Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.26 Mental autonomy

Nadine felt restless, and started to pace.

Producing that many tiaras would cost money. Yes, Wellington had a lot, but enough to pay for 100,000,000 high end tiaras? No, only the Hexiokos had that much to spare. What about Feodor Yerkes? He didn’t really have a horse in this race. Sitting up there above the gravity well, the driving force behind seeding thousands of self-ruling spaceships and asteroid mining outposts, if anything he seemed to be strongly in favour of freedom. But what could the Wombles offer him that he didn’t already have, in return for funding and cheap resources dropped down to them? Telepresence robots? A better recruiting pool? Designs for ‘reliable tiaras’ that he could use himself?

She shook her head. She didn’t like that phrase “reliable tiaras”. Sounded like a second-hand car. It didn’t sum up what they were. “Freedom tiaras”? “Jail-broken tiaras”? “Open source tiaras”? No, no and no.

She opened the door and went outside. Perhaps a breath of cool night air would clear her head. The moon was still dark, and she could see the skies clearly. She smiled at the memory of the previous evening and spent a few minutes letting her eyes adjust, sending her bee over to rest by the tree in the courtyard, where it startled a dozing cricket into forlornly chirping, still trying to attract a mate.

Were humans any better, or were they just as driven by their instincts, sitting on lonely asteroids, singing out messages saying “I’m here, come find me”? A desire for a community was a fundamental human need. Deep down, Nadine knew she’d feel lost without the acceptance of the people in her village - people who cared about her and would try to protect her as she’d try to protect them.

But could such a community last, if it didn’t have some way to indicate what its expected behavioural norms were, and expel those who fell too far outside those norms? Didn’t some freedom always have to be spent, in return for the coordination that made a community work, if only the freedom to do whatever you wanted wherever you wanted to do it? The best you could hope for was for an efficient rate of exchange.

No, “freedom tiara” didn’t work, it was too generic. She needed something more specific. She looked up at the stars, reminding herself of the names Heather had told her. There was Leo, looking like a bent coat-hanger, and there was Regulus, the “little king”, which wasn’t one star but four of them, ruled in their intricate dance by the bright Regulus A that fueled itself by stealing mass from the others. Typical behaviour for remote rulers, Heather had joked.

She still didn’t have a better word than “reliable” for the tiaras. She wanted the wearer’s thoughts to not be controlled by some far off ruler, so if they obeyed or became part of a community, it was their own considered choice. Self-rule. “Autonomy”! That was the word she was searching for. Not political autonomy, like the Hajduk Republic. Not financial autonomy, like that provided to a community by a copia.

Mental autonomy.

The freedom to rule your own mind.

A tiara you could trust your mental autonomy to, because it was trustworthy.

Everything was coming together. Thoughts flowed through her head now, not in a trickle but in a raging torrent, and the only problem was having her mind move fast enough to catch them. Rule her own mind!

Nadine: “Minion, boost the size of my working memory, please.” She felt the gel pads move into place, not flipping to velife, but going beyond what was needed just for normal orglife mode. She lay down anyway, just in case.

The tiaras needed to be more than trustworthy: they needed to be provably trustworthy. It was similar to the problem about monitoring hardware alterations to mythoi in order to prevent them being subverted. But did it really need third parties with cameras watching? No! There was a better way.

The Wombles could have people issue statements saying what they had personally witnessed, covering each step from design philosophy to every change made to the hardware and software design, through manufacture of the individual tiara, all the way to its delivery into the hands of the wearer at the far end of the supply chain. Every link in the chain supported by a statement, every statement supported by a full sense recording showing that the person making the statement believed it to be true. Archive the statements, put them in a standard format that a person’s existing expert system could verify, and link them cryptographically to the item itself to avoid substitutions. It would be rock solid, something no other tiara provider could match!

And the process would need to be rock solid. Not just to prove to customers that none of the Wombles had retained the power to later change their mind and enslave all the people wearing the trustworthy tiaras, but to prove it to the hunters, the power elite willing to do anything in order to gain such control, even kidnap and torture poor Wombles. The scene with Jincan standing over Alderney’s tortured body on the beach near Torello? She never ever wanted that to happen in arlife. The very thought of it made her want to throw up.

Who would give up the power to rule millions and live like gods?

She would, the Wombles would. They’d give it up as thoroughly as they could, and be totally transparent about doing so, because if they didn’t then they wouldn’t live at all.

Tomsk had called for revolution but she didn’t want to engage in a political fight against the world’s foremost political experts. It would be as futile as engaging in a stand-up player killing fight against Soul Bound’s most experienced clan of player killers.

What had Bahrudin said? “If you’re losing a battle, change the battlefield.”

Well, instead of aiming for a political revolution they ought to aim for an economic or technological one. Nobody had tried to oppose the material science revolution, that had swept away whole industries. It would have been futile. Once a product was just plainly better and everyone knew it, people didn’t voluntarily pick the inferior option. All the previous manufacturers had been able to do was quit the market or change their own product to use the new stronger materials.

That’s the mission. That’s what the wombles needed to aim for.

By New Year’s Eve there would be 100,000,000 heads wearing third gen tiaras, and what the Wombles needed to do was make sure all one hundred million of those tiaras were trustworthy, by setting up standard certification, publicising it, and getting their own implementation out there - an implementation popular enough to demonstrate to the existing tiara manufacturers that if they didn’t get certified as trustworthy, they would get utterly trampled in the market. Bungo had given her the clue - apply your leverage! In fact hadn’t Tomsk said the same about soft style martial arts? Get your opponent to do most of the work.

Achieve that, make a distributed Burrow and Wellington’s unsnoopable communication protocols part of the standard, tie it into the ability to make your own believable witness statements, participation in the gratitude economy and the ability to build up reputation with mythoi… do that, and and everything else would follow.

She collapsed, and lay on her back in a field next to her kafana, looking up at the stars, feeling she could float away; her body was so light, and yet heavy at the same time. It was a very strange feeling, as though just for a moment, the whole galaxy had been rotating about her.

Nadine: “Minion, brain boost off. Did I take any damage?”

Minion: [No my Queen, but your neurotransmitters may be feeling depleted for a few minutes. I recommend not standing up until you feel steady.]

She lay there for a long while, until she felt herself shiver, then slowly got up and went inside to make herself some coffee. Rather than drinking it in the kitchen, she decided to celebrate by putting it on a tabla, the proper copper serving tray, with all the accoutrements, including a lokum, and taking it through to the bar to eat at a table by the stage.

Come to think of it, this was the same table where she had put her new tiara to calibrate it, just two weeks ago. How much had changed since then. But she was dithering no longer. She was ready to take on leadership, she knew where she wanted to lead them to.