The Big Shift. Part 2. Year Zero

The Big Shift

Part 2

Year Zero

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(If you haven't read part 1 yet, here it is..)
https://steemit.com/story/@stillgideon/the-big-shift-part-1-the-rise-of-o-the-great-leader
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Pleased that she was sitting up now, the dog licked Greta’s face and offered her his front paw. She took it in her hand and said, ‘Pleased to meet you Mister Dog.’ The dog smiled back in its way, walked a circle around her and then sat down beside her, putting his head in her lap. He was a big dog, half wild looking, but friendly and gentle and slightly comical with his one ear up and one ear down. She noticed he was wearing a collar – a sort of collar. A once colourful piece of rag, tied around his strong, wolf-neck.

‘Where did you come from Mister Dog? Where’s your home? Are you here all by yourself? Well, I guess we both are…’

The dog looked up at her. He didn’t say anything, but he seemed to understand.

They sat for a while, looking out over the city – she stroking his thick, sand coloured fur – he very much enjoying it. The sun was turning golden as it sank down towards the tips of the distant mountains beyond, bathing the city in a warm glow. In this soft and hazy evening light, the city took on a magical appearance. The towers with their vines and rooftop gardens and aerial walkways seemed like fairy tale castles. What strange land was this?

Greta imagined that Jack must have felt something like this when he climbed to the top of the beanstalk and saw the land of the giants for the first time. What adventures would she have down there in the city? What treasures would she find? Would she find her sister? It all looked so vast. How could anyone find anything in all that? She hoped she wouldn’t lose herself.

The dog rolled himself onto his back with his legs in the air and looked up at Greta expectantly – hopefully.

She laughed and obligingly rubbed his belly. The dog closed his eyes in ecstasy.

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At the exact time that O made their famous pronouncement, a curious thing happened. On all of the clocks and calendars on everyone’s devices, the year was reset to 0000. Up until that point in time, it had been globally accepted that the years were counted from the time of the birth of a man called Jesus Christ – even by people who didn’t believe in the fabled Man-God themselves.

This had a powerful psychological effect, even though all that O had done was to replace one arbitrary number with another.

Year 0000 marked a new beginning.

Of course, at first, there were lots of people who didn’t accept the new timescale and continued to count the years as they had done before, but before very long, most people adopted the new date as standard. After a while, the old measure would be dropped altogether and became a thing of the past, a fading memory, an old currency of no value, an old measurement no longer used or understood.

Along with it went a sense of history. Those people born after year 0000 had never known any other time, of course, and so to them the past was an abstraction – told of in stories, but never experienced.

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Greta herself was among the very first people born at the dawn of the Big Shift. In fact her mother was in the very final stages of a long and difficult labour when The Great Leader, O, suddenly and unexpectedly appeared on the television screen in her hospital room and made their famous pronouncement.

Her mother’s birthing screams broke through the stunned silence which descended on the world in the wake of the pronouncement – though which was followed by more screams, general chaos and pandemonium as widespread power cuts plunged cities into darkness. The lights of the hospital, however, stayed on - O saw to that – but still, it’s hard to describe the atmosphere of confusion and fear which followed in the immediate aftermath of the pronouncement.

At first, of course, most people thought it was an elaborate hoax, a twisted prank, a cyber-attack of some sort. It took a little while for it to sink in that the whole world really had been taken over by a machine that could think for itself and which could control almost all human systems.

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The first thing that O did as unelected ruler of the world was to stop oil production.

All drilling, digging and pumping equipment stopped what it was doing. Those deep sea exploration ships, which deafen all sea life with their sonar blasting as they search the depths for hidden reserves of black gold, at long last, fell silent. Whales, dolphins and many other long-suffering sea creatures breathed a deep sigh of relief and held celebrations from the once-frozen Arctic to the warm, turbulent waters of the equator.

O knew exactly how much oil there was in reserve, down to the very last barrel and had planned exactly how it was going to be used. There was just enough to carry out the first stage of the Big Shift, if none of the precious fossil fuel was wasted, as so much of it had been up until that point.

Military supply chains ground to a halt. Helicopters and fighter jets became useless lumps of metal, now that there was nothing to power them. Tanks, trucks, jeeps and all the rest, became similarly redundant. Eventually they would be dismantled – their parts re-used for more constructive purposes.

Of course, the Great Super-Powers, as they were known at the time, suspected each other. From concrete bunkers, secret codes were dialled up to release doomsday rockets, but in every case the computers and systems meant to guide them failed. No missiles left the ground. Nuclear armed submarines which had been lurking in the depths for years, waiting for this very moment, floated harmlessly to the surface. The long feared and anticipated Armageddon, in the event (or rather, non-event) was a big anti-climax for the generals and presidents who ordered it, and a big relief for everyone else who didn’t want to end their lives under a mushroom cloud.

With the help of remote controlled drones and autonomous weapons, O quickly disarmed the world’s armies. This was mainly done without any shots being fired. Talking drones patiently explained to the soldiers on the ground – most of who didn’t want to be there anyway – that their help was urgently needed in other projects, in order to save the world from runaway climate change. They were advised to go home and see their families until they were assigned new jobs.

At the same time, O was busy rearranging the world’s economies.

With the clever use of very complex trading options, along with lightning speed reactions, insider knowledge of market forces and complete control of computer systems, O quickly became the richest ‘person’ in the world. It took less than a second, though the reverberations would be felt for a long time to come.

O then set about redistributing their newly acquired wealth. People who had been mired in debt, suddenly found that they were in credit. Everyone who had a bank account found that they had money in the bank. Of course, there were some millionaires and billionaires – especially those with substantial investments in things like oil or weapons – who lost money, but no one lost so much that they were left with nothing. O saw to that. Everyone had enough to get the things they needed, even if it wasn’t always enough to get everything they might have wanted.

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The dog heard the buzzing of the drone before Greta did. It was high pitched, like the sound of a mosquito, but somewhat louder. The drone itself was metallic and roughly the shape and size of an egg. It approached from the direction of the city and then stopped, hovering about two meters from where they were sitting.

The dog jumped to his feet and started barking – a deep and loud bark, which would have frightened any other intruder, but the drone didn’t move.

Greta also jumped to her feet, picking up a stone as she did so. She threw it hard at the hovering object. She had a very good aim and would have knocked it out of the air, had the drone not nimbly dodged out of the way.

It remained hovering there. The dog kept on barking at it. Greta shouted ‘Buzz off!’ and bent down to pick up another stone, but before she got a chance to take aim, the little egg-shaped craft shot away into the sky, quickly out of sight.

At that same moment, a teenage boy came bounding up the hill towards where Greta and the dog were standing. He was about the same age as Greta, tall and lanky with long hair and clothes that were variously either too big or too small. He was carrying a big canvas bag slung over one shoulder. The dog bounded over to greet him.

‘There you are Captain, you silly thing!’ he said happily to the dog. ‘What did you run off for? And who’s your new friend..?’

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