The Second Sphere

A consortium of leading peace activists and human rights organizations founded the Green Revolution soon after development of the Source. It was a somewhat anarchistic experiment in popular resistance. Pierre Gonzalez, a former priest from Quebec City and the leader of the Peace Forever organization, and Tatum O’Donnell, an ex-professional football player and gay rights activist were the faces of the organization. They took the name of the mid-twentieth century agricultural upheaval that industrialized food production to ground the movement in the difficult position of working with technology while retaining a connection to humanity. Or so they said.

They battled non-violently, all Kumbaya and give peace a chance, against the Source requirements and the coerced migration of those without power to the outer spheres, saying that individuals should have the right to create their own emotional, information hubs in this new environment, that we only re-created the failed social structures of past societies. These were ideas that the Three Spheres government didn’t find amusing, but not terribly threatening. The GR was a lot of buzz with no sting.

The movement swelled quickly, their ideology quite appealing, particularly to those who’d drawn the short end. They seemed a peaceful and vocal opposition, even reasonable at the time, a movement based on democracy and freedom of expression.

But rather abruptly, about 150 years ago, they became violent. No one was quite sure what made them turn, though there was speculation, which eventually became dogma, that it was their failure to make real gains peacefully that caused their actions, that the insurrectionist wing of the movement essentially took over.

Just around that time, Pierre and Tatum died in separate accidents, Pierre in a house fire and Tatum in a transport accident, which led to speculation that the TSG now had the Green Revolution in its cross hairs. Prematurely, pundits announced the end of the GR.

But, as bombings on the moon and Mars began to happen every few weeks, disrupting the lives of the very people they claimed to want to help, and creating an urgent push for more and more security, those same pundits realized that they were mistaken. The damage was generally minimal, a person here, twenty people there; a few hundred to a thousand at most. But still, they scared the hell out of nearly everyone. Any other GR leadership recognized by the TSG faded. The well-structured organization became totally de-centralized.

The Intelligence community, after connecting the dots for TSG leadership, won access to records at the Source, searching the minds of those who were suspected of this terrorism. Unfortunately, what we found was almost as disturbing as the violence the GR perpetrated--nothing. No bombing, meeting, or assassination left a trace after the fact. It was as though the GR didn’t exist. The common explanation was that the GR discovered a way to manipulate the Source. And that’s what scared decision-makers the most. Unfortunately, we had to rely on traditional investigative methods to fight them.

Tens of years ago, Laslow Intelligence and most everyone else in the field realized that to stop the GR, we needed to stop their money, which seemed ample. If we stopped the funding, then the bombs would stop. Most of us fancied ourselves smarter than the average terrorist. Of course, the whole effort was simpler to speak about than it was to execute.

Most of our analysts suspected that the largest source of funds for the Green Revolution came from illicit activity. This illegal activity included selling banned enhancements, particularly Love.

They were also thought to control the illegal sale of transfers. When the wealthy tired of their body and wanted a new one, they dumped their relatively new, attractive transfer, or, more accurately, threw them away. Some resourceful people—the GR, the intelligence community speculated, and which I knew to be fact--harvested these dumped transfers and rented them as prostitutes.

Transfers of course, weren’t quite human if they didn’t have a real person’s being encoded on their chip and had no connection to the Source. They were lifeless dummies that could be programmed to do whatever their programmer wanted them to do. It wasn’t long before they became the sex trade.

It was this connection between the illegal trades and the Green Revolution that led me to Cody. He was one of my best informants, delivering great intel on more takedowns then I could count. I had other sources, people whom I felt comfortable going to occasionally. But they were often less forthcoming with information, and more suspicious of handshake agreements.

And I didn’t have the same kind of arrangement with them as I had with Cody. He and I had a high level of comfort, a tremendous belief in the other. Only in the last six months had his information been less than perfect. There was the wrong date of a targeted assassination of a senator on Mars and incorrect coordinates of a cell’s safe house. I wanted to explain the percentages to Bryant to show him that there was no crisis. Everyone made mistakes. But observing his sallow, less-than-pleased-face, I knew that wouldn’t play.

“I need to talk to him, boss.”

“Orion--”

“I’ve got to talk to him before I can think about telling you his name, much less bringing him in here, see if he’s willing to let us trace him. You know I’ve kept this one off the books.”

“And I told you for years that I don’t like it,” Bryant said with bluster.

“I’ll go see him tonight,” I said. “Just give me until tomorrow morning. If he won’t give me any reasonable explanation, or whoever is giving him the intel, then I’ll bring him in.”

Bryant’s fist dropped with a thwack. “You realize how this makes us look?”

“I know,” I said.

“We’re going to take heat for this.”

“I know, boss, but just give me some time to make it right.”

“Fine.” Bryant’s shoulders slumped for a moment and he pressed an index finger to his temple. “We’re on a call to Lance Heittmann whenever Rosie gets in here, assuming she gets here.”

“Got it, boss,” I said as I stood.

“You’ve got until tomorrow, Orion.”

I left Bryant’s office and stumbled down the hallway wondering whether I was as dumb as he made me out to be. Maybe I didn’t care anymore. Whatever the case, the insinuation that the entire New Mumbai fiasco was my fault irked me. The end of the day seemed distant. I wasn’t sure I could wait that long to talk to Cody.