11.7- The Annulment of Contracts

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Episode 11.7 The Annulment of Contracts

We left off last week with Timothy Werner getting a bunch of batteries chucked at him in the upper warrens of Olympus on May 17, 2246.

What would go down in Martian history as the Day of Batteries.

The first of the three great revolutionary events that would be enshrined in the mythic pantheon of Martian lore before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the Mars Division Authority censored screen vids to prevent the story from spreading.

And the further you got from Expansion 1 5way 7, the more difficult it became to know that anything had happened at all.

Security services then fanned out looking for the rest of the battery chuckers.

They had arrested 42 people right there on the spot, but more than a thousand people had been there that day, and security was ordered to track them all down, interview them, and identify the rest of the culprits.

But this was tough going because the D-classes had long since perfected the art of answering security service questions without really saying anything at all.

This was a reflex whether they were guilty, innocent, or somewhere between.

Most of the people there that day knew nothing about anything, but their responses sounded exactly the same as the people who did know something.

They were vague, non-committal, and a little murky on the details.

Meanwhile, the corporate intelligence wing of the security services opened an investigation into members of the reception committee.

They wanted to know how and why such anti-social malcontents could have gotten access to 5W7.

As I said last week, it's hard for me to believe Mabel Dore wasn't involved, but it's worth noting that she was investigated and questioned along with everyone else, and corporate intelligence never came back around for her.

And that was even knowing full well she was a woman with political ambitions who was also a vocal critic of the new protocols.

But whatever she said to them, coupled with whatever evidence they lacked, was enough to let her walk free.

And surely one of the things she said was, look, I was up on stage with Warner.

I had to go hide in a stuff shop for crying out loud.

And then she could have shown them the bruise on her left shoulder where she herself got hit with a battery.

But these investigations were not wholly fruitless.

Further arrests down in the warrens did follow, as security services chased the few solid leads they could drum up, mostly provided by C-Class supervisors who had been in the crowd that day.

The total number of detained eventually rose to 57, but that still left just under half of those who had participated free and unidentified.

Among those was 24-year-old Alexandra Clare, and so for God's sakes, let's finally introduce Alexandra Clare.

Alexandra Clare is obviously one of the defining figures of the Martian Revolution, and there are plenty of biographies to choose from if you want to know everything there is to know about her.

My own personal favorites are Alexandra Clare, Conscience of the Revolution by Emuta Stren, The Blackest Cap by Toshiro Yons, and of course her own memoir, One Red Life, which she wrote in between shifts on the barricades during the siege of Elysium.

It is somewhat ironic that for a woman who was so important to this momentous political event, that initially she had to be dragged into politics by her friends.

Alexandra Clare was born in the D-Class Warrens of Olympus in 2222.

She was a third-generation Martian on both sides of her family, which meant that all four of her grandparents had been born on Mars, which meant that all eight of her great-grandparents had emigrated to Mars by the 2160s, which is to say within the first 50 years of the colony's existence.

In employment terms, those eight great-grandparents broke down into the following classes, five Ds, two Cs, and a B.

Her grandparents were a C and three Ds, and then her own parents, and she herself, were all Ds.

Her father died in an accident when she was 10, and her mother died of Skinner's rot when she was 16.

Skinner's rot, of course, being caused by overexposure to extraction lubricant.

After the death of her mother, Claire was briefly transferred to monitor housing, but was soon assigned to her own quarters in Expansion 5, Tunnel 37.

Claire attended basic technical school, specializing in drone bot operations, and on company time she did her job competently enough.

There were no major infractions, but also no standout performances.

She seemed to just stay off the radar completely.

On personal time, she and her friends hung out at the drink holes and entertainment zones.

And as I said, by her own account in her memoir, One Red Life, she was indifferent to politics at this age, even though both of her parents had died of company negligence.

At the time, she said her three principal preoccupations were fuel, feels, and fracking, which is to say, drinking, drugs, and sex.

She reckoned her life was going to be what her parents' life had been, and what their parents' life had been, so best to just get your kicks when you could, where you could, and ignore the rest.

This started to change in 2244, when Vernon Vernon Bird died, and when she was 22 years old and still mostly unconcerned with larger events.

When Mabel Dorr launched her bid for the board of directors, though, two of Claire's close friends, Akeo Juma and Desta Onyago, joined the canvassing among the neighborhood D-classes.

They all made a fine time of it bouncing around on both personal and company time, finding Martians with company shares stashed away in an account somewhere, and convincing them to use those shares to vote for Dorr.

Claire was along for the ride on these early efforts and did not much participate in the work.

For her, this was just another way to party.

When election day came, they caught the returns at a drink hole and watched along with everyone else as the Martian vote was totally ignored.

Her friends were aghast, but Claire herself shrugged.

This had been a fun lark, but the reality was, they didn't matter at all.

So they went back to their lives.

until the supervisor showed up one day in August 2245 and announced that there would be new protocols going into effect.

The first thing they had to do was update all their software, causing numerous bugs and glitches.

Routine work orders, maintenance, requisitions, delivery schedules were all immediately broken.

And there was no way to fix things on the job because they had to wait for orders from Werner's vaunted centralized brain, which was meant to make everything more efficient but obviously just jammed up the works even more.

On company time, Claire and her team started racking up failure to meet quota infractions while they sat around waiting for functional equipment or instructions on what they should do about it.

On personal time, the chatter in the drink holes was vocal and hostile, not just because their jobs were being made impossible, they were, but because they were also dealing with this right here, right now on personal time.

People's screens were running out of batteries and couldn't be juiced back up.

People were getting locked out of their housing allotments because the skin chip scanners were buggy.

Drink orders were constantly wrong.

Meanwhile, her friends, Juma and Anyago, who had been politically activated by Mabledore's candidacy, now reconnected with other canvassers.

Reconnecting into what exactly?

Well, as it turns out, reconnecting into the new society of Martians.

Suppressed after the coup attempt of Jose de Petrov in 2229, the original Society of Martians had been mostly B-class.

They were tolerated by the authorities and had operated out in the open.

But the new Society of Martians forming here in 2245 was underground, and now linked members up and down the the class system.

Its initial tendrils had formed in 2244 and were now being more formally bound together.

Juma and Anyago were both initiated within weeks of the new protocols being implemented.

But it was not until Claire received her third failure to meet quota and came back to the drink hole like, okay, what are we going to do about this?

What can we do about this?

that she got a little political.

because they were like, oh, let us tell you, my friend.

And that is how Alexandra Claire joined the new Society of Martians.

Claire's first political act was also an act of enormous personal importance.

One of the first goals of the New Society of Martians was documenting the harm done by the new protocols.

In November 2245, Zhao Lin came down with a documentary crew to interview D-Class techs about their experiences, and through Society of Martian contacts, met up with Juma and Onyago.

Claire had just then reached her breaking point, just happened to be fueled up a little bit, and gave Zhao's crew a stirring, if somewhat profanity-laced account of how she and her team were being screwed over.

This video that Zhao shot went into the files uploaded to Mabel Dorr's personnel review of 2245.

At the time, it was just a particularly amusing bit of testimony from a particularly angry D-Class tech.

Neither Claire, nor Zhao, nor Dorr, knew how intimately they would all soon be connected.

Now, of course, nothing much changed as a result of all all this, but it was extremely interesting to learn that Timothy Werner was now apparently coming to Mars personally.

As a part of the new Society of Martians, Claire, Juma, and Onyago were involved in the effort to spread outrage over the death of the Breathless Five, stoking the hostile atmosphere that Werner would be walking into.

Now at first the CEO was kept well away from the Warrens, But when word came down in May 2246 that Werner would be visiting Expansion 1517,

Juma, Onyago, and Claire all got their names placed on the list of approved attendees, approved not because they would be docile, but because they were willing to do a little direct action.

On the day itself, they sewed dead batteries into their coveralls and dusted their faces with pixel wash, homebrew makeup that was hard to see with the naked eye, but scrambled the facial recognition cameras just enough to make identifying them super difficult.

This was long-standing best practices amongst the Martians when doing anything they didn't want to get caught doing.

Claire later said in a retrospective documentary, I had no idea who threw the first battery, but when it pinged off the podium I dug into my pocket and started tossing batteries.

Probably got off six or seven before security services rushed into the crowd, and I ran.

Claire, Juma, and Onyago all managed to bolt out a tunnel without getting caught.

They were all of course later detained and questioned by security services but cleared when the facial recognition report came back.

Many of the faces in the crowd that day were never matched to anyone because many D-Class Martians dusted their faces in pixel wash as a matter of course.

But hilariously, Claire herself got off because her name was matched to a face in the crowd that was not her face.

But it did clear her of suspicion.

Another classic bang-up job by the security services.

Meanwhile, up in the Prime Dome, Timothy Werner was nursing a bruised ego to go along with the bruises on his body.

He knew that the new protocols had caused some discomfort in people's lives, and that there was a lot of complaining that was going on, but he didn't really think it was as bad as all that.

He had spent his life letting criticism just wash over him, and so he was shocked to discover that there was real actual hostility to him and what he was doing.

But luckily, Werner recovered swiftly.

After conversations with his wife Sarah, several close advisors, and Mars Division executives, they all agreed that this must have been the work of a few bad apples who did not represent the whole population.

The day of the batteries drove Timothy Werner right to the brink of self-reflection, but he managed to pull back from that brink just in the nick of time.

Phew, that was close.

But Werner was aware that the new protocols were not rolling out as smoothly as he hoped.

But he concluded that this was partly because the third pillar of the new protocols had not been fully implemented.

The first two pillars, remember, were centralized decision-making and technological upgrades.

But the third pillar was about the quality of the personnel.

Werner believed that under the geriatric drift of the later Bird years, little effort had been made to get rid of redundant or poor-performing employees.

Werner reckoned Omnicore as a whole would function much better if they cut about 10% of the workforce, either because those workers were unnecessary or because they were actively bad at their jobs.

This now became even more of an imperative as Werner concluded it was the worst employees who must be causing all the problems with the rollout of the new protocols.

So it was time to start trimming some fat, and it was time to start annulling some contracts.

As with everything else, Werner planned to be scrupulously attentive to the question of which employees should be let go.

He was not a capricious monster after all.

He planned to wield a scalpel.

And even if that scalpel ultimately cut out as much as the biggest space saw, at least it was done in a highly meticulous way, trimming out the bad bits, keeping the good bits.

And how could he tell good from bad?

Well, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that he developed his own metrics for judging employees.

Omnicore, of course, had a host of metrics to evaluate their employees, but Werner developed new metrics of his own devising, and which no one had ever seen before, and which would remain something of an opaque black box except for the round number it produced which Werner would use to decide whose contract would be retained and whose would be annulled.

So where is he getting this information to plug into his new metrics?

Well, it's the same data the company always collected, he just felt it wasn't being used in the right way.

But at this moment, there is a massive issue with that data, because since the rollout of the new protocols the year before, infractions had skyrocketed.

And while I've said that this affected everyone, on the granular level it did hit some Martians harder than others.

One D-class team might be annoyed because their diagnostic machines didn't work half the time, but another team might be totally screwed because their diagnostic machines failed all the time.

And this is where a half-drunk Alexandra Clare really starts mouthing off because she's on that team.

And this is to say nothing of the people whose records are being marred by straight-up computer glitches.

So as infractions exploded across the board, they were concentrated on some Martians more than others.

Well you might say, well, easy, just discount the most recent records as being fatally corrupted by issues with the new protocols.

But you're not thinking like Timothy Werner.

Far from discounting the latest data, he weighed it even more heavily because he took it as proof that some people were adapting to the new protocols better than others, and the ones failing to adapt were the ones he most wanted to get rid of.

So in the weeks after the day of batteries, Werner hunkered down in the Prime Dome and started going through employment records, meeting with various department heads, and pointedly not continuing with any plans to visit more places on Mars.

Plans to visit Tharsis and Elysium, for example, were put on hold, as no doubt came as a relief to the administrators of Tharsis and Elysium.

On July 21, 2246, after much careful deliberation, Werner was ready to go with his first list of contract annulments.

These first annulments were confined solely to the D classes.

They were poor performers, according to Werner's metrics, people who had compounding failure to meet quota infractions, especially those who already had black marks on their records prior to the new protocols.

Now, let's be clear.

Annuling a contract is no small thing.

When your contract was annulled, that meant your life on Mars was over.

Every single aspect of life ran through the company computer systems.

Access to your housing allotments, commissaries, drink holes, everything.

Even opening and closing tunnel doors meant scanning your skin chip.

And if you didn't have any employment status because your contract had been annulled, well then almost instantly there was no way to maintain your life on a basic level.

Food, drink, shelter.

You were just cut off.

So if you couldn't stay on Mars because you literally couldn't live on Mars, what could you do?

Well, you could go back to Earth, which cost money and required connections, people on Earth who would secure your claim to return.

But what happened if you had neither the funds nor the connections to return to Earth?

Well, then the moons of Saturn await.

Now the threat of relocation to Saturn had always been a heavy stick used to keep the Martian population in line.

But even that was a brighter prospect than what Werner was offering here.

Because those previously relocated to Saturn at least kept their original original contracts.

They kept their service points and experience levels and other accrued benefits.

But Werner saw an opportunity to do something novel.

By annulling existing contracts outright, he could save Omnicorp a bit of money down the line.

Those whose contracts were annulled and who could not secure birth back to Earth would be offered new contracts and a one-way ticket to Saturn, effectively starting as new hires no matter how long they had been on the job.

The first list of contract annulments posted on July 21st was pretty small.

Werner was at least persuaded that firing a bunch of people all at once would be catastrophic.

But the alternative turned out to be awful in its own way, because once the annulments started, they never stopped.

Every day a fresh batch of employee IDs would be flagged and contracts annulled.

So on any given day you could wake up and find out that you had been sacked and just locked out of everything.

And if the person next to you said, oh gosh, you poor bastard, I'm so sorry, well they might wake up the next day, or a week later, or a month later, and find themselves in the same boat.

This created an ambient anxiety that grew steadily worse over time.

No one could feel secure.

Everyone was afraid of being next.

And of course, people were deeply upset about co-workers, friends, lovers, parents, children, suddenly finding their contracts annulled.

As the numbers of the annulled grew, and that's what they came to be called, the annulled, so too did they grow into other classes.

After six weeks, the first list of C-class supervisor IDs hit the list.

Werner went through the metrics and started pulling out supervisors whose teams or departments had not been doing well.

If there were issues with their particular team or area under supervision, remember they were running housing allotments and commissaries and health clinics and all that stuff.

then they themselves were now on the hook and face the threat of annulment.

But as we'll see, the resentment of the C-classes would mostly be directed downwards towards the D classes, the people they oversaw and who they really blamed for screwing everything up.

It was the D classes who caused all the problems and were making a mess of things.

But even with that general mentality that the people to blame were below them, not above them, the annulments were obviously a blow and plenty of C-class supervisors were angry at Werner for betraying them.

So more than anything else, What all of this triggered was a slow-rowing humanitarian crisis.

Once someone's contract had been annulled, they couldn't get food.

They couldn't get into housing.

They couldn't even open a tunnel door.

In theory, they were supposed to present themselves to the authorities for processing and either relocate to Earth or be deported to Saturn.

But most of the Ennuled had been born on Mars.

Their lives were on Mars.

Their families were on Mars.

Were they really supposed to just voluntarily report for expulsion from the only home they ever knew?

Werner clearly had not thought that part through, nor did he really understand the people he was dealing with.

Because what the authorities discovered is that most of the Enoll just sort of dropped off the map.

They were out of the employment system, they never showed up for processing, and no one could quite say where they had gone.

But if they had gotten booted from the system, how did they live?

How did they get food?

How did they get medicine?

How did they move around?

Well, here we can go back to some of the cultural components of life on Mars.

something I touched on a bit when I talked about the Martian way.

From its earliest days, Mars had a strong culture of cooperation and mutual support.

You could not go it alone on Mars, and you were constantly surrounded by other people.

Self-sufficiency was basically alien to them as a concept.

Life was a cooperative effort.

And so when the annulments started being posted and people got cut off from access to the basic necessities of life, the answer was simple.

The people surrounding you took care of you.

As readily as a family took care of their own, so too did they take care of neighbors and co-workers.

You can't get food?

Here, I'll bring you some.

Can't get into your house?

Sleep on my couch.

Can't open a door?

Don't worry, I got it.

As the annulment crisis continued and more people found themselves among the annulled, this mutual aid expanded.

People like Alexandra Clare and her friends in the New Society of Martians organized more formal food and water distribution.

A thing called the No Doors Movement started where tunnel doors would be jammed open so people who had been annulled could continue to pass without needing to wait for somebody to open it for them.

When security services fanned out trying to track down the Annuled, they ran into the same wall of vague platitudes meant to sound helpful, but give absolutely no useful information away.

And since the Anuled were now formally out of the employment system, their skin ships could not be tracked because there was no locator record to refer to.

So that, plus a little pixel wash, and the Annuled could survive amidst a loyal population of friends, family, and co-workers, who were not about to let their friends, family, and co-workers get sent to certain death on some faraway planet.

That was not the Martian way.

Now I know what you're saying, because I know what's coming.

How could Werner be so stupid as to do this?

No one could possibly be this stubbornly committed to pushing through policies whose impact would reverberate back on him and create 10 times as big of a mess as what he was attempting to clean up.

But if you think this, then I'm afraid you've never really looked at human history, which is replete with examples of people stubbornly, stupidly, myopically, following through on terrible ideas because they think in the end it'll all work out.

King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland got it into his head to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the Scots, and for his troubles, got that head chopped off.

Tsar Nicholas was convinced he had nothing to worry about because the people were with him, and then the people overthrew him.

Veda Basu definitely thought she was so powerful she could crown herself Empress of India.

She didn't even last a week.

History is full of examples of people making stupid decisions and then clinging to them for dear life until it kills them.

So in this, Timothy Warner is hardly unique.

Now the Sab Elite were initially untouched by the contract annulments, but that did not mean they were untouched by the growing humanitarian crisis.

Advocates like Marcus Leopold and Ivana Darby and their colleagues attempted to represent and fight the contract annulments and get them overturned.

They were now joined in this effort by advocates on the prosecution side, who had already grown disenchanted with the infraction explosion, and who now worked to stall processing those among the annuled who did wind up in custody.

Not all of them, of course.

Prosecutors had technically been making out like bandits since the infraction started compounding.

From a completely cynical financial perspective, the new protocols were a real financial windfall.

But this was all getting a bit unseemly.

Consciences were forming.

The annulments had been rolling out daily for about two months when Werner grew frustrated with the inability of the Mars Division authorities to process and remove those who had been deemed unworthy of continued employment on Mars.

Director Apollo Tanaka had to deal with the brunt of Werner's increasingly peevish responses to being told, we've only processed a fraction of the annuled.

He didn't even like the phrase the annulled, which he thought was a sop to Martian sentimentality and gave those poor performing malcontents a sympathetic identity.

He deemed sterner measures had to be taken to identify and remove those who no longer had contracts and thus no longer had a place on Mars.

Meanwhile, the annulments now finally crept up to the SABs.

Werner identified administrators and managers he thought were redundant or who represented unnecessary bloat that could be easily cut.

So now it wasn't just D-class techs down in the Warrens suddenly finding themselves unemployed and without access to the basic necessities of life, but the upper classes, nearer the centers of power.

Just like the CDs, the Sabs were often born on Mars.

Their families were Martians.

Their children were Martians.

And now they were being told, oh, sorry, you have to go.

And no less than the Seeds did the Sabs hide and cover for their own.

Werner had just sort of assumed he would be able to annul contracts, remove dead weight, and move forward, and everyone would just kind of go along with it.

But he was finding that really wasn't the case, and what he was really doing was uniting all the classes of Martian society against him.

This is where the first revolutionary wave is going to come from.

Next week, that wave will start forming.

The Martians will stage the first mass demonstration in Martian history.

Now I said at the beginning of this episode that the day of batteries was the first of the three great revolutionary events.

and it had been relatively small.

It was 100 people in a crowd of about 1,000 chucking batteries at Timothy Warner.

But what the Martians now planned was something far bigger.

A mass procession to protest the annulment of contracts, to get them overturned.

What they intended to do was take the no-doors movement all the way up to the Prime Dome.

They wanted to do this peacefully, but seriously.

They wanted to show Werner in no uncertain terms how much Mars was united against the contract annulments.

And that can only lead us to one thing, and that's the second great revolutionary event.

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