Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 294: The only remaining “Secret Cabal”

“You know things are bad that when the Bundeskanzlerin responds to a proposal by saying ‘if my grandson were here, he’d run over to the bookshelf, show me one of his dystopian novels, and talk about how this plan is its plot’,” Habicht grumbled.

“What was the proposed plan?” Japinder asked.

“Way I was told, it was all about requiring people to do a certain minimum of summoning and giving the results of that as taxes in exchange for a set amount of space, utilities, food, and medical care.”

“So basically, the bare minimum with little chance of advancement once the XP dries up from the weak, required, monsters, people are stuck,” Arthur nodded.

Japinder thoughtfully stroked his beard, “The importance of this is to give people at least the possibility of advancing. It is up to the individuals if they want to walk that path, but the option needs to be truly available.”

“How long’s it been, anyway?” Jason asked, “It’s July 27th, 2029, so …”

He stared at the ceiling for a couple of seconds while he did a little mental math, “Seven years, two months, and twenty-five days. We’ve killed the demons of hell, seen the dead rise and put them back in the ground, literally reshaped mountains, and we can’t even hammer out a single working social contract?”

Isaac was pretty sure that Jason was imagining this would be easier than it was in reality, but that wasn’t exactly a problem. Political acumen wasn’t what he’d been invited to share.

“Why don’t we just open up space?” Jones suggested, “It’s not like we don’t have the, uh, space. Eat what you kill, grab random rocks, and turn them into your home, and the nearest neighbor is hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.”

Jones looked … more than a little silly at the moment. One of the previously unknown properties of the [Round Table] was that it fully reflected the physical state of those projecting in. Usually, this worked exactly as it sounded, showing clothing, injuries, dirtiness, etc.

But given that they’d caught him sitting on an asteroid, “catch some sun”, he had real trouble staying in their seat.

The hardened captain of the ghost ship of legend was currently resembling nothing if not a balloon bouncing around in his seat, hair, and beard wildly flying about the place whenever he moved.

“It’s also incredibly easy to get oneself killed in outer space,” Elena pointed out, “When people need to get up there under their own power, there’s a minimum requirement of either funds or personal ability. Tossing people up there is only slightly more humane than just feeding them into a woodchipper.”

Isaac winced. It was an accurate description, but that phrasing … sheesh.

“By the way, did we finally manage to get enough degrees of separation between the summoning resources for the animal sanctuaries that we can use them?” Bailey asked.

“Sure, I stole that stuff right out of the stash,” Jason said, “Do you know where would be the best place to drop it off?”

This entire game of smoke, mirrors, and mental gymnastics was frustrating beyond measure.

But by telling Jason where the stuff was without outright instructing him to remove it, he’d technically stolen the whole lot.

And by not directly telling him where to put it, just giving good drop-off spots, he hadn’t been given any orders either.

So even though the amount of mental gymnastics required to make that sense bordered on the absurd, as far as the usual methods of investigation went, things were on the up and up.

“I’m guessing I don’t want to know where we got that stuff?” Bailey asked.

Isaac nodded, while Arthur “helpfully” explained, “We only work with the most reputable black market dealers.”

Isaac facepalmed when he noticed Japinder frown.

“I made sure the people sourcing those materials were either people without any other options, and when that wasn’t possible, at least focus on people who’d spend the money on a new gold chain for their pet alligator, as opposed to funding terrorism.”

“How many of those sanctuaries are actually necessary?” Fenrir asked, “I know you’ve gathered a lot of stuff, are you going to use all of it?”

“A lot of rare species have already gone extinct,” Bailey reminded him, sighing, “Anything limited to a small geographic area is fucked if there’s a fight nearby, and we don’t have nearly enough stuff to protect every species in existence. But honestly, why would we wait until rhinos are extinct to create a sanctuary?”

“Raul’s going to be making sure everything works,” Isaac said, “We’ve got other stuff to do.”

The conversation shifted again, covering a few other topics, like an update on the hunt for the last remaining members of the cult, of which there were only seven left, at last count.

And then things came to the meat of the matter.

“We need to figure out a basic framework for a constitution in the [System] world and how society can deal with individuals having the power to overthrow the government in an hour,” Isaac began, “I’ve got a few ideas, drawn from the German constitution.

“Mind you, that has nothing to do with national pride, but history. The current German constitution was created by the Allies post World War 2, making it fairly recent as far as constitutions go, with things like equality and freedom of speech baked in from the start. In fact, is literally called ‘basic law’ because it was never meant to be a permanent legal code, just temporary until Germany could create it’s own constitution.

“It was written as a direct response to Adolf Hitler, and has several paragraphs specifically aimed at preventing the rise of another tyrant like him. Paragraph one, which states that a human’s rights and dignity cannot be touched, and covers everything from ensuring that all people are equal to stating that it is the job of the government to ensure that everyone can live a ‘dignified’ life, meaning providing at least a basic measure of social security. There is also a paragraph that explains how the German state must be both democratic and a federal republic.

“Those paragraphs fall under something called the ‘eternity clause’ which states both those paragraphs and itself cannot be changed, by anyone. The gods could descend to Earth and those pieces of legislature would remain as they were, so long as the Federal Republic of Germany continues to exist, it will be a federal republic that guarantees human rights and dignity to its citizens. We don’t need to make a perfect solution right now, if we can figure out an immutable core, tweaking things later would be a lot safer.”

“That’s it?” Habicht asked, “I thought you were going to mention the ‘Wiederstandsrecht’.”

“What’s that?” Elena asked at the same time that Amy asked, “Is that the thing that lets people legally revolt?”

“Can I take this one?” Habicht asked, and Isaac nodded.

“Basically, Article 20, Paragraph 4 of the German constitution states that all Germans have the right to resist people trying to end German democracy or the rule of law, as long as the legal route does not work.”

“Giving people a legal fig leaf to revolt seems like a terrible idea,” Bailey said.

“Oh, I know exactly how badly that could go,” Habicht nodded, “I’ve arrested quite a few conspiracy theorists who convinced themselves that the government had become a dictatorship, tried the legal route, got laughed out of court, and the rest is history.

“But if we ever saw the rise of another Adolf Hitler, stopping them would be a hell of a lot easier. No legal risks if the situation is properly assessed, a clear line for when the government has gone too far. And we can make that part a magical contract, something along the lines of ‘I will never use this right to revolt unless I truly believe this is necessary and the last resort’. It wouldn’t restrict freedom at all, but would hopefully cut down on the instances of abuse.”

There was silence for a long moment, then Arthur spoke.

“Basically, you’re both saying we need an immutable core of rights in any future constitution that we can build around, and we need a way for people to legally deal with any cases of the rule of law being usurped from the top.”

“There’re also the usual core rights like freedom of speech that need to be placed in any future legal frameworks,” Isaac said.

“So basically we’re copying those straight from the German constitution?” Elena asked, “That should make it easy.”

“There’s an issue that needs to be fixed with that. In Germany, freedom is a human right, and as such, striving for it is legal, even if that means breaking out of jail. Mind you, any injuries caused, property damaged, bribes paid, all of those are still going to be crimes, but if you can get out without committing additional crimes, you’re legally in the clear. You’d still have to serve the rest of your sentence if you get caught, but it’s still a problem because legally escaping is going to be unfortunately easy to do under the [System],” Isaac said.

Amy flushed crimson at that. Huh.

Then Isaac caught Habicht stifling a chuckle.

“What’s wrong?” Arthur asked, suddenly.

“In the early days of the [System], the walls of jails could not prevent phasing and there was an … incident, let’s leave it at that.”

Amy sighed, apparently having decided that the “incident” was likely to come out, “Basically, two months after initialization, I was at a party, a whole bunch of people got drunk, some shit happened, and I ended up in the drunk tank. I wasn’t that drunk, mind you, but apparently, that didn’t matter. Patrick mentioned that legal trivia about escaping and I decided I wasn’t a big fan of jail. So I walked out, got re-arrested, and the instant I was in a cell and therefore no longer ‘resisting arrest’, I walked out again. I’m not sure how often.”

“Seventy-two times,” Habicht said, “That video is now being used for training purposes, as a prime example of when someone’s got you by the legal balls and you should just surrender because you can’t do anything other than look like an idiot.”

The meeting had been thoroughly sidetracked by this point, so they decided to take the three minutes to watch the admittedly very funny video. Amy’s face had been pixelated, but it was clearly her.

At first, she just walked out through the bars, let herself get cuffed, brought back in, and left it at that.

After the fifth time, the asshole started yelling at her, so she tore off a part of the paper covering the mattress, stuffed it in her ears, demonstratively shoved her fingers in, and finally walked backwards through the other wall, holding eye contact the entire time.

And then, she’d waited outside to be arrested again.

The whole affair had been reduced to a three-minute instructional video accompanied by the Benny Hill theme, but in reality, she’d apparently kept it up for two hours until the officer had practically thrown her out of the precinct, well and truly fed up.

“So, the point is that we need to ensure that any created system of government isn’t usurped,” Japinder said, “That still doesn’t fix the problem of lacking jobs, but I have a few ideas for that.”

The general plan was fairly simple on the surface, but it got very detailed, very complicated, very quickly.

In essence, employers would have to hire a certain percentage of lower-Level people who wanted to gain or advance a [Class] related to that job to ensure that the path to advancement was always open. Beyond that, anyone above a certain Level would need to spend at least some small amount of time supervising summoning, or teaching beginners, as another form of taxation. Around an hour a month at the most.

That was another idea that went straight onto the “should help to create a stable society” pile.

Beyond that, there were a few other ideas that may or may not work.

For example, Fenrir had suggested that maybe there should be tax breaks for people above a certain level, where acts of service would reduce the amount of tax that should be paid. Considering what kinds of salaries people at the fourth Evolution and above could command, a couple of days of menial government work would wipe out the entire tax burden for all but the highest earners.

A way to encourage people to strive for great heights beyond just power.

And so on. Idea after idea, ways to ensure that society didn’t ossify and ways to prevent super powerful S-Rankers from taking over that didn’t basically amount to the [Round Table] kicking the ass of any would-be tyrants. Granted, that would likely work a few times, but there was no guarantee. And quite frankly, this was meant to be all about a society that worked on its own, not about how the thirteen people in this room could play shadow government.