King of All I Survey

After reviewing the details, I decided that President Arroyo's suggestion of adding Haiti to the UEC next, was a good one. We blanketed the country in surveillance drones, recording conversations and immediately picking up anyone we found in the process of violent crimes. Once word got out that people were disappearing and it was pretty obviously the work of the UEC, a few groups tried to barricade themselves in houses, with guns ready. It didn't help. The guns fell to the floor as the person holding it vanished. Then the guns, and any others in the vicinity vanished as well. The people reappeared in our simulation room jail cells where they would undergo extensive direct implant therapy. If they could be treated to the point where Joe judged them to be free from violent tendencies and safe to be on the loose among the public, then they would be released.

When we release them after therapy, we always provide them with jobs and a regular check-in to reinforce the therapy for a time. Just sending them back to the same environment and situation in which their violent ways thrived would be asking for recidivism.

Haiti needed a lot of rebuilding. It had never been rebuilt fully after the earthquake, there was some effort to rebuild, but much of the funding was lost to corruption (both from those in Haiti and from those in other countries). The corruption ran the gamut: from funds being diverted before they ever reached Haiti, being stolen or misdirected once they were in Haiti, or contractors taking the money and then either disappearing or cheaping out on the work with substandard materials and workmanship. Once word of the misused funds got out, aid dried up, and Haiti was left half in rubble, infrastructure badly damaged and a loss of faith in leadership or aid from outside the country.

Over 200,000 died in the earthquake, itself. Lack of basic infrastructure led to cholera outbreaks that killed thousands more. Hurricanes and tropical storms in several of the subsequent years compounded the problems. Lawlessness took over, overwhelming strained law enforcement and government services. Eventually, organized crime, strengthened by lack of effective opposition, stepped in, providing handouts of food, cash and even helping with some rebuilding in neighborhoods under their control, using the profits of their crimes. The recipients began to see them as a more immediate source of aid than the government, and things devolved from there. Eventually, the President was assassinated by two dozen men with guns. The office has not been filled in the more than three years since it happened.

Because Joe was able to unwind financial records both by finding paper documents and infiltrating any computer system, we were able to trace back some of the misappropriated aid funds although it had been 14 years since the earthquake. We took the people responsible for that as well if they were in Haiti. If they were in non-UEC territories, we simply seized their assets through electronic transfers and record manipulation. We also flagged them so that when we did take their countries, or if they ever travelled to one of ours, we would take them as well. As far I was concerned, stealing these aid funds was murder, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Haitians and extreme hardship for the entire population. You had to be psychological defective in order to do something like that, and the risk of further harm committed by these people was just too great.

So-called white-collar crimes like diverting funds, in cases like this, were some of the coldest, most cruel crimes imaginable. I could not fathom someone being willing to unleash a cholera outbreak on a city by stealing funds meant for sewage and water infrastructure repair. Babies were often the most severely affected, accounting for a disproportionate number of the deaths. If there was a hell, there must, I thought, be a special place reserved for the kind of people that were willing to cause that kind of harm to innocents so they could buy a bigger house and a bigger yacht. I could, through the use of our simulation room technology actually put them in a hell, however they imagined it in their worst nightmares. For the first time, I was tempted more than a little to do it. I didn't do it. I would not add my own morality to the list of their victims.

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During this same time, my second self was completed in body and mind. I half expected to feel some sort of connection or to be in two places at once, kind of like when I tried using the android body and my own at the same time. But there was none of that. We were two separate people with identical traits, memories and personalities. Joe said that the second me, was more like Maribel, in that the systems driver its (his, my?) emotions and thoughts were less sloppy than the organic systems of my real body, but would have a more than 99% match rate with me if we were both given the same set of circumstances. Each day, Joe took any new memories of mine, including internal dialogues and even dreams, and duplicated them in the other me, then vice versa.

The end result was that the next day, I remembered the thoughts and actions of both bodies as if they were mine. It was almost like living two days every day. There was no real sense of simultaneity between the two, just another day's worth of memories added to mine. Joe also used the time to 'monitor drift' and make slight corrections to my alternate self if needed to keep our thought processes synchronized. He said the main reason for the drift was because of one crucial difference between the two of us. My duplicate knew he was duplicate.

I could feel that knowledge too in the memories that originated with him. It was unsettling at first, but we would each have half of our memories created knowing we were the real me, and half knowing we were a duplicate. Joe said he had to use a tempering filter to weight these particular feelings differently in each of us or we'd quickly lose our 'selves' and have a constant identity crisis trying to figure out who we were. It wouldn't be bad at first, he said, but over time, we'd get more and more mixed up about whether we were the original Timothy Aaron Bailey, or Tim Two. Eventually, he said, the probable outcome would be a creeping paranoia that we both felt we were real and the other was trying to steal that real identity and make us become the duplicate. We'd be at a constant state of psychological war with… well, with our 'selves'.

It could really get like something out of the Twilight Zone, I thought. I kind of wish Joe had mentioned that before. I wasn't entirely comfortable with the fact, that Joe was actively tampering in duplicates head, which somehow passed his personal morality guidelines, because it wasn't a 'real' person. It seemed to me, however, that by incorporating those altered reactions into my real brain each day, I was, in fact being 'altered.' Joe said he didn't see it that way.

It didn't occur me until later, but the constant copying and transferring of my complete daily memory set, meant that from that point on, he was literally reading my every thought. It was now impossible for me to keep secrets from him. If I had doubts or concerns about Joe, he would know. While he said direct tampering without consent was against his own moral code, I knew he would have the ability to edit those doubts and concerns out of my psyche every day.

Did I trust him? Could I afford to trust him? On the other hand, could I afford not to trust him. He was the reason I was even in the position I was in. His help was what would keep Earth from being destroyed by powerful alien civilizations.

In contemplating this, I realized that those diverting crucial aid funds from places like Haiti, were in fact, no different from the civilizations that would raze Earth or the bug-world for profit. There entire populace was at a minimum aware of what their leaders were doing, if not actively participating. They certainly benefitted from those actions. Another part of me said, Joe was also aware of those actions and had every ability to stop them, but hadn't.

Anyway, without getting too caught up in the gymnastics of an eight-year-old's logic, it was during this exact period when I began to doubt Joe's benevolent intentions. And I knew he knew I doubted. I guess, the fact that these doubts existed and didn't disappear from my head overnight was a good sign that maybe he wasn't just using me as some sort of playing piece on his grand chess board to alleviate some eternal boredom or whatever, but maybe that was just a part of his game, too.