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“… that Jehovah’s real father is the King of Spain!”
They’re wrong.” An angelic calm dawned on Sniper’s face. “The Hives are separate because they stand for separate things. I’m a Humanist. I’m not taking orders from any Mason, and I don’t think a Mason should take orders from a Humanist.
The Hive system made monarchy popular again by eliminating the risk of tyranny, since if a bad Emperor came along, all the Masons would just switch Hives,
While I slept, the world spent these five hours trying to make sense of how one woman could have twisted all seven Hives into passing power to a single Youth.
“It’s unthinkable!” the Vice President railed. “Sniper, who we thought was our brightest star, not just defending mass murder, not just committing mass murder, but crowning it with this attempt on the life of a Romanovan Tribune! Never in my life did I expect to feel ashamed to be a Humanist, but how can I not? We’re the guilty ones! Europe and the Mitsubishi were complicit, but Humanists conceived this,
the Anonymous serves truth,
our Hive’s most prized conviction, our love of human excellence, has degenerated into a cult of celebrity which hands power to the most charming, regardless of how rotten they are inside.
The Humanists don’t have that excuse. We have open elections, the most open in history, and still we elect nothing but murderers!
nothing but murderers because the voters who elect them are all murderers themselves!”
“It’s called the Wish List.
Arrest Ganymede, yes, but don’t make me President! You trust the Anonymous, I trust the Anonymous. If I became President, the Anonymous through me would lead the Humanists wisely until the next election, but the system wouldn’t change!
this Hive which breeds competition, and glory-seeking, and backstabbing, and idol worship, and will keep producing murderers as long as it exists!”
Dissolve the Humanists! Dissolve the Hive! Make all current Humanists into Graylaw Hiveless,
“Friends, do not be deceived. I am the Anonymous. DeLupa has been my Proxy in the past, but I did not write the speech they just delivered, nor do I support their call to disband the Humanists. DeLupa is exploiting my name to trick you.”
Back off, or it’s not the Humanists you’re going to destroy, it’s the office of Anonymous.”
the list of Gag-genes rested here, the Registry of Sensayers’ Beliefs, logs of Censors’ Office predictions, the wills and marriage contracts of Earth’s remaining monarchs, and in Vault Four the true names of the Seventh Anonymous and their six predecessors. Here, with Jehovah’s blood crusting his black left sleeve with brown, the Emperor waited.
For your sake I did manage, at least, to ask the Anonymous why he picked DeLupa as his Proxy in the first place. He answered that, of the ambitious young Humanists he had found flocking Buenos Aires, DeLupa had seemed the emptiest.
“On this, the third day of May in the year twenty-four thirty,” he read aloud, “I, the Sixth Anonymous, appoint as successor, and Seventh in my line, Vivien Ancelet.” “The Censor?”
Brody. Ah, and here’s your nine hundred eighty-nine million,” he pinched the paper to underline the name he sought, “for Mycroft Canner.”
“I don’t think any Mason, Brillist, or even Cousin here can claim the Humanists are the only ones who’ve ever wished Mycroft Canner dead.
Cousins. We’ve lost Sniper, that’s irreparable now. We’re going to lose Ganymede, Chief Director Andō, and Casimir Perry.”
“Now you’ve lost me, too, at least as your Anonymous. Madame D’Arouet—Joyce Faust—has been exposed. We might lose J.E.D.D. Mason, who, all else aside, kept things civil by making Andō and Caesar and Spain and Felix Faust all think of each other as family.
Bryar Kosala, who stepped out of the Senate doors behind to watch her husband and lover finally—in the public eye—reveal themselves as one.
Humanist Senators should have no difficulty passing a vote of No Confidence in the current Humanist government. In the emergency election that follows, if I am nominated for office in the Hive, whether President or any other office, I will accept, and, since all the other Hives still trust me, hopefully I can help oversee the Humanists as we transition to a system without O.S.”
gives all nouns the capitalized dignity which its bastard cousin English reserves only for names, Gods, concepts, and the selfish I.
We now know that the CFB staff has been altering this data by changing the computer’s search terms. For example, the terms ‘land grab’ and ‘turf slurp’ are both slang for the Mitsubishi effort to buy up land, so letters using those phrases are usually sorted into the same folder.
This prevented the Cousins’ Board from taking action to place more blocks on Cousins selling land to Mitsubishi. That’s just one example.
The common belief within the CFB is that they invented the trick in the twenty-three forties, but the Anonymous quickly realized what they were doing and blackmailed
“Now,” she continued, “this makes it sound as if the Anonymous has been corrupting the CFB to their own ends, but the facts do not support that. Upon deeper examination, the alterations I discovered are primarily reactive, engineered to conceal brief spikes or drops in the number of letters on a subject, and always relating either to some new Masonic law or policy, or to a subject that the Anonymous is about to publish an editorial about.
In other words, the Anonymous and the team at the CFB have been altering the letter sorting to prevent Cousin policy from being dictated by short-term, emotional reactions to Masonic policies or the Anonymous’s own editorials.”
The information I have seen suggests that, if not for the Anonymous controlling the CFB, the Hive’s core political policies would have been dictated all these years by wild short-term oscillations of opinion, resulting in a chaotic and panic-driven system incapable of long-term stability.
the Cousins would have suffered crippling economic decay over the past century, or even fallen apart, rather than remaining the second-largest Hive.
“In brief, this conspiracy’s effect has been to conceal and protect the Cousins from the fact that the feedback system does not work as a form of government.
“The CFB has not been shut down,” she continued. “Letters are coming in, in unprecedented numbers, and a new and uncorrupted staff has been there all day sorting them.
first demand is that I resign as Chair.” Could you, like Kosala, reader, deliver such words without even a wince? “This cannot be treated until the Administrative Board convenes tomorrow morning, but if at that time the board consents, I will step down.
shall pursue the second suggestion, supported by over one billion Cousins, who have requested that we enter negotiations with Emperor Cornel MASON, first to have the Masonic Hive take over administration of our most vital social services, schools, hospitals, and such, to buffer them through this transition, and second to begin the process of merging the Cousins with the Masons, not fully but as a sub-Hive, like Greenpe—”
“Heloïse!” Kosala cried. “What are you doing here?”
“An interim constitution. Seigneur Jehovah had it in His jacket. He and I spent all last night drafting it. You can use it to transition away from the CFB!”
one. It’s ready to implement. It uses strats and interest groups to divide the Cousin population into two hundred and twenty voting groups, which will each elect a representative to a temporary
my name is Heloïse D’Arouet. I am Tribune Jehovah Mason’s bash’mate and fiancée.
“He had me help because I grew up with gender.”
“The Tribune and I both grew up with gender, so we can see and talk about the Cousins clearly, where no one else can.”
“Being a Cousin is all about gender. Specifically about the feminine. I don’t mean anything biological, I mean the old cultural construction. All the eclectic things we associate with Cousins—nurturing, helping, healing, child rearing, tenderness, charity, welcoming the lonely, comforting the sick, tempering the violent—they’re all things that, in olden days, were associated with the feminine.
That’s what happened when we suddenly silenced gender. The broad, vague, cultural concepts of masculine and feminine had served a lot of social functions beyond oppression.
Since masculine was the empowered gender, the rushed transition encouraged everyone to act masculine, and all at once humanity went from a race of half peacemakers to a race where those with instincts toward the feminine felt ashamed of the label, or ended up sheltering in its only acceptable modern form.”
Renunciation. That’s the heart of the Hive, but the words are taboo so no one dares admit it, and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it’s teetering!
How could the CFB’s computer sorting figure out what the Hive really wants when the words we need to express it are forbidden? Motherly affection, sisterly devotion, uxorial duty, filial piety.
Think of the Set-Set Riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset?
motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children.
“Someone just blew up the European Parliament!”
