11.6- The Day of Batteries

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.6, The Day of Batteries.

Last time, new CEO of Omnicore Timothy Werner unveiled the new protocols.

which were meant to increase efficiency and productivity after decades of corporate malaise.

But what they really did was cause havoc and severely disrupt life on Mars.

Today we will talk about the reaction to all that havoc and disruption, specifically how it fanned the flames of political consciousness among the Martians.

These flames had been reduced to fading embers in the repressive atmosphere of the 2230s, but during Mabel Dore's campaign for the Board of Directors in 2244 they had rekindled a bit.

And now here in 2245 and 2246, the new protocols would pour gas on that fire and let the flames really roar back to life, just in time for Timothy Werner to show up on Mars in person.

Now to sketch out this growing political consciousness and the proto-revolutionary organization that will harness and direct it, let's start among the SAB elites.

Despite her failed bid to get elected to the board of directors, A-Class executive Mabel Dore remained incredibly rich and incredibly popular.

and was in fact at this point probably more popular than ever.

For her, the new protocols were absolute ironclad proof of her campaign's demand that the Martians needed a voice.

If the Martians had been heard or if they could be heard, none of this would be happening.

And perhaps more than any other single person, Mabel Dorr knew what was happening.

She was an executive in the personnel department, and as soon as the new protocols hit, her office was inundated with complaints and grievances and desperate pleas from every class and department to do something, anything about it.

Whether they were on company time or personal time, Martian lives were being severely disrupted and it was becoming intolerable.

However bad the declining standards of living had been during the later bird years, Werner and the new protocols somehow made it even worse.

So in her official capacity, Dorr started compiling a database of examples and evidence and proof that the new protocols were doing far more harm than good, perhaps only harm, with no good to speak of.

When she was not on company time, she and her husband, Royce Saito, organized a humanitarian response to what was clearly becoming a slow-moving social crisis.

Her philanthropic efforts had long been tolerated by the Mars Division authorities, and they were not about to clamp down on them now when things were getting even worse.

So just to take one example, the couple used their extensive social network to access fabricators capable of producing public charging ports, ports that would work with the updated firmware mandated by the new protocols that would allow people to bring in their dead electronics and boost them back to life.

These public chargers were distributed as quickly as possible to Fiveways, Fiveways being the large open hubs at the intersection of five tunnels where most drink holes, commissaries, and entertainment arcades clustered.

It was far from enough, and long lines developed anywhere these charging ports were installed, but Mabel Dore was smart enough to slap her name on the side of every one of these public charging ports so that people knew where this small bit of relief was coming from.

Dorr also dipped into her private fortune to cover pay docks caused by the myriad infractions that were building up, thanks mostly to the havoc caused by the new protocols.

The biggest of these infractions being failure to meet quota, especially down among the D-classes.

And they were failing to meet quota because the equipment was breaking down.

There was nothing that they could do about it.

This brought Dorr into direct contact with the legal department, and she organized a series of meetings with the mostly B-class advocates working both sides of the corporate code.

Caseloads had exploded since the new protocols had been introduced and the system was overwhelmed with automated infractions that did not register the fundamental change of circumstances.

It was surely recognized by all that a temporary set of glitches should not cause permanent harm to employees whose only real infraction was not being able to do the job they would have otherwise been doing just fine.

People did not deserve to have their pay docked or their employment records flagged over issues far beyond their control.

So Doerr implored prosecutors to be lenient and defenders to fight charges rather than just accept verdicts.

And that brings us to a couple of very important people who were present at some of these meetings and who met Mabel Dorr face to face for the first time.

There is vid proof of them talking after one of Dorr's presentations to a group of defense advocates laying out the systemic impact of the infraction boom and how every employee was suffering at every level.

So who are these two defense advocates chatting up Mabel Dorr after the meeting?

None other than Marcus Leopold and Ivana Darby.

Leopold and Darby were obviously on the brink of beginning a meteoric political rise alongside their good friend Zhao Lin.

And since the three of them are about to rise up together, I think it's a good time to introduce them all to the story right now.

Marcus Leopold was born in Olympus in 2218, the son of middling B-class personnel managers who grew up on the outer inner skirts underneath the dome line.

In primary school, Leopold showed real promise and was flagged for a merit transfer to an A-class school.

He did well enough at that A-class school that he secured a further advancement to the Martian Academy, the most elite institution on the planet, located in the Prime Dome.

Here he encountered the S and A-class children of the Martian elite, who were not at all keen to have Leopold show up and show them up, because he basically aced every test he ever took.

They derided him as a test tuber, somebody who took the tube up to the Prime Dome because of his test scores.

Get it?

Test tube?

Haha, ha ha ha ha?

Yes, it's all very funny, and for somebody like Leopold who didn't have much of a sense of humor to begin with, well, he just stared at them blankly whenever they called him that.

Now, if you want to know more about Leopold, there are a ton of biographies to choose from, but I think the best and most even-handed is Righteous Justice, The Life of Marcus Leopold by Olborn Krill, which manages to mostly avoid the lazy ideological ruts other Leopold biographers fall into.

Mostly.

Mostly.

After a year spent pretty socially isolated, Leopold met and befriended an incoming B-class test tuber named Zhao Lin.

Or more precisely, Zhaolin befriended him.

By far the best biography of Zhao is the absolute classic Blazing Red Fire by Juanita Toke, which is not just an impressive work of scholarship, but also a legitimate prose masterpiece, and I fully cop to my interpretation of Zhao being heavily influenced by Blazing Red Fire, because it's really hard not to be.

Zhao Lin was born on Olympus in 2219.

He was a year younger than Leopold and the son of a pair of B-class executives in the education department.

From an early age, Zhao had a passion for all things creative, and though he would become known for his posts and his screen vids, his first loves were music composition and drawing.

This latter passion led him to become fascinated with architectural design.

Now all he really wanted to do was draw his nifty ideas, and it was practically by accident that he wound up acing the structural engineering test that earned him his test tube ticket to the Martian Academy.

But he had no passion for structural engineering beyond expressing himself creatively, which is all he really cared about.

And he was just a kid during the heyday of the Martian Way cultural movement.

But Zhao spent a great deal of time during his teen years in the 2230s amassing a fairly impressive collection of Martian Way songs and vids and posts.

He was interested in anything that had fallen under the censor's ban, probably because it had fallen under the censor's ban.

Leopold and Zhao formed a close friendship during their years together at the Martian Academy that remained tight even after Leopold graduated in 2236.

From the Martian Academy, Leopold went straight to Olympus University to complete his studies.

His off-the-charts test scores in logic and linguistics slated him for a career in the legal department.

And it was in the legal department at Olympus University that Leopold first encountered the third member of our little proto-revolutionary triumvirate, Ivana Darby.

Now, Ivana Darby is harder to pin down.

She was born into a family of very ambiguous standing.

Even now, the employment records of her parents are unreliable and contradictory.

At the time of her entrance into Olympus University, they were both listed as B-class.

But deeper record searches show telltale signs of scrubbing.

Junis Gandhi, the best biographer of Darby, who wrote a three-volume series extensively covering her entire life, eventually had to throw up her hands in despair on account of the inconsistencies and contradictions in her family's records.

Gandhi ultimately concludes that the state of these records is almost certainly the result of class hacking, which, while not precisely widespread, was far from unheard of at the time.

And in the later Bird years, who was really watching anyway?

But if Darby entered Olympus University thanks to a little shady class hacking, her talents and intelligence kept anyone from asking questions about whether she belonged.

She had a photographic memory that allowed her to not only pass her classes with ease, but also to form an infinitely expanding social network.

Darby had that capacity to remember every face and name and anecdote, such that you could come back around years after a brief encounter and she would remember exactly who you were, what you had talked about, and seem genuinely delighted to see you and pick back up where you had left off.

Gregarious and funny, Ivana Darby basically made friends with everyone.

You had to be really determined to not make friends with her.

In class, she was capable of standing and delivering captivating little monologues, which often started with her saying, this is more of a comment than a question, but then the comment was so entertaining that nobody seemed to mind.

But despite Darby's many talents, Marcus Leopold still shone as the best student in the class.

Where Darby could move and persuade through her personal magnetism, Leopold was far more the logician, and he performed brilliantly on any test that was put in front of him.

He even famously broke the Maris test, which was supposed to demonstrate that there were ironclad logical forms inside the corporate code against which no defense could be mounted.

But Leopold successfully created a schema that folded several loopholes back on themselves such that when his machine registered the verdict record cleared instead of infraction confirmed, he was subjected to several weeks of interviews trying to establish just how he had cheated.

But he hadn't cheated.

He could just see paths that no one else could see.

Zhao Lin, meanwhile, entered Olympus University a year after Leopold and Darby, and though he was meant to enter the engineering department, he successfully lobbied his parents to let him transfer to the entertainment department, with an eye towards joining documentary services, a job that would give him access to crews and equipment he could use for personal projects when he wasn't on company time.

Leopold and Zhao reconnected, and through Leopold, Zhao met Darby, and the three of them forged a deep friendship founded on their shared experiences of being the best and brightest despite their modest backgrounds.

In Darby's case, perhaps a very modest background.

In between classes, Zhao brought his friends back to his B-class neighborhood, which was just a short tube ride from their university housing allotments.

This plugged them into a quasi-underground cultural scene of B-class kids, who were both creating novel art and music and also preserving and rediscovering prohibited Martian Way songs vids and posts.

This scene coalesced around a particular joint that was just around the corner from where Zhao grew up, and that is the Mons Café.

And it was at the Mons Cafe in the late 2230s and early 2240s that they all formed the core of what would become a potent political force during the revolutionary days to come.

As they approached graduation in 2240, both Leopold and Darby were obviously slated for careers as prosecutors in the legal department.

That's where all the top scorers went.

But their time in university, spent most profitably at the Mons Cafe, had convinced them that Martians suffered unjustly under a corporate code designed to keep them in perennial fear, so terrified of the threat of pay docks or possible relocation to Saturn that they endured unjust and exploitive conditions.

Leopold and Darby resolved to put their intelligence and talent to work on behalf of their fellow Martians, not against them.

When administrators objected, Leopold and Darby successfully proved that there was no rule preventing them from selecting a defense advocate post.

It had just never happened before, since the wages and food and housing allotments were all markedly worse.

Plus, the job itself had traditionally amounted to little more than being a processing clerk.

But Leopold and Darby had no intention of being just processing clerks.

They planned to actually mount defenses.

So they entered the legal department as junior defense advocates in 2240 and spent the next several years trying everything they could to tame a code book that lived only to dock pay, restrict privileges, or threaten relocation.

They competed with each other to secure the most dismissals and record clearings, and even occasionally restitution for employees caught up in bogus infractions.

Prosecutors were incentivized by a 5% commission on pay docs and loved to pursue the kind of ubiquitous vices everyone was engaged in so you could practically just reach down at random, pull someone up, and find infractions they had committed.

Usually it was possession of prohibited material, which Yeah, basically everyone possessed prohibited material, including all the security service personnel and prosecutors shaking people down and issuing these infractions.

The other big one was possession of non-prescription stims, drags, or feels, which again was practically everyone on Mars.

So Leopold and Darby fought these infractions every way they could, and though the entire corporate code was tipped against them and so their record was not sensational, they were doing far more than any other defense advocate ever had, which, as I said, most of their colleagues considered themselves processing clerks for predetermined punishments.

When Vernon Bird died in 2244, Leopold and Darby and Zhao all joined the effort to elect Mabel Dorr.

When her campaign started, her aides reached out to the younger set in the B classes, and she gave a series of talks to gin-up support and volunteers.

One of these talks was at the Mons Cafe.

But so far as we can tell, while we know that Leopold and Darby and Zhao were all there, They did not interact with Dorr directly, at least not yet.

They then watched the returns on election night at the Mons and were as furious as anyone about the failure of the Screenvids to so much mention Mabel Dorr or the Martian voters.

And the drinking and dosing that night led to a lot of outraged bluster.

Ivana Darby gave a rousing speech decrying Earth's chauvinism.

So that brings us up to the quote-unquote present, because after Werner unveiled the new protocols in August of 2245, Leopold and Darby were caught up in the caseload explosion.

Some of it was the result of outright glitches and mistakes, like the D-Class tech team that got underwork infractions because the log said zero when they had in fact log 100 hours, but the new processing software only used two digits, and so it rolled not from 99 to 100, but from 99 to 0.

But mostly they dealt with failure to meet quota infractions that came with compounding punishments for repeat offenses.

And people were repeatedly offending all the time because with all the malfunctions and delays and miscommunications, it was practically impossible for anyone to meet quota.

Meanwhile, down among the lower classes who were really dealing with the brunt of all this abuse, we start to find novel forms of self-organization.

Despite being the employment class most reflexively allied with Earth headquarters, thanks both to their pay structure and personality types, the C-Class supervisors were getting awfully peeved about the new protocols.

They too were now caught up in multiplying and compounding infractions because they had their own performance metrics to meet that they were failing to meet.

They started organizing meetings during personal time to come up with a coherent and unified strategy to deal with this problem.

But the main topic of these meetings was mostly about how to ensure the D-classes took the blame for their own poor performances.

The C-classes then flooded the inboxes of the B-class advocates demanding that their records be cleared of all infractions that were caused by D-class infractions.

None of this should count against their own records, they said.

The C-class supervisors also discussed how best to to keep the D-classes in line should all of this mounting frustration explode into something bigger, which brought them into talks with representatives of the security services who happened to share those concerns.

And so while revolutionary ties are being formed in this period, counter-revolutionary ties are also being formed.

And the thing is, they were right.

The D-classes were getting awfully frustrated, and it was on the verge of exploding into something much bigger.

Within this amorphous mass of discontentment, there were those who had been involved in the canvassing efforts for Mabel Doran 2244 who relinked their old networks back together.

They began collecting evidence of patently unjust treatment.

And here, Zhaolin served as a part of the connective tissue in his position inside the documentary services.

He took crews down to the Warrens and made contact with many of these D-class activists and made sure to record the testimony and evidence they provided.

This put Zhao in direct contact with people he would go on to have intimate connections with during the revolution, and the trust and shared purpose found here in the response to the new protocols would continue to guide them all in the years to come.

And it was, of course, during these documentary missions in the Warrens that Zhao first met Alexandra Clare,

but we'll get into that later.

All of this work culminated at the end of the year when Mabel Dorse set to work on the annual personnel review.

Rather than simply compile existing data into a standard issue report, she used her official authority to invite new testimony and feedback and documents and evidence that would help her impress upon the Mars Division authorities that the new protocols needed to be repealed, suspended, or at least drastically modified.

Zhao Lin's documentary Cruz and others like them provided a wealth of material for Dorr to include in this report.

From their positions in the legal department, Marcus Leopold and Ivana Darby compiled and shared infraction records.

With all of this in hand, plus a lot more, Mabledore produced a report dramatically called the Personnel Review of 2245, which was a damning collection of irrefutable evidence that the new protocols were making a hideous mess of things.

So, let's head back to Earth now for a moment, because Mabledore's personnel review of 2245 neatly coincided with Timothy Werner being told by the Mars Division authorities that Phosph extraction had fallen off badly, and if something wasn't done to immediately correct core strategic reserves would have to be tapped and no one wanted that.

Werner at first refused to even believe the numbers were real, but then when they were confirmed his immediate reaction was not to rethink the new protocols, but to demand they be implemented better.

He finally allowed that he and his team perhaps lacked a certain first-hand knowledge of the situation on Mars, which led him to conclude not that other more qualified people should be allowed to make decisions, but that he must now go to Mars personally.

He did not expect it to take long to sort things out once he was there on the scene.

This was a shocking pronouncement.

No Omnicore CEO had ever left Earth's orbit, let alone gone all the way to Mars.

But Werner always did have a penchant for bold path-breaking.

Oh, it's never been done before, all the better reason to do it.

So he wrote in a chat memo on January 5th, 2246, initiating logistical coordination for this trip.

Seeing this as a golden opportunity to broaden all of their horizons, Werner planned to travel with Sarah and their children and make it a little family vacation.

The arrangements were duly made, and on February the 17th, 2246, the family began their eight-week voyage to Mars.

En route, they went through the acclimation regimen that would get them used to the grav units on Mars, which so nearly approximated Earth's gravity, but not quite.

While Werner and his family were on their way, tensions continued to rise on Mars.

On March 28, 2246, with about three weeks left until Werner arrived, five D-Class Techs working a loading bay suddenly had the doors locked and air sucked out of the room because of some accidentally triggered auto vacuum program.

None of the supervisors outside could override the program, and the five techs died of asphyxiation.

When the story spread, they became known as the Breathless Five, and budding political activists in both the D-classes and B-classes spread the story and the outrage about the story far and wide.

Many of them, as I said, had cut their teeth canvassing for Doar in the election of 2244, and they now put their energy, efforts, and connections into something a bit more subversive.

Because the message at this point was something drastic needed to happen, or Timothy Werner and the new protocols might literally get them all killed.

So this was the atmosphere into which Werner and his family would walk on April 25th, 2246, when they made their grand entrance into the Prime Dome following a week of acclamation protocols.

Every S and A class executive was present for the reception, including Mabel Dorr, who had further managed to secure a spot on the reception committee, which would hopefully allow her face-to-face interactions with Werner.

Werner himself pronounced himself eager to go out and explore Olympus and talk boldly of visiting Elysium and Tharsis.

But given the volatile atmosphere on Mars and the protests and hostility that would surely meet Werner anywhere he went, his Martian host worked hard to ensure the boss was not exposed to anything more than tightly controlled appearances at tightly controlled locations.

In the weeks that followed, Werner split his time between these carefully choreographed appearances and taking meetings with various department leaders to assess why they had failed to properly implement the new protocols and what Werner could do to ensure that they succeeded in the future.

Many of them who had been full of complaints before he arrived now buckled under the weight of directly facing the CEO.

They admitted that they could do better, try harder, listen to his wise counsel.

But others tried to at least make a dent in Werner's self-assuredness, including Mars Division Director Apollo Tanaka, who made several stabs at trying to get Werner to see reason.

The bluntest contact came from, who else, Mabel Dore, when she delivered her personnel review that so thoroughly damned the new protocols.

She spent her 15-minute presentation attempting to get Werner to look at the catastrophe he had created, but instead Werner simply listened silently, accepted the file, and promised to look at it.

There is no evidence he ever did.

Werner had been on Mars about four weeks when he finally demanded to visit the Warrens.

He wanted to get down among the D-classes so he could understand better how to help them adapt to the new protocols.

Werner was also keen to stage an appearance with D and C class employees so he could bolster his image with those classes and show them that he cared about them and their concerns.

His Martian hosts had successfully dodged previous requests to go down to the Warrens, but now it was a direct order and they could do nothing but comply.

So they scheduled an event for May 17th, 2246 in Expansion 1 5way 7, which was the upper bound of the Warrens and from which they could easily get back to the surface if trouble arose.

On the day of Warner's appearance in Expansion 1 5way 7, a carefully selected crowd of about 700 D-Class techs and 300 C-Class supervisors were escorted in by security services.

But despite a careful vetting procedure, especially looking at the D-Class contingent, there were amongst the crowd about a hundred techs who were there to do more than just serve as a backdrop for Werner's speech.

Techs who never should have been cleared in the vetting process, and who in fact probably were not cleared in the vetting process.

But they were there because their names had been swapped on to the invitation list.

Swapped onto the invitation list by somebody with the authority to do so.

Now, Mabel Dorr always denied involvement at this stage in the escalating crisis.

But login and chat records from the period show signs of deletion and scrubbing around the invitation list.

So somebody who had proper codes was able to access this list and substitute in certain names.

And though Dorr always denied being involved, it is hard not to see how she wasn't involved, especially given her position on the reception committee.

She had access to the list, she had authority to make changes to the list, and she perhaps had good reasons for doing so.

So though Dorr always denied being involved in the day of batteries, it is hard to believe she wasn't involved.

Werner kept everyone waiting for several hours past his schedule arrival time, so when he finally showed up, the mood was sour even amongst those employees who had been handpicked to be docile.

Werner and his entourage, which included Mabel Dore,

took the stage to tepid applause.

Werner started talking about how much he looked forward to working together to learn to adapt to the new protocols.

But he was interrupted with shouts of no more pay docks and suspend quotas.

Just as Werner was about to continue, a whirling black something pinged off his podium.

At first, Werner couldn't quite tell what had happened, but then more little black somethings started whizzing in from different angles.

They were crashing off the stage, hitting equipment, and then in short order, hitting people.

Werner took one off the right arm and then the left leg in succession, and everyone on stage dove for cover.

Now what was flying in from all directions were dead batteries, dead batteries that had been smuggled in by those hundred or so D-class activists who had been led into the event.

These dead batteries were dead because of those firmware updates, and they served as a potent and perhaps deadly deadly symbol of Martian anger.

Now as soon as these batteries started flying in, everyone on stage dove for cover, and the crowd became a chaotic scramble.

Security services mobbed out into the crowd looking for whoever was hurtling batteries, and the audience scattered away from the stage and fled out any available tunnel.

Werner and his entourage posted up underneath the stage while a group including Mabel Dorr wound up taking cover in a nearby shop.

Now the whole incident lasted barely 10 minutes, by which point the five-way was completely cleared, and Werner and his entourage were hastily escorted back up to the Prime Dome.

Meanwhile, security services had 42 individuals in custody.

So this goes down in Martian revolutionary history as the Day of Batteries, a day that would be enshrined as one of the first great revolutionary events.

Now, as I said, it amounted to little more than a few minutes of hurling batteries at Timothy Werner.

There were no deaths, and the worst injury was an S-class colonial administrator who lost an eye.

It is in fact a classic case of an event taking on great significance only in light of later events.

It is only because of the coming revolution that the Day of Batteries becomes an important milestone along the way.

Absent those future events, the Day of Batteries might have gone down as a few moments of semi-violent anger and nothing more.

There were so many different things Timothy Werner and the Mars Division authorities could have done at this moment to isolate the Day of Batteries and keep it from becoming a historical milestone.

But Werner did none of them.

Instead, he decided he needed to push through the third big piece of the new protocols.

Decision-making had been centralized, technology was being upgraded.

All that was left to do now was commence with an employee review.

with an eye on trimming the poorest performers to ensure a more streamlined and efficient operation now and forever.

So next week, Timothy Werner will ensure ensure that the Day of Batteries becomes a revolutionary milestone by triggering the annulment crisis.

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