The old concepts of the Magna Carta, the American Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights had all been nullified in the year 2046 with the election of the highly conservative Marcus Buffet. His family had, for some generations now, been in the elite top tier of financial security. To put it in more common terms, he was rich, and rich in the way of old money. It was the new leader’s heartfelt belief that taxes and society should not be forced to bear the costs of education and health care, and when an equally conservative minded planetary congress was elected, an entirely new system of economics was born. It would be each individual’s responsibility to pay for their own lives, freeing government to deal with global trading tariffs and import-export treaties and planetary protection. Thus it fell incumbent on everyone to excel in school, their only salvation from ending up in perpetual indenture. Of course, like the sharecroppers of early America, the indentured never were able to pay off their debts, even when the “payment” for labor was in high numbers. They were charged for literally everything during their employment, from their home, to food, to working materials and clothing, all necessarily purchased from the Corporate Store, and at usury grade prices tagged with corporate taxes and high interest rates. Even the air they breathed had charges associated with it, along with fees for the removal of the gasses they exhaled as a part of the breathing process. Humanity and philanthropy de damned, when those emotions were in play they clogged the flow of business and the powers that be had no time for that crap.

Three quarters of the planet’s population was in perpetual indenture, and any debt they owed at the time of their deaths was automatically transferred to the surviving spouse, or to the children of the debtor. Along with fees and interest payments on the transfer of course. There were some who bristled at the idea of literally being a slave to a caste system based solely on wealth and mildly bolstered by education. But the wealthy got the kind of education that permitted high grades from the testing process that would, on educational completion, determine the course of the rest of their lives. The wealthy remained wealthy, and in fact were able to increase their wealth because where taxes had one time been gauged against income and paid out to society, now society was taxed to pay the wealthy. Those who fared badly in the system and who made the mistake of expressing their umbrage found themselves sentenced to prison-like planets where the level of exertion and dangerous working conditions resulted in death in a fairly short period of time. This, of course, ended up loading their hapless heirs with the costs of recycling the corpse and the fees to process the death records.

Slavery was no longer defined by violence and chains, instead it was meted out economically, a situation that perpetuated an endless vicious circle that continued to saddle successive family generations with crippling debt. The only way out of the seeming black hole of financial servitude was enlistment in the military. The off planet wars raged between the various breakout colonies established in an attempt to create more humanized societies, and the life span of the average space marine was a mere ten months. Of course, if they perished in the line of duty, all debts were erased, freeing the youthful offspring of the crippling debts otherwise added to their already insurmountable total. It never really freed anyone from being in debt, only 1.3 percent of the world population enjoyed a debt free life.

Policing departments were another fatality of the new society. Private security and private security forces were all that stood between the preening rich and the unwashed masses. But to qualify for security work required that you come from the high echelons of the plutocratic top tier of society. In short, the game of life was rigged, and that caused the private security forces to earn their high wages by waging an effective war on the less fortunate. Prisons had given way to the right of private security to ‘fine’ those who transgressed their employers rules, this often resulting in the offender being hustled off to an indenture colony –slave camps.  Harper was considering this as he stared in shock at the amount of debt he accrued and mentally calculated that while he was not among the hopeless, it would, nonetheless, take him a full decade to pay off his bills if he joined the military and turned back three fifths of his wages to the Debt Adjustment Corporation, the oversight organization for debt.

His reasonably high scores did qualify him to enter the military as an officer, should he choose to take the courses (which,oddly enough, were free to those who graduated with a passing grade). As an officer, one could choose what type of duty they might be assigned, and in that way could choose research divisions and avoid the deadly fighting which claimed so many lives each year. He sighed deeply and closed the portfolio and stood there looking depressed. After a few moments, a friend wandered by, a friend who was one of the few with their own personal vehicle, and he wangled himself a ride to the head recruiting offices of the Planetary Navy. A branch of military service which only five years ago eschewed their last sea going ships in favor of even larger and more populated space-faring battleships, cruisers and tenders.

After a ten day evaluation period in which his physical and mental condition was assayed from every imaginable perspective, he was finally granted status as an Associate Major, meaning that on completion of his studies, successfully of course, he would assume the full rank of major and be sent off to take charge of a contractor company in the employ of the Planetary Navy. If he was successful in his studies, on leaving his debt would be somewhere under one hundred thousand dollars, and he’d have an opportunity to pay that off in the first two years of actual service. Continuing his service then by doubling his enlistment contract, he could leave the contract military not only debt free, but with credits in the bank. A tidy sum to defray his costs as he sought out a civilian position that would virtually assure him a minor role in the Plutocracy.

He considered his graduation day and the commission it had guided him into and he decided that life wasn’t really all that bad. He felt somewhat aloof as, on leaving the recruitment building, he paused a moment as those students who scored lowly on their studies were rounded up for shipment to one of the new space bodies being readied and terraformed for human growth and exploitation. Better them than me, he though to himself.

Decades ago, I remember that the Lotus company was in the news when they had a CD set they were offering that contained the personal information of virtually everyone in a given community. People had a cow over the idea that anyone with the fee could find out about people’s work and home life, where they shopped, what they bought, their schedules, their political leanings and much, much more. Never mind that in this day and age most people offer this information themselves as they post to social media sites, often unaware that their cumulative posts have provided this data, back in those days the illusion of privacy was much more robust. Today, many are disconcerted by the reach of agencies to tap into lives at the click of a mouse even though they clicked the terms of service agreements on the long list of online services they use. The fact is, what people are upset about the NSA doing, as huge in scope as it is, still can’t hold a candle to the information available to marketing organizations. When you consider the Lotus offering all those years ago, before computers became so central to everyday life in the majority of households, just imagine what those data files look like held in the bowels of product promotion houses. Advertising is being individually targeted now. The waste of shotgun advertising is a large stumbling block to the companies paying for promotion. About ten years ago I ran across some details about marketing that said that for every thousand people experiencing ads for a specific product, less than a single percentage point purchased the advertised item. Now it’s still a minuscule number, but it has crawled into the single digits of percents, at time reaching almost to double digits of percents. That’s a huge gain.

It’s only going to get better for advertisers as the information about us builds in the various dossiers that exist on us all. Never mind the government having such a clear view into the habits and ideals of John and Jane Everybody, the people who want you to use their toothpaste, buy their electronics, drive their cars, drink their beer, …whatever will have a much more cohesive and complete view than Uncle Sam is likely to. After all, in and of itself the government has restrictions and oversight that the private sector is not burdened with –especially since so many people click “I Agree” on so many terms of service agreements. Of course, very few people actually read those agreements. They go on for days and use confusing legalese terminology that boggles the mind; just how many people are going to wade through all of that when all they want is to play a game, read the weather forecast or watch television or something. I was kind of amazed at what I agreed to when I signed up for DirecTV –whose terms of service I happened to read through one day because I was bored. I basically had told them that if they could find it out, they were welcome to know it and could share and use that information in any way they chose. Of course, the service terms for Microsoft Windows made DirecTV’s look like a lightweight.

My point here is that we shouldn’t be too upset about the government intruding on us, not when the information they are getting is data that we have signed off on already for the companies we deal with to do with as they please. We said that these companies can share our information with partners, subsidiaries and other third parties –and not only that, we agreed that they could change the terms of service at their own whim and discretion, and do so without giving us any notice, never mind a way to interrupt the collection or transfer of data. If you don’t want the government finding out things about you, then quit letting others collect that information. Sure, you may well go off grid and live in a lean-to in Antarctica and never deal with another human being, but the fact you left, where you went and what you took with you will still be available. We have no real privacy anymore because we threw it away, failing to see what we were giving up because we were blinded by awesome technologies, convenience and even thrift. We cannot live in a society so technologically capable without leaving our digital fingerprints and DNA everywhere we go. It’s especially true for those of us who write personal blogs.

It was a lot quieter inside the car and I saw right away that there were a lot of open seats, unfortunately, none of them were window seats. The next few trains to leave Grand Central would be packed to standing room by commuters headed out to the suburbs. My father would be on the next train, part of the reason I ran so hard to catch this one. My dad and I rode into town each weekday morning and he would use the time to explain how it was important for me to go to summer school. I didn’t want to hear it. I was an ‘A’ student, far enough advanced that with summer school I would be allowed to skip a grade. I didn’t like this idea one bit; not only did it cramp my time with my friends in summer, it would separate me from them by pushing me ahead and out of their classes. As a result, I was “not working up to my potential,” as the summer school teachers put it. Thus I started each and every day listening to my old man grouse about my lackadaisical performance. I would think about his expressions of disappointment while I sketched pictures of my father being eaten by sharks, forced to walk the plank by pirates, and being assaulted by jet airplanes with blazing machine guns. There was no way I wanted to have to listen to him as I rode back out in the evening.

I found a seat and pulled a comic book from my book bag and settled in to read a story of Superman on the 40 minute ride. Darien was the third stop. The noise of the train was suddenly amplified as the conductor opened the door on his return. He moved from seat to seat punching the tickets of riders. I fished in my book bag for my ticket, a monthly that allowed me 20 rides in and 20 rides out on the New Haven Railroad commuter trains. I was still rooting through the bag when the conductor reached me. He stood a minute as I grew more frantic in my search, then chuckled and reached over me to punch the ticket of the window seat occupant.  He moved along then, continuing to deal with the rest of the riders, leaving me to hunt down my elusive ticket. We recognized one another and he knew that I had a multi-pass. He was the one who punched it that morning. When he finished the car he came back to my seat where I sat embarrassed and still ticketless. He smiled and told me not to worry about it, that he would just punch my ticket twice in the morning, assuming I found it.

This got the attention of the woman who was in the window seat. “Now wait just a minute!” she barked. “The rest of us have to pay so this young man shouldn’t be an exception.”

“It’s alright, ma’am,” he replied. “I know the boy and I know he has a commuter ticket.”

“It’s not right!” she continued. “You must put him off the train at the first stop.”

“Lady,” said the conductor, “I’m not going to put a kid off the train in a town he doesn’t know when I am fully aware of who he is, that he’s a paying passenger I see every day, and this isn’t the first time a commuter has misplaced their ticket. Further, as the conductor of this train it’s in my power to let someone ride for free if I think the situation warrants it. Now, I’m not letting the boy ride for free. Both he and his father are daily riders on my route and I know as fact that one of them will make this ride good tomorrow.  I’m going to ask you to please tend to your own affairs and allow the people of the New Haven Railroad to operate their trains as they see fit.”

She reacted as if he’d slapped her. “I’ll have you know my husband has friends at the railroad. Friends in high places. I can assure you that he will be contacting those friends during business hours tomorrow.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small pad and a pen. “What is your name, Conductor?”

“You called it. You may call me Conductor.” he said with a shake of his head. With that, he moved off to finish collecting and punching tickets.

The woman stared daggers at me and then started to tell me that I was a filthy little urchin who shouldn’t be allowed on the trains in the first place. She went on for a couple of minutes until another woman stepped to the seats and inserted herself in the seat between us. She had a beautiful smile and turned it to full wattage and looked at the woman by the window. “If you say one more word to this boy, I will have you put off the train yourself.”

“This is none of your business!” snarled the window seat lady.

“Oh, but it is!” said the pretty woman. She reached in her purse and pulled out a leather case and opened it to show the irritated woman a badge. “I’m with New Haven Railroad security. You will please stand up and accompany me to a different car, away from this child. I think you’ve made him feel badly enough for one day.”

“I don’t care to move.” said the woman, somewhat less self-assured.

“If you don’t, I will have the conductor put you off the train in White Plains, our first stop. It’s coming right up so you should decide quickly.” She stood and gestured for the woman to walk ahead of her. Reluctantly, the woman rose, shot me a withering look, and walked huffily down the aisle. The lady from security gave my shoulder a squeeze and gave me another beautiful smile, then followed the woman, seeing her into the next car. I immediately moved to the window seat. I Put my book bag and my lunch box on the seats next to me.

Some people are naturally nice and have kind dispositions. On the other hand, some people are just dicks. Unhappy people who can only try to feel better by making others feel worse. I never saw the security lady again, but I saw the conductor on the ride into town the next morning. I presented him my ticket –which had been stuck between the pages of one of my books– and he winked at me and punched it twice.

The blood drained from my parents’ faces and they stole surreptitious glances to see if the faux pas had been overheard. Momentarily stunned by my good fortune, it took me a moment to gather my wits and reply “Yeah, that’s what your friends at school said too.” A gentle wave of tittering wafted across the tables nearby and my sister’s face reddened. My father stared at his plate as if he were waiting for it to explode and my mother smiled at the faces turned our way. She had the smile of someone who accidentally passed loud and odious flatulence in an elevator.

We were actually talking about blue crab and our relative abilities to catch them using a ball of hamburger suspended on a string for bait and a long handled net to scoop them up with. Most people wouln’t think it, but in the water crabs can move fairly quickly, especially when their lives depend on it. I had just commented that a friend and I had a pretty good haul earlier in the day. In fact, my friend’s family was dining on the proceeds even as we spoke.

My sister and I led competitive lives. We were forever arguing and always working to best one another in just about everything. In spite of the win-by-default from the previous night’s victory at the restaurant, the next day found me armed with a bucket, a half pound of purloined ground beef from the freezer, and my trusty crab net. I hiked the mile or so down to the bridge that connected the causeway to our island with the mainland. It wasn’t actually our island, we shared it with twenty other residents and a beach and tennis club. Peering over the railing, I saw four decent sized crabs right off the bat. I knew there were more than that hiding in the rocks and beneath the strings of kelp undulating in the tidal current. I made short work of the four crabs and kept on going. In the course of a couple of hours, I had filled the two gallon bucket to overflowing, having to defeat some escape attempts by my victims. I had sixteen crabs in the bucket and my arm was sore from carrying their weight back to the house.

I took the crabs upstairs to where my sister’s room and mine sat one beside the other, barging into her sanctum to gloat and show off my bounty. My sister wasn’t there unfortunately. So I set the bucket of crabs down just inside her door where she would see them and suffer immediate humiliation when she stepped in her room. I then went off to play with my boat, and perhaps find one or more of my friends to pass the summer day. I found my frined Doug and before long, we were off to go follow the oyster boats around. They hated it when we did that and we took delight in the insults and threats they would hurl at us as we buzzed them. It’s not like they could do anything about us. At noon we were fed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by Doug’s mom and then found Toby. We spent the afternoon water skiing.

I got home and put the boat away properly around five thirty in the afternoon, plenty in time for the family’s seven pm supper. I was laying on my bed in my room reading a Superman comic book when I heard my sister thump her way up the stairs. A few seconds later she screamed and began to make a kind of wailing noise punctuated by gagging. I opened my door and peered out to see her in the doorway to her room, bent at the waist, one hand cupping her mouth as she made heaving noises. I had totally forgotten about the bucket of crabs I’d dropped off some seven hours prior. During that time, many of the crabs had escaped the confines of the bucket and had wandered under the bed, into the closet and bathroom where they expired. A warm summer day, the eighty-something heat of the day had done its work and the various crustacheon cadavers were emitting a stench so awful as to be indescribable.

I was horrified by my error and demonstrated my deep empathy for laughing so hard I fell over, tyears blurring my vision. The smell coming from her room may have had a little something to do with that blurry vision as well. My dad, having heard the plaintive keening of my sister had dashed up the stairs to see what was wrong. He mnaged to assimilate the facts rather quickly and was none too pleased with me. “Why, for God’s sake, would you do that to your sister?” he asked, showing a bit of awe as he spoke.

“I’m sorry!” I said, trying desperately to stop my chortling. “I forgot all about the crabs. I dropped them off so she could see how many I caught and I forgot about them.” He looked at me and then at my sister. He grabbed me by my collar and yanked me into my sister’s room and demanded that I find every last crab and dispose of them. I went right to work, admiring how the little bastards had been so creative in choosing places to die. I found one on a closet shelf that was two feet off the floor. It took me about ten minutes to locate them all and toss them off the cliff in front of the house, returning them to the sea that they might complete the cycle of life. Although both of my parents brought a plethora of cleaning solvents to bear, the pine scent of the cleansers were no match for the iodine and ammonia tinged odor of dead fish. For the next week, the poor girl smelled like ocean creatures causing her friends to start calling her “The Tuna.” 

From the outset I had luck on my side when it came to crabs and my sister. From her blurted claim at the restaurant to her odiferous quarters to her friend’s chiding, I’d definitely won the skirmish. This was one of the very few times that ever happened. Eighteen months her junior, most of my life as a child was destined to follow in her honors garnering, cotillion filled popularity and accomplishments. Of course, in winning I lost, I was condemned to lawn and garden work so long as the slightest wiff of festering seafood was detectable in my sister’s room. It was in the third week of my indenture that my mother caught my sister waving a dead fish around in her room to maintain the odor of fish, and in turn, my sentence to chores. I was released from my bondage and got to look injured as my sister delivered the mom-enforced apology to me for her deviousness.

In that same year my sister sprouted, rising to the six foot height she would live with the rest of her life. The nickname ‘Tuna’ was forgotten in favor of a new moniker: due to her large size her friends started calling her ‘Horse’ and made whinnying noises on her approach. She took it all in stride, her friends meant nothing by it. That’s just the way of cliques and the good natured chiding they inflicted on one another. Of course, they didn’t see her when she was alone and her tears flowed from the caustic meaning of the taunts. Nor did they see me trying to cheer her up. Competition was one thing, but hey, this was my sister.

She took great delight as I told her of the mischief my friends and I wrecked on her name calling friends. She was cheered hearing that I’d managed to lock a number of crabs into the trunks of her high school chum’s cars. After all, everything must go full circle, just like the bucket of crabs I’d so proudly left in search of my sister’s approval on a hot summer day.

I ran over and grabbed the crab and tried to pull it off, but it wouldn’t let go and Toby just yelled louder about it. So I picked up a rock and started smacking the crab with it. I ended up crushing the crab, which even in death kept a tight grip on Toby’s foot. I tried to pry open the crab pincers, but my hands just weren’t strong enough. That thing had a heck of a grip. Our dingy was laying upside down up the beach a bit and I ran up to it and yanked one of the oar locks from the gunwale. It looked like a ‘U’ sitting on top of an ‘I.’  I ran back and shoved the ‘I’ part between the pincers and was finally able to prise them apart, freeing Toby from the nightmare grip. The bruise on his foot was immense and ugly purple.  Toby sat down and we stared at the damage, admiring it as boys do. I took care not to notice the tear that rolled down Toby’s cheek. I mean, what are friends for?

After a couple minutes, Toby picked up the rock I had killed the crab with and smashed it into the mangled corpse of the crab until it could only be described as chum. This was one of those sleights that couldn’t go unpunished, so Toby and I decided that we’d go get some hamburger and our long poled crab nets and head over to Brackish Bridge to catch some of the offending crabs relatives. With malice aforethought, we would provide a seafood option for dinner. Toby limped and winced with each step so I had him ride my bike which he could pedal somewhat painlessly as I walked along beside him. About halfway to the bridge Toby said his foot hurt too much to go on, and said he wanted to go see if his mom could do something to make it feel better. I readily agreed after looking at his foot and seeing that it has swollen up rather dramatically.

Mrs. Hubner took one look at Toby’s foot and screamed, and then wrapped him in her arms and hugged him to her saying “my poor baby” over and over again. Toby finally pulled away and asked if she could do anything about how much it hurt. She led him down the steps to the driveway, put him in the car, and drove off, leaving me standing in the driveway. I guessed she was taking him to the clinic. My guess was correct, Toby explained, when he called on the phone a couple hours later. Turned out the stupid crab had actually broken a bone in his foot and he was the proud possessor of a cast on his foot. I was invited to come over and be the first to sign it. When I got there, Mrs. Hubner was wringing her hands and complaining to her husband how terribly dangerous the shoreline was. Mr. Hubner said “now Margaret, it’s just part of being a boy to get the occasional bruise,” and that seemed the end of that discussion. Mrs. Hubner was always sure that we kids were all going to succumb to some awful thing in the ocean, and while God knows we tried to accommodate her, we survived anyway. I took notice that from then on he wore his sneakers when we were mucking about the shoreline.  I was giving him a hard time about it a few weeks later when I stepped on a piece of broken glass that caused me to get twelve stitches.  After that we both wore shoes as we challenged fate in the shallows.