Project Mayhem vs. Big Brother

Cafe Society
1

I’m working on a story in which the protagonist finds himself in a technologically-evolved 1984 police state. The government owns everything, including you. There is no censorship as such. Instead, the government taxes you based on how good a citizen you are. Can’t pay the taxes? The government forecloses on you, and sells you to the highest bidder.
Within this soceity, there are a group of people who have decided to bring the government down by any means necessary. Many of them are willing to die to help this goal. They communicate through stegnographay (sp): They have arranged signals hidden in the next-gen version of the internet.

Now, the question: who will win? Given my knowledge of humans, I assume that even if I had the ubergov catch the terrorists, more would join up. Conversley, I can’t really think of any way that a distributed group of terrorists could take down a planetary government, without resorting to killing off a sizable percentage of the population of the planet. (Hmmm. Possibility?)
So, does anyone see an alternating ending besides an unsatisfying status quo?

2

If a threatening guy is standing on a soapbox, you can take him down by punching him, or you can do something to the soapbox. Mayhem took the soapbox. What do you suppose its success was like?

3

Hmm… I’d go with an ending something like that in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, and as an added little touch maybe have the main character tell the main leader he is “sold” in the end (a la twilight zone’s “Obsolete Man”) or something like that…

4

The only reason the real “Project Mayhem” worked on the screen is that they pulled this stuff in America, which is a pretty open society. If they tried that in, say, North Korea, they’d get their lungs handed to them within the week, no matter how great their stenography or secret handshakes were.

In any real “Big Brother” Stalinist society, forget it. They stand no chance at all. THOSE societies tend to get shut down from within the government–i.e., an army-led coup, bloodless or otherwise, a termination of the leader from within parliament (such as with Gorbachev, although he wasn’t Stalinist), or the death of whover has the whole personality cult thing going (Stalin, himself).

Civilians who try to overthrow totalitarian regimes get strung up by their intestines, and every one of their relatives becomes intimately acquainted with the gulag for 25 years or so. This is always enough to cow the rest of the civilian population into submission, especially when you consider that these governments rely very heavily on their secret police.

That said, Robert, it’s an interesting topic. Let us know how it works out.

5

I’ve got more of my story, if anyone’s interested.

The setup: sometime in the (relative) near future, a way to eliminate many diseases from almost all organisms is perfected. Lifespans shoot up, plagues (including STDs) and blights are a thing of the past. Life is good.
Now, most animals’ population is controlled by food supply and diseases. Humans are also controlled by war. Remove famine and plague from the equation, and things look bad.
Fortunately for the human race, some people notice this ahead of time, and send out colony ships to nearby star systems. The early ones are sleep ships, loaded with cryogenically stored people and tools. Soon (after many sleeper ships, before anything too big happens on Earth) FTL is invented. It’s a standard Gate deal: big shiny things in space that can connect two unconnected points. However, it’s useless for getting to places you haven’t already been to and built a gate at.
So, early ships still in the void moving at relativistic speeds (and some ‘young’ colonies), and ships that used a proto-Gate engine that requires little fuel and is a basic sci-fi starship engine as far as intra-solar system flight is concerned (accounting for planetary revolution, of course). Ships with really good proto-Gate drives left later and arrived earlier than most ships.
Now, picture humankind scattered amongst the stars. Due to the difficulty of synching colony start times, very few inter-system Gate connections exist. The colonies that started later have intra-system gates, to facilitate bringing raw material from planet to planet in bulk.

Enter the Mothership.
The Mothership was the last thing to come out of Earth before it got blown to hell. It can warp without Gates, doesn’t use fuel, and is Turing-intelligent. It owes alliegence to humanity as a whole, and showed up at the location of the last-launched colony ship before it did. It helps set up an interplanetary trade network, can zip people or gates to uncharted locations, and refuses, on pain of self-exile, to let anyone examine it in detail.

So, the human federation, based on peaceful trade (The Mothership really doesn’t like interplanetary war) is humming along, when the Horde* attacks. The Horde is a horde of robotic Von Neumann killing machines. They descend on weak planets, kill everyone they can, smash or steal the technological infrastructure, and use it to attack the next planet. There have been many Human-Horde wars in the past, and at the time of the story, all is quiet on the galactic front.
We meet our character, who is on a research station which is attacked by the Horde for no apparent reason. He escapes, making it to a gate with the data that the station collected, and crashes on a nearby planet. He manages to beg, borrow, or steal transport off the planet, only to be met with a Horde offensive.
Meanwhile, Mothership is acting strangely.
I would point out that Gates can’t transmit signals (no galactic Internet), and that Gates require energy to bend space long distances. This means that the Horde can’t go from backwater-gate to Human Central. Neither can the protagonist, however.
Our hero decides that he has something powerful in the data he’s got, and tries to make his way to the seat of Government to present his data/point out that the Horde is following him. He can’t send an e-mail, because it might be intercepted, and because the odds are the Horde would pinpoint him with it. The story will be him trying to get from planet to planet without drawing attention to himself (he connects his presence on the local data nets with the horde assaults pretty quickly).

I’ve got a resolution for my above planet: The hero resorts to major crime, skips town ASAP, and hears that just as Big-Brother world is gearing up for war with the Horde, the last remnants of the dissidents sabotage everything they can. The horde massacres revolutionaries and opressors alike.

I’m still working on the climax, but I have the plot twist down: the Horde is a creation of Mothership. Mothership figured out from the destruction of Earth that people needed an enemy, and provided one. The plot twist will be found when our hero discoveres that the Horde has found several ancient sleeper-ship colonies that have denegerated into barbarism, and is re-civilizing them.

A note on interplanetary war between Horde and human: When a large fleet of horde ships is discovered coming out of a Gate, the humans send an SOS drone to the central government, and does their best to blow up their own gate before more Horde ships Gate in. The concept of self-destructing Gates was abandoned when the Horde caught on to sending small ships at random intervals with the sole intent of destroying Gates. Horde ships are several steps behind human technology: They can steal tech and learn tactics, but not research things themselves.

*I really don’t want to call it this. Please, suggest a better name.

My longest post to date! So, tell me what you think!

6

I thought of an idea while in the shower. Our hero is finally captured by the Horde when he tries to hide on an ancient sleep-ship colony world which the horde is developing. As a last-gasp measure, he sends off his data courier drone, pinpointing his location to the Horde in general and his hunters in particular.
He is caught, and the truth is revealed: The Horde doesn’t care about the data. It wants to know how he evaded capture so well. It decided that the conflict had improved him, just as it did the human race in general, and mounts up for a major offensive to improve the race more. It keeps him alive to study him, and learn what characteristics it should be watching for. (A note is that the Horde went after ‘inferior’ planets with much more force then working ones.) Meanwhile, our hero makes a startling discovery about his new home: (the primitive planet): The people there are all semi-related, and are very resistant to disease. It turns out that one of the colonists had been given the treatment which overpopulated Earth, and passed it on to his children, who were better adapted to survive rigourous colony life. Robert sends out the secret to a friend he made in his travels, who sends it to a friend, etc. Fast forward several years. Humans have gotten the treatment en masse. They are starting to be able to overpopulate the Horde. The Horde catches on, and retreats. Mothership, in a desperate attempt to stop humanity from killing itself like it did before, openly switches sides and manages to disrupt the Gate network. It’s not enough. Slowly, surely, humanity crawls from star to star. The protagonist will wonder, as he ages and notes what is ocurring from his home on the primitive world, what will happen when humanity hits the galactic rim, and runs out of room.

7

robert, I’m pretty well hammered at the moment, but if you drop me an e-mail, I’ll respond to it when I’m sober. I’ve written a lot of stuff in a similar vein (though I’ve not bothered to try to get it published yet), but I think that I can help you out. Damn, whiskey!