how they got into Sammie’s accounts and then managed to wipe all the data and its entangled backups spread up as they were all over the Solar system. For all intents and purposes somebody had murdered her grandfather.

This was the equivalent of losing all your mementos in a fire. She could reconstruct some of it from her logs and her own memories but that would take a long time and the results would not really be useful or reliable.

Out of frustration she reconstructed enough of her great-grandfather scattered data. There wasn’t much about him, except a few references to his parents, and his mom in particular. She followed her path and after many, many hours of research with the Worms’ help, a Mod of her great-great-grandmother started to emerge. And a lot of things started to make sense.

It turns out that Hanne Nader, or Hannah as she was renamed in the US, had been a very determined and tenacious woman. In 1908, at the age of 13, she emigrated from Lebanon, the country, to Lebanon, a tiny town in southern Illinois in what was then one of the united states. Along with her came her husband and newly born child, two of her brothers, and her mother and her newly born child. The town turned out to be a good place for them where a couple of Lebanese families already settled there.

A couple of years after she arrived, her child and her mother’s child died of whooping cough. A few months after that Hannah’s husband was run over by a west bound train. After a period of mourning, the small Lebanese community found her a new husband, Balawi, or as he was renamed on entry, Bellamy, Leo Bellamy. The Worms never found out his original birth name so Leo was it.

From Humble Beginnings

From the back of his horse, Leo sold cloth, thread, buttons, and the like to the farmers in the area; he also sold leather goods, mostly shoes and horse mounts. Every day he’d get on the horse his Saint Louis cousin, Aziz, had loaned him, loaded the stuff he had sent him and set out to knock on doors. Over time he got friendly with the local farmers, brought them other goods they had asked for, and he learned passable English.

He was very industrious and pretty handsome, with an exotic look about him. The women loved him and he smoked and played cards with their husbands and fathers. He had happily found his niche, but he was lonely. When Sara Oaïs, the one and only ḵāṭiba, approached him, he was ready. He had been saving all the money he could and knew he was capable of setting up a household.

He knew Hannah from afar but when he met her up close, he was smitten. He got a taste of her character when she started to interrogate him over the objections of her mother Mariana Barquet.

She wanted him to know that she expected to manage the money that she was going to earn for herself. She was going to send some to her brothers in Lebanon and the rest she was going to use to pay for school.

She had befriended Marian Harmon, daughter of McKendree University’s President, and she convinced her she’d do well in school. She wasn’t a Methodist, but she was Christian, a Maronite, and that was close enough so she would become a Methodist and get into that school.

Leo loved it, he loved her spirit. And he loved her from that moment on.

Later he didn’t love it so much when she joined up with the suffragists, got herself thrown in jail, and he had to go to Saint Louis to bail her out. The next year, in 1918, Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi to grant women the right to vote for President and Hannah could not stop smiling, beaming really. The year before, she had traveled to Saint Louis, while pregnant with Armand, supposedly to get proper shoes for the boys, but really it was to listen to Mary Parker Follett who spoke at the University of Missouri. She got to speak with Ms Follett who asked her about her life and she told her about her family and the daily laundry work she did to support her family. I don’t know what came over me, but I spoke to Ms Follettt of the Mother’s Club I was part of and how I felt it my duty to help the other women go home with higher standards for her home, her children, and herself. She came back a changed woman and this was the woman that Sammie could now talk with.

You look a lot like I did at your age, were her first words to me. Then, nothing. As with any new Mod, there were going to be lots of lulls like this for a bit. The Worms needed time to find bits and pieces of her in flat archives and then more time to weave them into the Mod. Sammie left the Hannah Mod alone for a while and when she came back to it later it was more capable. Not perfect, but OK.

We talked about a bunch of stuff. She “showed” Sammie a photograph of her with her child and her first husband, but the image itself was lost. She smiled as she talked and looked at her empty hands where the picture would have been.

She asked Sammie if she spoke any Arabic and she said no, but I speak passable Mandarin but she didn’t know what Sammie meant by Mandarin. She had to say, I speak Chinese, and then Hanne laughed. Even as she did it was painful to watch the damage that her untreated diabetes already had on her, young as she still was.

Sammie asked her about what she had learned in school and that got her talking. Then she started to talk about her involvement with the suffrage movement and how they managed to change the laws that had prevented women from voting. She got even more passionate as she talked about how these same women had turned their back on their negro sisters. Hannah ended up trying hard to convince Sammie that people must be put at the center of everything we do, particularly when we come together to work. We don’t set our sites high enough, she said, and we settle for hoarding money instead. And that, she said, is where things go wrong. The suffrage movement had forgotten that they were after equal treatment under the law, regardless of color, and it became all about getting power for some women and not for all. She was talking about the roots of RADICAL thought! Sammie loved it and her cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

Hannah was very lively when she talked about her children, and then Sammie said, what about my great-grandfather, Manny? and her face dropped. Manny was consumed with الجشع. All he cared about was money and power and controlling other people. Since he was little, he always wanted the prize, no matter who got hurt on the way. I talked to my children about everything I learned at the University and from people like Miss Follett, but Manny never wanted to hear it.

Even though Sammie knew it was pointless, she told her that Manny’s progeny had turned out well. Look at me, she said, and Hannah smiled. Sammie knew the Mod would not incorporate into itself anything beyond what the Worms had found. Even so, Sammie wanted to make Hannah smile, at least a little.

After her talk with Hannah, Sammie’s best guess was that Max Bellamy, her grandfather and Manny’s second son, must have heard about Hannah from his aunts and uncles. Enough that as he grew older he picked up on some of her ideas. Or maybe he put it all together from scratch. Either way, she was surprised that RADICAL ran in her family and even more surprised that her dad had never said so. Maybe he didn’t think it was that important but, damn it, it was to her now.

A Grain of Fear, or Two

Vic was at a loss. There was genuine enthusiasm for his narrative but now, it was pretty much down to a handful of people. A short while ago almost 100 people were part of his movement. But then the damn interchange happened and he had lost all momentum. He thought he would have the numbers on his side, but it didn’t turn out that way. Not all of them had gone to the interchange but the ones who stayed behind were now busy welcoming the newcomers, making new friends, and reconnecting with old ones. Worst of all, they were rejecting their fears.

He had to think bigger. He had to get his message out, beyond his habitat and to at least the Major habitats. Sammie’s habitat near the Minor Trojans could wait. Besides, she and Munjez were now here, much to his surprise. He had to act quickly and take advantage of this ever-so-lucky turn of events.

It was obvious he needed a new strategy. What had almost worked in their habitat was not going to work across all habitats at once.

His message was fine. It didn’t take that much work to convince people that having one person direct their work would make it that much more efficient. And that from the Distribution history, a bot could learn to mimic anybody’s allocation pattern. And with a little hand tweaking now and then, it would work fine and save everybody a bit of time. That’s what they wanted. At least, that’s what they’d say when they were feeling low. Anybody else would have helped to get to the bottom of the complaint, but not Vic. That moment of loneliness and despair is what he was looking for.

Really, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that some kind of fear was behind all those momentary comments. Everybody knew how to bring it out in the open with the help of others, and face it until it went puff. But he did notice that without somebody else helping along, a little grain of fear would do all kinds of things to people’s heads. More than anything else, they became docile. Keep the fear in them for a while and they’d become adolescent-like. That’s pretty much the state his inner core of six were in and why they had skipped the interchange.

Vic figured out how to broadcast fear.

The Big Nothing

It was total darkness. The emergency lights had not come on, so it was as dark as she’s never experienced before. And quiet. Very quiet. She…

What was going on?

Sammie was starting to panic, something else she’s never experienced before. She couldn’t do much, locked in as she was. Except… she heard a hum. She tried the door and it was unlocked. Of course, the magnetically locked door would be unlocked and her room was no longer acoustically isolated.

OK, she was no longer panicking, she could think again. The unlocked door gave her a place to start. And a way out.

It seemed like everybody was out in the hallways. The hum she had heard was now a roar of voices. It was crazy.

My baby is going to die! somebody screamed. Evidently somebody had an intensive care baby and without power the poor thing was doomed.

And then the power came back on. From a sea of voices to the familiar lights and total silence, in an instant.

After a few minutes of staring at each other, a voice came through our devices, Vic found the problem… well… OK. One more time, Vic brought back our power, but he doesn’t yet know what caused it to go down. At which point Sammie felt hands holding her and leading her back to her quarters. This time the door was firmly locked behind. And about time, so she could get back to her Mods.