Venus: A New Beginning…
Brent looked out over the endless sea of clouds blanketing Venus. Every human space station, since Mir, has had a viewport to look out onto the cosmos. On the International Space Station it was the Cupola, a multifaceted observation area where you could look at the Earth for hours while you float in microgravity. In the Bigelow habitat, it’s the Bubble, a three-sixty, inflatable sphere that lets you look at Jupiter in all of its intensity. And here, in the Glass Boat, while reclining on a comfortable couch staring through the floor at the clouds below, Brent made his plans to trick the Earth Authority delegation into believing that everything was in order.
The Earth Authority had a few principles on which its authoritarian rule was founded: maintain the peace throughout the Solar system by keeping a strict hierarchy in every organization on Earth. This meant every organization had a CEO, a COO, and a CFO. There was even some wiggle room, for example, you could have a CXO for user experience. Or maybe you wanted to integrate well with non-profits and needed a CNGO, to interact with the Non-Governmental Organizations of the world. Below all of these were managers, and below them were lesser managers, and finally, hopefully, perhaps, people who actually did something.
IT. WAS. THE. LAW.
To enforce the law, the Earth Authority had Mirror organizations that watched over their siblings. The Venusian Mirror organization was finally on its way, and Brent was desperately trying to organize a defense for the Venusian research colony, which had spent the last twenty years drifting into what it’s called a RADICAL co-organizing. The colony had gotten along this way because resources were tight and a Mirror Authority would have been too expensive.
The crew delayed the Mirror Authority from occupying the station as long as possible by concocting all sorts of accidents. An oxygen leak. Circuit damage from solar flares. Hull ablation from an acid in the atmosphere. In the end, Earth must have been suspicious because they had only been able to delay the mission by two years. And now, the Mirror Authority will be here in two weeks.
Meanwhile, the station existed without managers. People self-organized into groups and after conversations and on-going planning they would set up bubbles for scientific instruments and attend to the constant needs of an entirely artificial living space. Everyone, in the eyes of the colony, owned the station as a collective. The ownership was equitable, not equal, thanks to a system they called RADs to assign ownership.
For example, right after they had lied to the Mirror about a solar flare, there really was a solar flare, and they had to repair a bunch of electronic damage to electronics on the station that had been unshielded. Allen, a former manager, discovered a technique similar to degaussing and repaired a bunch of electronics that everyone thought they would have to reprint. Every week, the crew would get an equal share of RADs, and then assign those RADs to other people. You could not assign RADs to yourself. That week, Allen really cleaned up and many of the crew gave him their entire share of RADs.
Brent remembered the last discussion they had, all one hundred and forty two people, tightly packed into the main bubble. People would go to the center of the circle and discuss their ideas about what to do about the Mirror Authority. There was total unanimity in everyone not wanting to go back to the old way of having a static hierarchy. They still had temporary hierarchies for dangerous things like excursions on the hull of the station. There, it made sense to have someone with their hand over life and death. But every day was not a life and death emergency, and for everything else hierarchies would come and go as needed.
One idea was to kill everyone on the Mirror spaceship and revolt. Announce their independence and go to war with Earth. To Brent’s relief, this idea did not have a lot of traction. Not many were willing to be murderers.
Another was to find some way to hack into the approaching ship’s computer and send them off course. While that idea was being thrown around, someone did calculations while sitting at the periphery of the bubble and yelled out that it would be murdering them as well. They didn’t have enough food on board. Someone pointed out that some of them would survive from cannibalism. The murder faction tried to sway people with this option, since it seemed less direct than doing it in person.
Other people just wanted to come clean, tell the Authoritarians about everything that had happened on the space station. They could tell the Mirror how they learned to organize themselves with leadership teams, rough consensus, and RADs. Everything was transparent and decentralized. No one loomed over your shoulder, or withheld resources or information to hold power over you. It was a paradise in comparison to life on Earth. The society in action should be persuasive enough by itself, so some claimed. These were mostly people who rarely worked with Mirror counterparts. Twenty years of doing things Radically made it hard to remember the static and brittle hierarchies.
The option they finally agreed on was to co-opt them and slowly turn them to their Radical ways. Create a fake fiat hierarchy, with bosses and what not, but continue to use their practices with the blessing of the bosses.
A massive subterfuge of fake emails and video communications would be needed, in case they had to communicate about their co-managing and co-owning intentions. This would be relatively easy because hierarchies on Earth typically produced copious amounts of useless paperwork. And most of it was just stupid ritual.
Conversations by managers would also be easy to simulate, given enough video recording, they would be able to simulate people’s faces. And given enough reliance on buzzwords, best practices, and reams of technological jargon the mirror would be unable to understand, they could create whole conversations with total believability. The problem was the station occupants were all much more cheery and alive now, and none of them had video of them looking dull, tense, and nervous like they used to in their old meetings. They would have to do some aging of their faces to make the archives of their younger selves more believable.
The hardest part would really be pretending. Trying to be someone you are not as long as it might take to slowly co-opt the Mirror to their way of doing things. They would need endless practice sessions. And one couldn’t laugh at the whole farce of it all.
Brent set to work on building a system of systematic lies.
Two weeks later, the Mirror Authority arrived at the Venusian Airship Colony.
The Mirror CEO greeted the executive staff curtly. Handshakes were given. Dinner was had. Underlings had their own separate working dinner, where they exchanged all of the latest reports on paper. It was a ritual from olden days when paper was used for such things. Documents were signed by hand instead of with your cryptographic key.
Later, the Mirror staff were escorted to their Silo. The Mirror lived separately from the organization that they monitored. It would not do to have them fraternize with those they were expected to reprimand and punish for deviating from The Way Things Are Done. Fortunately, this made the subterfuge even easier for the Radicals.
After dropping the Mirror off at its Silo, the Radicals had a huge party celebrating the success of the deception. None of the Mirror had seemed the least bit suspicious.
For a few months the subterfuge went on without a hitch. People did whatever they wanted, working however they liked without shame for doing so. And whenever the Mirror walked through for an all-hands or stand-up meeting, everyone’s digital assistant would inform them of the impending invasion.
It would have all gone well, if Alex had not cracked. Brent was standing at a phony meeting, and Alex was giving a presentation on the efficiency of the power reactor, when he looked directly at the Mirror representative reclining at the head of the table and spilled everything, and said he couldn’t take it anymore. Alex just wanted to be told what to do. It’s all a sham. For a brief moment, the Mirror Agent didn’t react at all. In hierarchies people regularly break down all the time. It’s part and parcel to the self-amputation one must do to fit in. The Mirror Agent thought that’s what’s going on, and they almost got Alex out of the room, but he pleaded with the agent to check the regularity of the logs before they could shove him out the door.
They thought they had fixed things and smoothed things over with the agent, telling him Alex was one of their hardest workers, and he had probably just been in crunch time just a little too often this month. They even assigned a few people to manually watch the comms back to Earth to make sure the Mirror didn’t send anything out of the ordinary. The mirror did send a worrisome request for further analysis of ‘Compliance with Best Practices,’ a euphemism for insurrection. Brent and the others faked a signal from Earth commanding the Mirror here to desist prosecuting insurrection and it worked. The Mirror received the command and stopped investigating. It was not for them to ask why. In hierarchies, power flowed only one way.
They had used the hierarchy to preserve their freedom.
Or so they thought. One day Wilhelmina, the woman in charge of station threat tracking, who would laser the occasional micro meteorite that could potentially damage the airship, called an authentic all-hands. She told them there was a troop ship on its way from Earth. Gasps of disbelief were soon replaced with panicked voices. It was one thing to be caught by a Mirror Agent. You would just be demoted or transferred. Or perhaps wages would be docked or access to resources. A visit by the Mirror Marines meant firings. And not the old type of firings. To be fired meant no one would hire or fund you. Your saved up income would eventually run out and you would eventually die of starvation or exposure.
People started to immediately look suspiciously at Alex, who had come back around to their Radical position and had apologized for almost giving up the game. He begged them to believe he had not betrayed them. But if it was not him, who had?
An engineer typed furiously into a personal counsel at the back of the room. The room was so loud he hit the emergency horn once to shut everyone up. He explained that as much as he would like to throw Alex out of an airlock for almost getting their little utopia canceled it was not him. He had just navigated probes all around the station and discovered there was a second comms antenna that only the Mirror knew about. They had been sending out a simultaneous radio signal alongside the ones they were sending from the legitimate comms they all had access to.
The Mirror had been running its own subterfuge by pretending to be duped.
The Marine ship used a special drive to get to emergency Compliance situations. There would be no time to prepare. They would be there in days. Wilhelmina, the most willing to commit violence offered to use the anti-meteorite system to destroy the oncoming ship. Cooler heads determined the Marine ship would be guarded against such things. The jig was up.
Four and half days later Marines descended on the floating city. Even though inhabitants had signaled their surrender, the Marines blew the airlock open. A giant of a man stepped through doorway handcuffs in his hands. The station’s Mirror CEO rushed up to meet him. He pointed an accusatory finger at the station’s bygone CEO who had ironically been the one to instigate the beginnings of Radical co-management on the station. Brent looked down saddened that their way of life was over.
As Brent looked back up after hearing a cry of shock, the Marine was pushing a handcuffed Mirror CEO through the airlock and into the Marine ship. The Marines were bursting out in laughter at the surprised station crew. The Marines had already gone native only a few months prior to receiving the message to come and fire the rebellion. They had just started to self-organize and convert their Mirror Agents to a more free way of organizing, but like the crew of the Venusian Colony at the beginning of their transition they were similarly struggling around on how to do so. They were struggling with how to throw off their mental shackles. The Venusian Mirror had sent the Marines everything they had collected on how the Venusians were co-organizing and the Marines had quickly used this as a blueprint to self organize and maintain a virtual parody of themselves they could continue to fool the rest of the world with.
The Marines rounded up the Mirror Agents. Once they were all in the brig, the whole station partied like the universe was about to end. Eventually, the Mirror Agents asked to stay as part of the habitat crew.
Everyone asked what was happening on Jupiter and how big was the revolt there. Marine General Pura Cintron, who refused to be called “General,” smiled as she climbed back into her ship. There was no revolt. They had faked one. They had always just wanted to go to Jupiter, and they were done being told what to do.
