The Unincorporated Man (47 page)

As soon as an opportunity arose to leave, she grabbed it. It seemed she’d been awarded an internship with TerraCo, an interplanetary terraforming corporation. The internship had been arranged quietly by Sean’s parents with Elizabeth’s father’s approval (without either of the teenagers’ knowledge). But for Elizabeth it wouldn’t have mattered. It was a great opportunity for adventure. In a little lie that would have repercussions far beyond what she ever could have imagined, Elizabeth broke the news to Sean. Rather than hurt him by saying she
wanted
to leave, she told him she
had
to. The easy patsy for her desire to not hurt him was the incorporation movement itself. Elizabeth told him that she had to go because she didn’t own a majority of herself. Of course, Sean offered to buy her majority on the spot, but she’d told him that she wanted to earn her majority on her own, a common work ethic among the pennies. The truth was that for someone as deeply in love and, most would argue later, “disturbed,” as Sean was, there would have been no good reason. Elizabeth’s departure left him devastated, with only one glimmer of hope. She would one day return.

Though he knew in his heart that Elizabeth didn’t love him, and was even aware that she’d been dating other men and women, he held out hope. He knew that after ten, twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years she’d want the type of life only he could offer her, and then… then she’d return to his waiting arms. This was yet another way in which Sean Doogle had separated himself from the masses. He wasn’t interested in instant gratification, and was willing to wait for however long it took to get what he wanted. So he said good-bye, confident that Elizabeth the stable hand would one day return to him, and they would then live happily ever after.

Three months later she was as gone as gone could get in the unincorporated world. She’d been transferred to a top security site run by GCI near Neptune. It was one of those deals in which she’d agreed to give GCI sixty-plus years of her life, working in high-risk areas, in return for self-majority and a great benefits package. This had the intended effect of cutting Elizabeth off from Sean. It did not, however, cut off Sean’s memory of her.

He had, at his own expense and on a newly purchased property, built an extraordinary stable. Though it was a bit of an extravagance, he’d arranged for Elizabeth’s horses to be allowed to wander and graze undisturbed on the land. Her parents hadn’t minded, thinking it would perhaps make a good transition for Sean’s eventual acceptance of Elizabeth’s departure. Sean also had the stable equipped with a salt lick and a watering trough that would only activate in the horses’ presence. It dropped hay and was cared for by an elderly couple. This stable, he believed, would help him remember his love without the memory being too painful.

The rest of his life was mired in misery, and there was little anyone could do about it. He was barely an adult who owned an almost incontestable 75 percent of himself. When he finally did lose his virginity it was two years after Elizabeth had left, and it was to a girl who looked, but was not like, the fearless stable hand from his “youth.” He felt so guilt-ridden about having betrayed his love that he didn’t try it again for years, and never had anything close to a normal sex life. He was lost and going through the motions of living when he came across a listing for a tiny college-based political/economic organization called the Majority Party.

And so it was that Sean Doogle finally awoke out of his morass. If it was not for the fact that Elizabeth was a penny she could have stayed with him. The idea that she would have left him regardless was something Sean was no longer capable of entertaining. He now had his answer. His raison d’être. Incorporation had stolen Elizabeth away from him, and so incorporation was going to pay. The sad fact was that had Sean not been a majority shareholder of himself, his “eccentricities” and clear streak of depression would have made him a prime candidate for a psychological audit. But Sean had about as much freedom as a person could expect in the incorporated world, and so his odd behavior, very much like the rich and famous before him, was tolerated.

Sean took to the new group like a nanite to a molecule, and quickly established himself as a leader. And like other leaders before him, it was his eyes that told you this was a man you should pay attention to or, conversely, avoid. His eyes seemed to have two modes. They either blazed or smoldered. When he was trying to convince or make converts they tended to blaze. It was when he was quiet that they would smolder, dwelling on some injustice or problem that he felt only he alone could solve. Still, his intensity was a useful trait to have as the leader of a fringe political party that most in society felt was pointless or, at best, offered a modicum of comic relief.

The group’s political history had been brief. It had been formed only within the last thirty years and supported the radical notion that people should, as an inalienable right, control a majority of themselves. This radical idea had very little support among the public at large, and was severely frowned upon by the corporations and the government.

The humorous point, and one harped upon by a mostly hostile media, was that the bulk of the party’s membership, as well as its entire leadership, had self-majority. It seemed to be an indelible truth of political history that fringe movements survived by the efforts of the desperate and the rich. In the modern society that had emerged since the Grand Collapse there were very few desperate individuals or groups. This meant that the Majority Party was made up of the rich.

The truth of the matter was, government did
so little
that most people
cared little
about politics, and certainly not in the way people of the past had. After all, the government did not tax, which had been the main focus of the people’s concern with government for centuries. No matter what the idiots in Geneva decided, they’d only be able to take 5 percent of a person’s income—ever. This meant that the people could ignore this relatively harmless and predictable aspect of their lives. Truth be told, an individual’s parents took a whopping 20 percent of their earnings, which meant that the family had far more impact on a person’s life than government ever would or could. Which, most reasoned, was how it should be.

Also, the government services that ancient Americans were once forced to use had been either limited or eliminated. For instance, such societal needs as mail, health care, unemployment, welfare, retirement, and disaster relief were no longer handled by the government. Police and law, formally a pre-GC government monopoly, were constitutionally made open to competition from private enterprise. The current grand old political party was the Libertarians, and they were completely devoted to limiting government power. The opposing party was an offshoot of the Libertarians. They were called the Eliminationist Party, and their platform was predicated on the belief that corporate society had evolved beyond the need for government
at all
. For decades the Eliminationists remained a fringe party because of their shortsighted insistence on scrapping all government everywhere. Because corporate society was inherently conservative, and the party’s platform too radical, the Eliminationist movement never got off the ground. However, with the rise to power of one Shannon Kang, the party managed to right itself by taking a different and more tactful approach. Instead of calling for the elimination of all government, they began to push for something they termed a “government-free zone.” This “zone,” it was proposed, could be a continent or terraformed moon or planet. In this zone they sought to let the corporate society function without government interference, using the rule promulgated by David Friedman. The rule stated that a society could be run, even at the point of enforcing and creating laws, using the machinery of capitalism itself. And Friedman’s theory had been proposed before the culturally enforcing effect of incorporation had been discovered. The government-free-zone idea appealed to a large enough audience that it had paid dividends politically, and for the first time in centuries an opposition party had come into existence. However, the Libertarians were still in a comfortable majority.

While this course of political events, certainly with the rise of a new opposition party, may have seemed exciting to someone from pre–GC, to a citizen of the present it would be about as exciting as watching a university chess club discuss its charter. Politics were never a public draw, and the competing party’s only audiences were usually themselves.

Into this political snoozefest, and trailing the Eliminationists by a light year, came a third political group known as the Majority Party. It started out more as a joke amid some college students needing a fun project for a fluff class they’d all been taking. The project had to do with how to make a positive change in society. After many debates it was decided that the basic idea of the proposed party would be to help those who would have little time or inclination to help themselves. These young idealists decided that since everyone they knew at their wealthy and exclusive school had majority, it would be nice if everyone else did as well—and so was born their platform. Being young and well-intentioned, they created the idea while ignoring the obvious economic reasons not everyone had majority, and had a complete disregard for the consequences of the concept, should it ever come to fruition. The fact that they received poor grades for their “project” didn’t hinder them one bit. They were determined to better society for the common good, even if the recipients of that supposed good weren’t interested. In this they were rather like those well-meaning activists in city governments around turn-of-the-millennium America. Those activists, like the misguided Majority Party, had a similar logic. They, too, lived in large, spacious, well-lit, and convenience-filled homes and apartments. They, too, felt the burning desire to enact laws for the people’s “own good,” often to disastrous results. In fact, “low-income housing of the pre-GC” was still taught in most university econ courses as the epitome of government intervention gone awry.

But by the time the Majority Party got started, the very real pains that the pre-GC government intervention had wrought were a faded and distant memory, relegated to texts and not reality.

The Majority Party decided early on that the best way to get everyone a majority was to use the government’s power. The idea of an interventionist government was so abhorrent to society that for a number of years the party existed, it seemed, for the sole purpose of annoying as many people as possible. And in this, much to their parents’ embarrassment and dropped stock values, they succeeded mightily. Of course, only those who were guaranteed a comfortable majority, i.e., the entire makeup of the new party, would be able to flaunt society’s wishes so easily. However, for those truly working their way toward a majority the quickest way to kill a promising career, and therefore
not
achieve self-majority, would be to come out against private property and be in favor of government theft. Not likely, and hence the reason for the Majority Party’s tepid reception and inordinately low membership. Further, for those who made majority on their own, the thought of having the government take a percentage of their effort and hard work—beyond the constitutionally mandated 5 percent—was beyond the pale. And then, when it was pointed out that the only way to pay for the idea would be for the government to take 10 percent or reinstitute taxes, the reaction turned violent. And so, many an earnest and rich dilettante got the crap kicked out of him while failing to understand why the people he was trying to help the most tended to be the very ones who most wanted to kick the crap out of him. It wasn’t until Sean Doogle showed up that everything changed.

For Sean, the Majority Party was not a game, nor a way to piss off one’s parents before going into the family business—it was a passionate calling. When he spoke of the rights of everyone to own a majority of themselves, he did so with so much passion and conviction that even the most hardcore Libertarian might be swayed momentarily. Most eventually snapped out of it, but not all. Some became true believers and followers.

The first thing the exceptional orator did was to end a rift that had emerged in the party. The spat was about direction. Namely, whether to concentrate on giving a majority to everyone, or to simply push for a law that would state that no one who currently had a majority could ever lose it. The clear advantage of the latter school of thought was that in theory it was not only more palatable, it was also an idea that would not impinge on percentages or impose taxes. But after a few ardent speeches by Sean, the group was made to realize it was wrong to leave anyone enslaved. His reasoning, while making the party feel much more ideologically pure, destroyed any chance it would have to win over more than the barest sliver of the discontented.

But win that group over he did. His mantra was simple. It was all incorporation’s fault. And “all” encompassed everything. You’re poor, you can’t get a good job or good training, your stock price is too low, your girlfriend doesn’t love you because your stock price is too low, your dog died and you couldn’t afford to get him reanimated. The list was endless, the villain an easy mark, and the prophet exemplary.

The Majority Party headquarters was located in San Francisco in a Victorian building that was centuries old and had been rebuilt countless times. The house exterior was as exact as historical records could make it, and Sean was convinced that Mark Twain or Emperor Norton themselves would not have found the old abode out of place. But for Sean and the purists of the Majority Party that was not the reason for their chosen residence. They were not restorers or preservers by nature, being more interested in tearing down and disrupting. No, the house served a political purpose. As Sean or any of his followers would tell anyone willing to listen, the structure was created by free labor, i.e., noncorporate-built, and as such served as a symbol of the free men they wished their own society would aspire to be. If anyone were to point out that the house was built by Chinese laborers that had most likely been beaten, miserably paid, stolen from and/or taxed by various gangs and bureaucrats—the two not being mutually exclusive—the stalwarts of the Majority Party would have pooh-poohed the suggestion. In fact, one journalist had the temerity to suggest that any of the “free” workers of the past would have gladly killed for a chance to live in an incorporated world, with all its obvious benefits. He was ignored.