When one of the reporters present at the press conference had asked if he could attach his AI (Artificial Intelligence) “Einstein” (the successor to the rather slow, stupid, ancient “Newton” palmtop), gray-haired “Old” Bill (as the industry called him) agreed. The result was a disaster for Old Bill; the reporter’s AI had correctly divined that it was connected to an enemy computer and had imaged the hard drive onto it’s unused space before activating a self-defense program that wiped Old Bill’s drive and made the head of the hard drive on Bill’s desktop unit vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to burn out the motor. Within seconds, Bill’s demonstration was in ruins as the thermal control circuitry mediated by the software on the hard drive died and his secretly overdriven eight gigabit per second processor cooked itself in an futile attempt to compensate. Smoke poured from the demo unit as “Old” Bill went down in flames.
In the meantime, aside from Microsoft’s difficulties, food and housing riots would ensue from the increasing rate of joblessness, causing the State to focus on “Bread and Circuses” as it had in Rome. Only this time, it would be “TV Dinners and TV” for the masses. Food stamps would be replaced by TV stamps; which would guarantee every “citizen” full Cable TV, an eight megabit per second Internet connection and five POP accounts as well as a Web site and three TV dinners (approved by the FDA) per day. Within ten years a Constitutional Amendment would be passed denying the right to vote to anyone who was on TV welfare. Nutrition would slide into a pit from which the public would never emerge. Agribusiness would make fortunes from the government giveaway of TV dinners. It wasn’t necessary to waste any advertising monies to leverage the populace out of the trap which it had complacently allowed itself to fall into. The national taste in TV programming would slide southward of Italian TV. Nudity and fetishism would be commonplace. Drug use would be almost universal as the people gave themselves over to hopelessness. The only bright side to the dismal future which Thomas beheld in his mind was that the police would give up their fruitless drug wars against the poor and desperate.
By that time, the drug lords would be part of the elite and warfare against them would be made illegal. Marijuana would be part of what kept Amerika from revolting against its masters and would become part of the “Bread and Circuses” program (as it was derisively referred to in closed Senate Conferences on ‘How to Deal With Popular Unrest”) What the drugs didn’t take, State-sponsored gambling in the form of the lottery would. When that failed, the Federal government would lower taxes on alcohol substantially in order to keep the populace drunk, drugged and hooked on TV. By that time, there would be no difference at all between organized crime and the government. They were the same animal. The personages who ruled either organization would be the same. “A difference which makes no difference is no difference”, ipso facto, the government would become a criminal organization.
Actually the changes in government attitude had been happening since WWII, but no one wanted to admit it. Once Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States, who acted as the “situation manager” that ordered BATF to assault and burn a wooden church building full of parishioners in Waco, Texas down to the foundations in “order to protect the children” inside, it became supremely evident that the government’s gloves were off. No group or people could resist the will of the Federalist apparatchiks. To resist the government meant death. The Constitution of the United States of America was a de facto joke to anyone “in the know” by the year 2000.
The small town governments acted accordingly and rewrote the law of the land as they went. Citizens had no rights. The rights of the people that weren’t subsumed into the power-hungry maw of the Federal government were left as crumbs for the black-hearted crows of State and Local tyrannies. Populations and private property became financial resources to be “harvested” at will. The lawless cops could do as they pleased; they were the official “gangs” that enforced the illegal and immoral acts of local governments gone mad.
Amerika was, ipso facto, in a legal state of anarchy. There was no law, only the ever-changing and bribe-biased opinions of the rulers. When the government breaks the law, there is no law, only individuals trying to survive. The government tried to stem the tide by invoking the death penalty in as many cases as it could, but its efforts only cheapened lives and made murder more prevalent. The message from the government was clear and understood by those who lived by violence. Murder by government or individual was in, tolerance was out.
In 1998, one group of heinous white-supremacists in small town of Texas beat up an African-American and tied him to their pickup truck to drag their victim down the street. They left pieces of the innocent man all over the highway. The press went crazy for twenty-four hours decrying the injustice of the black man’s death and then fell silent as the poor man’s demise fell out of public interest. He was only another victim. America had become a land of victims.
The Amerikan government had made it clear that it was the enemy of religion and of the people as a whole. Local and Federal Judges and Prosecutors died by the dozens as the people made their personal will known and followed the moral example of the government. IRS agents had been ordered to arm themselves in the late nineteen-eighties. In many ways this had been a good idea for its time; when one sends lawless thugs out to mug the American public, Americans have a disconcerting tendency to shoot at robbers no matter who their criminal “Godfathers” might be.