We are Cult: The Central Directorate (Chapter II)

That night I returned home and went to bed with a peculiar hunch. I woke amidst the night all sweaty and anxious. I rarely wake up during the night, I must have been dreaming. I know I did, yet I have no recollection of any dreams… or nightmares of mine. Maybe I wasn’t dreaming after all, maybe I woke up because of all that fuzz from the outside of my apartment, those horrific noises coming from the streets. For a moment there, I felt an unnatural breeze, as shivers run down my spine.

I grabbed the baseball bat I always keep hidden underneath my bed, then carefully got out of it to slowly approach the window. My knees half bent, almost crawling across the dark room, in an attempt to not get noticed. On the building right across the street, there were a few oversized shadows being projected, resembling human figures surrounded by a reddish halo. They were blending with each other, as if they were dancing around… or they could be fighting as well.

Over at that same building, I spotted an apartment where a dim night light was still on. I noticed a little girl, standing by her window grasping a teddybear. Somehow, she tracked my moving figure as her eyes got off the street, all the way up to my apartment, staring at me with no fear. I nodded, trying to urge her to back away from that window, but she didn’t move.

Damn… what if those troublemakers realize they are being watched, how will they react? Most importantly who are they and what are they doing outside at 3:00 a.m., I mean sure, the neighborhood is rarely completely empty and scarcely deadly silent, however, other than sporadic criminal incidents, we are not accustomed to such seemingly violent outbursts.

I tried to sneak a peek, but it was impossible, seems like they were located right underneath my building. I slightly opened my window, just enough to take a quick look at what was going on. Seems like a bunch of youngsters were wrecking a couple of parked cars. They were wearing masks, similar to the ones reported earlier on the news channel, they also held baseball bats and had already set several street dumpsters on fire.

One of the young scoundrels turned his look upside, to the apartment where the little girl was still spectating mesmerized, the night light from her room must have caught his attention. He swung his bat pointing to her direction, yet the child remained still. At that point I was ready to call the police… I didn’t! I don’t even know why I didn’t, I just kept staring at the scene.

The young man from the streets was wearing a shirt with a logo I haven’t encountered before, a red cycle with the letters R V L T encircled, colored red as well. Surprisingly, he removed the white mask from his face, held it besides him and yelled:

“No one can stop us! We are doing this for your generation…”

Before he finished his sentence, the sound of several gunshots echoed from not quite that far away. The young man was still staring at that little girl while dropping on his knees. A couple of police officers arrived at the spot on foot and kicked him on the ground. For cryin’ out loud, isn’t this a bit too far stretched? I mean, he was practically only just a teenager.

Suddenly, I felt enraged… It was the first time I was feeling anything after a long time!

Seems like similar such incidences were taking place in major cities all over the country. Obviously the news shared last night were not quite welcomed by the people, especially by the younger generations, suffering the most during these unprecedented times. Huh… who would have thought? I remember me smirking and thinking I somehow sensed a revolution might be coming.

So that’s what the logo on that kid’s shirt must have meant… ReVoLuTion!

I still remember those days…

What started off as a peaceful movement dedicated in spreading awareness, organized by just a group of a handful of individuals, promptly escalated vastly, progressing into a globally widespread societal destabilizing event.

To be fair the society was already closing in to a boiling point. Plenty of concerning signs were already evident. Fiscal injustice, job insecurity, financial instability, economic uncertainties, rising debt, housing crisis, heightened demand for additional power resources to sustain an ever growing population, extreme urbanization and increased crime rate, migrating populations due to war, famine and natural disasters, in addition to certain regions turning completely uninhabitable due to climate change.

The apparently valid allegations against corrupted officials, highly ranked within governmental agencies, financial institutions and global organizations, formulated and shared by The Cult of Revolutionaries, served as proof of humanity’s downfall in terms of ethical values and moral principles.

The ironic decision of the same officials to restrict human freedoms and rights, turned out to be the final push, leading people to revolt!

Anyways, after almost a decade and a half since the Second Rebellion took place, followed by its subsequent suppression by the ICMF, the International Conjointment of Military Forces, which came together to forcefully dismantle the uprise, we as a humankind have more critical and increasingly escalating issues to deal with.

Climate change proved to be irreversible and its effects accelerated at a fast pace, turning certain regions of the Earth completely uninhabitable. The air quality greatly diminished, especially in major cities where the vast majority of the human population currently resides in.

Both have essentially been attributed to fossil fuel behemoths, still purposefully stalling the mass adoption of electric vehicles and clean energy solutions to these very days, by pressuring local governments to not incentivize their uptake and further delay building an adequate infrastructure of commercial charging stations, as well as a network of power generation units for producing sufficient amounts of renewable energy, either at a household or professional scale.

The suppression of the Second Rebellion was followed by a major global economic collapse, which was actually perceived as an opportunity by the world’s superpowers to impose their sovereignty over the populous and reform the political and financial landscape.

Local governments of countries still not abolished, now report to a Central Directorate, which upon establishment, almost immediately instated GSI, the Global Sovereign Identity, a novel technology to enforce control over people. With this digital identity, data of individuals are being communicated with and processed by an artificial intelligence empowered server, Sofia a.i., then stored centrally and shared with private corporations paying hefty amounts for such information.

Social security and tax identification numbers, personal health records and health insurance plans, level and type of education, job description and employment status, criminal records, properties and assets, spending accounts and aggregated data thereof for advertisement and marketing purposes. One I consider especially annoying, the Social Status ID which depends on a multifactorial algorithm taking all previous information under consideration and assigned by Sofia a.i.

These are only examples of the information being handled by the Central Directorate. So many additional composite output data derive from processing of this base layer.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.