Data Element Framework
DEF.001.004
Terra 7 – 458.794.210 OS
Project Study Case 0… Initiate Scenario
Recognised.
Slate Identifier… Scenario.003.001
Function signifier… Potential
Construct Scenario Actor…
Witness.003.001
Recognised.
Identity… Martina Delia
Identity Date… New Earth. 6. OS
Reconstruct Sensory Element…
Sensory.001.003
Recognised.
Element… Lands of Hellen
Element Date… Old Earth. 2031. CE
Begin Scenario.003.001…
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Recognised.
Slate Value… Prospector.001.001
Project Study Case 0
Scenario 003.001
Martina got up with a start. What time is it!? She looked at the half-functioning chronotracker. Its outer glass display was cracked in a way that the minutes were blurry but she saw that the hour was seven. Martina pushed her college mate awake.
“Carmila! We’re going to be late!”
“Uhhh...just a few more minutes,” Carmila replied groggily as she pulled the sheet to their ‘bed’ tightly over her.
Dr. Bradson was lenient enough to let them come in a few minutes late but she didn’t like to miss her lectures. Dr. Bradson’s lectures were the ones she would be most looking forward to. Martina shot up from the mattress they had dragged into the dorm room they called a bed and set about preparing to leave.
It was deplorable. The Interdependent States of Europe, or “I-D-S-E” as most called it, gave its citizens a grant bonus of two hundred Blaze Coins monthly with an additional hundred for those who applied to outside universities. It was great pay in the IDSE itself, people could live off just under a hundred Blaze Coins relatively well, but in the Lands of Hellen that was most definitely not the case. The Citizen’s Livelihood Act proposed by the Socialite Speakers in the IDSE had been embraced by its member states but its neighbour blocks considered it a callback to ‘communist sentiment’ which was in increased fear after the formation of the Imperium of the Commune. The Lands of Hellen, and its shadow corporate overlords, had spoken greatly against it and had advocated against the Act being introduced in the Global Reorder as one of its Orders. The Nordic Bloc had built their own self-sustained system and had also spoken against the idea of it being forced on the Global Reorder. The Polanic Border Block was worried enough with a potential Communist Superpower to its east and had no interest in supporting one to its west.
It was unfortunate then, Martina thought, that the Lands of Hellen had developed the best universities with the best lecturers and they had the most well established scientists who were funded by the Tech-Holds. The dorm room she shared with six other transfer students, which should only house three, cost each of them twenty Blaze Coins a week to keep. The Prospect’s Housing Block was a short distance away from the University of Ethical Technologies at least but because they weren’t employed directly with anyone in Hellen, because no one would employ a foreigner, access to the Hydro-Rail cost fifty Blaze Coins a month, and even then if they needed to board the train outside the 08:00 - 22:00 work hours they would need to pay an extra fee.
Joshua and Frederique had apparently already left. Must have gone out to make some sales before class. Martina looked for her own stuff, it was all bunched up behind the embedded cold-store fridge they had to share. They kept as little as they could as even using it cost them, only keeping a supply of water and two lunch-rations each, that way keeping the cost down to only a tenth of a Blaze coin divided amongst them per day. She opened her satchel, took out her Virgo-Orwell translucent fabric mask, slapped on the cryptoclave-wrist, or CC-W as most knew it, which instantly connected with both mask and her unregistered AlphaFlag-tab which her mum Grace had given her before coming to Hellen. It was such a hassle to stay outside the Corp-grid in Athenis, harder than any other location in the Hellenite Block. Her trackless permit took up another ten Blaze Coins per month and because of it she couldn’t use half the resources available in Athenis, though the only real detriment was the Product Imperium stations, which she avoided like the plague regardless. Congratulations Hellenites, you managed to make a Surveillance State without even owning it yourselves. Thankfully her mums had taught her how to get around these sorts of things.
The unregistered AlphaFlag-tab had made all the difference. It had all the features of any Alpha-Omega Corp tablet but it was outside their direct framework and instead connected to the VirgoNet to get access to shrouded networks. Martina discovered the CC-W when a friend of hers had told her about it, functioned like the comp-wrist when it came to running the Crypt-Net software for cryptocurrency exchange but it would encrypt transactions and exchanges within an independent Virtual Network that another friend of hers, alias DarkNetVPN, was running in Sicily. The Virgo-Orwell mask was something she found herself before coming into Athenis. Apparently even if she had acquired all the necessary permits to remain trackless the corporations were not beholden to those permits and could still gather data on individuals with permits. The VO-mask was made by a Pro-Trackless private distributor which Martina supported with some left over Blaze coins she could spare. It used a bio-safe transparent material to refract light which disoriented cameras and scanners from registering the face of the wearer.
Martina made sure that all her devices had connected, inputted her encrypted codes and then took a deep breath as she put on the VO-mask. It was extremely uncomfortable but at least it provided a sense of privacy which had become a scarce commodity. She hated people stealing her data, the IDSE had passed laws to safeguard the Virtual Citizen and held to it even when some of the Corp Networks like MacroNet and DistribuNet threatened to disconnect the IDSE from their services. The Lands of Hellen were different though.
Carmila was still tossing left and right. Martina shook her head, oh you gorgeous minx. She found her sachet of crypt-spice, opened it and placed it under Carmila’s nose. There was a sharp inhale and Carmila got up holding the sheet over her body.
“What time is it!?”
“It’s almost 8 I think, the chronotracker got smashed again.”
“Why didn’t you say so! We’re going to be late!” Martina laughed at that as she looked at Carmila frantically get dressed and go through the same routine she had just been through.
“Singularity help me, Carmila. I did tell you.”
“Try harder next time, Mar.”
The two ran to the Hydro-Rail. It didn’t take them long to start sweating from the unbearable heat. Even with their black-tinge absorbent jackets it was incredibly hot. Martina wasn’t sure if these jackets were really helping the situation or making it worse, she loosened the jagged zip and tied her white sleeveless top from below her waist hoping that maybe some errant breeze would cool her down. There was no breeze sadly. Carmila was worse off as she had already begun to pant like a rabid dog.
“The next train should be coming in 15 minutes. We’ll make it if we keep up the pace,” Martina advised as she looked at her CC-W to check the Transit Locator.
“I would kill for those bionic legs Cryo.203.001 was talking about.”
“Yeah...Sure...Now is not the time for daydreaming Carmila. Just keep running!”
The two kept sprinting across the open promenade that led from the Dorm Block to the Rail Station. They both had taken a heavy dose of crypt-spice before leaving which helped. Martina could feel her mind drift but the adrenaline that was shooting through her system was counteracting it. She was thankful for that fact now, although it did mean that her supply was getting stale. It was Crypt3010-5SP and she had taken 5mg, she should be in a different world at this point even if she was having an adrenaline rush. She would need to talk with Michelangelo about it.
“How much did you give me Mar?” Carmila asked through heavy breaths.
“10.”
“10!?”
“You were half asleep, you needed it.”
“Remind me to pay you back.”
“Oh come on, Carm. I still owe you for last week’s train ride. Just call it even.”
“Thanks bae.”
As they continued across the streets there were a few onlookers, there was a group of foreigners who cheered them on. Martina cheered back at them. ‘Better to play along than antagonize,’ one of the great pieces of advice her mum Eli had taught her. ‘Unless you’re actually threatened,’ her mum Grace would add to which Eli would sigh but nod in resigned acknowledgement.
The two university students arrived at the entry node that was framed by the entrance to the Electro-Tube. It would have been nice to have one of these connected to the Dorm Block, Martina thought to herself.
“It would be nice to have one of these connected to the Dorm Block,” Carmila echoed. Martina let out a chuckle.
“Come on Carm, we’re going to be late.”
They passed their CC-W over the entry node. Carmila passed without issue, Martina was held up for a few seconds as the scanner rejected the marker.
“Which server are you connected to, Mar?”
“I should be on the Sicilian one.”
“Try Florence. Joshua said he had the same issue.”
Martina took out her AF-tab and changed the network connection, she waited for the connection to synchronize and then passed her CC-W again. There was a bit of a pause, Martina was worried she’d get stuck here but then the scanner beeped recognition and the metal bar retracted. The two then ran past other people who were standing around looking at their screens or in line for the vending stations and rushed to the train that was about to depart. It had already gotten easier with the change of temperature in the tube, in comparison to their dorm and the oven hot streets of Athenis the tube felt like the inside of a cold storage. Stepping onto the train it was even further contrasted, “out of the frying pan and into the freezer”. It had become a common saying for those who had to make the walk outside the electro-tubes, it had become so common as people began to experience minor influenza due to the drastic temperature shifts. They both began to jitter and quickly zipped up their jackets. The two women made their way from one carriage to the other, there were several passengers who were sleeping tucked under heavy blankets. Must be nice, Martina thought.
They finally got to a train carriage that was less packed and that had two-seat sections. They tossed themselves into the seats and let out exhausted breaths, the air steaming out of their mouths. Carmila tapped Martina’s shoulder and as she turned Carmila breathed a jet of steam into her face as she mimicked a dragon roar. Martina laughed as she waved away the steam and then countered with a pantomime of her smoking a cigarette. After a few minutes the crypt-spice kicked into full gear and they were both lost in their respective thoughts.
Martina’s mind first began going through her finances. After cutting off the generic hundred-forty coins that served as the monthly expense for her scraping by existence she began to go through all the micro-expenses and tried to figure out if she might be able to cross off some of them.
Crypt-Spice from Michelangelo was forty blaze coins, it was expensive but it was the only splice that even registered a kick for her. And she was getting it at a bargain since she also helped with distribution to avoid using the Big Z’s vending stations, Damned Imperium takes 20% of any earnings, all the self-made distributors called it corrupt, though most of them didn’t even speak out against it. Why would they? Most of them think they can take the great Emperor of Mazona’s place, and if they did they would also want to charge 20% on earnings...if not more. Michelangelo was one of the good ones at least, it was why she helped them out. She also thought they had a thing for her but Michelangelo was very professional, that Venician-Accent was quite convincing when they wanted to sell. Thanks to him she was saving some twenty blaze coins so that was good. What else?
On average she’d spend twenty coins on the train when she needed to go to the Thought Singularity meet-ups, those were only held from 01:00 - 04:00 so her monthly train payment didn’t cover it. Then there were the visits to St. Star hospital and her hormones which came up to sixty coins a month too.
40 blaze coins left. She would need to save just in case she needed a random visit to the hospital, buy some extra food, subscribe to another stream for her studies which normally wouldn’t go beyond ten coins. Her subscriptions to ‘King Virgo’, ‘MatrixReloadOut’ and ‘DarkNetVPN’ came to a total of six coins to maintain access to the anonymous networks and then even less necessary her Stream-Net subscriptions to watch her favourite shows and RarLibNet to access pirated novels which was a total of ten coins.
24 blaze coins left. She wondered if it would be smart to try and use some of the coins to shift to other cryptocurrencies, possibly making a bit of a side profit. Blaze Coin was the only stable currency available, it was the only reason why it was so universally used. The IDSE made sure to keep it stable, they were the ones who made it after all. The only State-Made cryptocurrency made in honour of the Global Blaze. She knew some of her classmates who made something off of crypto-trading, but they were residents, they could afford losing. I mean I could too but it wouldn’t be fair on Eli and Grace. The exchange rate for one Blaze Coin was roughly 18 Euro, though that really didn’t mean anything anymore. FIAT currencies were relics of an older age. Martina’s parents told her about the old currencies, the Euro, the US dollar, the pound, they mentioned the Maltese Lira too, but that was even older so much that even they didn’t remember it. They were technically still in circulation and the big players still used them but you could buy with Blaze so why bother holding onto a coin that could so easily be shifted around. 24 blaze coins will have to be enough for now, she finished. It was a decent amount, she wouldn’t be able to buy anything from outside Hellen with the spiked costs of distribution but at least she could buy Carmila a coffee every now and again and she could give Cryo.203.001 a coin or two to continue to rent out the small basement apartment in the Power District for the Thought Singularity meet-ups.
Her thoughts drifted to the lectures she had. Starting off with Ethical-Econ, they had had to read so many papers and books over the semester that she had models, equations and fancy words oozing out of her ears. She’d been listening to documentaries on the history of economic evolution pre and post the Global Blaze, the rise of the Crypto-coin and then she even managed to find a stream that was focused on the takedown of the IDSE in comparison to its old counterpart the EU which was pretty interesting when it came to how they managed production and the “Supply and Demand” structure. From what one of her more favourite streams had said she would probably be called ‘left-leaning’ or a ‘socialist’ since the IDSE itself seemed to be considered Techno-Socialist though some other “less favourite” streams Martina had watched claimed that the word ‘socialist’ was just a facsimile for ‘lazy’ and ‘commie authoritative cucks’. Not very nice, it only made her more receptive to the AnonLeftNet streamers who called the anti-socialist ‘facist bigots’. She pondered it for a while and thought about some of Dr. Vasiliadis lectures on ‘War in Media’. Martina couldn’t help but notice that effectively she was in part putting herself in a camp that fell right into Vasiliadis’ ‘Us & Them’ mentality which she claimed was a general human tendency, a mechanism used to forge ‘easy to frame’ social groups.
There were some more neutral documentaries that highlighted pros and cons for both ideologies and she was slowly starting to understand what Dr. Bradson had been preaching to them about ‘seeing yourself through the eyes of your opposing ideology’. It was a hard thing to do, but thinking about it there was some sense to it. She would need to read some more though, it felt wrong in a way, like admitting to some unseen failing, to even allow ‘the right’ some level of victory but they were living in the system weren’t they? The corporations had been greatly successful and all of those were ‘profit-centric’ as one economic takedown stream had put it.
She would probably ask Dr. Bradson if he had some better reading material that she might be able to reference, maybe offer him some of her left over crypt-spice in exchange for actual books. He had lent her a book once. She had always read books on her tab or listened to them. When Dr. Bradson had given her an ancient book, a book his parents had given him when he was starting his own studies, she was baffled. It was so heavy in comparison to the tech she relied on so heavily.
He told her that when Dark Sun hit they had to stay off their devices for a few weeks, books had been the only media they could consume, that and plays he’d said. He had given her “A Wealth of Nations”, reading it was like unearthing a relic of a long forgotten age. The smell of paper was so strange, there was both an off putting smell of mold but also there was something Martina could only call an emotional scent, this elevating feeling which she couldn’t describe. She used to watch old movies and series and she’d seen people reading books but they never seemed to react any differently to books like her generation and her parents reacted to their tech. Although, it might have been the heavy dose of crypt-spice I probably had had that day though.
Regardless, she had enjoyed reading the book, she had immediately recognised the author from one of the streams she had watched, ‘Adam Smith’. The streamers called him the ‘Father of Capitalism’ and she felt that that was somewhat fair. She had been listening to the audiobook and she was arriving at a similar conclusion. It felt ironic that she had managed to acquire the audiobook through less than legal or ‘economic’ means from her connection to VirgoNet-HashYarg, a great source for downloading resources that weren’t available on RarLibNet and which I don’t need to front cash just reupload the same resource at least once…”Yarg”. When reading it on physical paper it felt different though, it took longer to read but it was worth the time spent. It wasn’t as economics heavy as most streams portrayed it to be, it was more of a philosophical take. Dr. Bradson had stated that capitalism was more of an ideology rather than ‘just’ an economic model much like communism or socialism were also ideologies which economics could be based upon.
“And that is why this is NOT an Economics class BUT an Ethics class.” Dr. Bradson had made it crystal clear on the first day of the unit.
There was a jolt and she was snapped out of her musings. Carmila had rested her head on Martina’s shoulder at some point, the blue tipped mess of curly hair which still wreaked of sweat and last night’s caffeine filled Martina’s vision who had in turn rested her own head atop Carmila’s.
“Carm. Get up, we’re here.”
“What? A few more min…” Carmila was about to reply in the same groggy voice as she had done earlier in the morning.
“No! Not a few more minutes! Come on get up!” Martina pushed Carmila’s head which shifted automatically to bump against the wall.
She then wiped the drool from her mouth and slowly got up. Martina followed suit and the two made their way to the train’s exit.
The temperature shift was unbearable. The VO-mask did not help in the slightest. The massive crowd that filled the Electro-Tube. They pushed past people who yelled insults or simple exclamations in an attempt to avoid the queue to the exit node. It did not help that there were clusters of people who were gathered around fortifications made of luggage and patchwork stitched sheets which occupied a portion of the tube itself. These were the refugees, people who had run from the eastern states in the wake of the insane heatwaves. Martina had heard that many of them were aiming to make their way to the IDSE, sadly there weren’t many options for the people that came through the Lands of Hellen. The trains only took them as far as South Kosovo if they were able to save up enough to be able to even get on the trains. There were public funded organizations that were trying to provide help but it was clearly not enough. It was sad Martina thought, what was worse was that so many more were probably outside in makeshift shadow-shelters dying of dehydration and heat strokes. As Martina and Carmila had just gotten past the senior students that were probably there to use the Prospect Stations rather than their own local vending sites a group of enforces came moving into the tube to break up the congestion of people.
Their dark green and blue uniforms were not a welcome sight with the academia students. They had a habit of cracking down on crypt-spice traders under the pretence that they were distributing unregistered products, which was never the case since it wouldn’t even make any sense to do so, which meant they could seize good quality product and then sell it through the vending stations. They were equipped in high-quality gear, integrated HDM-cam masks that covered their faces, stun guns and even their “uniforms” were the equivalent of military-grade power armour. From Martina’s perspective they looked like Techno-Super soldiers from the old sci-fi movies she used to watch. Carmila pulled Martina through the crowd who was not as deterred by the enforcers, making sure to avoid their own path through the crowd. They managed to get to the front of the line and made for the scanning node. Carmila went through the gate but Martina’s device seemed to cause her the same issue as before. Damn! She went to switch the network connection again but this time the scanner lit red registering a fault in the scan. Not now! There were people behind her who were looking a little too curiously at the situation. Carmila reached over the gate and grabbed the AF-tab from Martina.
“What are you…” Martina began but was handed back the tab before she could finish.
“Do it now. Come one!”
Martina passed her cc-w over the scanner and it immediately retracted. She rushed past and the two ran even faster than before. As Martina looked back she saw one of the enforcers had actually been making their way to the exit-node but had instead stopped seeing that she had passed through. She felt her heart pounding, the rush of blood in her ears silencing her surroundings. She kept running and then Martina saw Carmila looking at her, her mate’s mouth moving meaning. As she tried to focus she slowly began to make out Carmila’s voice.
“Breath Mar! You’re drifting.”
Martina began breathing just as Carmila had taught her to do the last time this had happened. She gulped the little saliva that had gathered in her mouth and then mouthed a thank you.
“Don’t drop on me now Mar,” Carmila returned with a smile. Martina nodded again and smiled back. As they made their way across the long promenade that led to the University Martina noted a few small groups of students, prospectors as the Faculty liked to call them. There were some who were isolated under shadow-cubicles reading or working on their devices while others were in groups of three or four and seemed to be enjoying each other’s company. Probably early risers, or their lessons got cancelled… lucky. The two dorm-mates came up to the foot of the stairs that led to the open doors of the University. It was an intimidating collection of buildings. The central structure housed the bulk of the auditoriums and faculty lounges. “A bastion of learning for the Future Prospectors of Humanity in Hellen and beyond” … though with the ludicrous lack of subsidies for the foreign students the “beyond” part of their slogan was lost on Martina and most of the prospectors outside of the Lands of Hellen like her. The satellite structures that orbited the main building were the sites for the laboratories that were used to exemplify different technologies and others were the dedicated housing blocks that were allowed to Hellenites that were in need of housing and attended the University. Must be damned nice.
“Come on Mar. We’re only five minutes late. Maybe Dr. Bradson is still setting up his holo-presenter.”
Martina nodded. They crested the stairs, stepped through doorway and rushed through the far more bearable temperate hallway of the University of Ethical Technologies, making their way to their first lecture of the day.
