"Just remember your promise," She was saying to me.

"My promise?" I hedged, trying to hide my confusion, I wasn't even sure where I was.

"How could you forget a promise to speak to the President of the United States?" Laura smiled quizzically. "Your Commander in Chief??

"Good question." A damn good question I thought. "I was only joking! I haven't forgotten!" I stuttered as Laura left, seeming slightly peeved.

Of course, at that moment I wasn't capable of remembering whether I had I just made love to Laura Silvan, the most beautiful woman in the world, much less made a promise to speak with the President. I rebuttoned my own shirt, straightened up as best I could and followed Laura, though she was already far gone down some corridor.

There was no one left in the Ultima building, except a big burly guard with bulging biceps, holding an contraband AK47 - you couldn't own a squirt gun legally much less real weapons since the Brady mandatory gun confiscation. He looked like former U.S. military, more buff than buff, almost as if he were a Presidential guard.

"Pardon me, but could you tell me where everyone went?" I asked politely.

"This way Dr. Heller," the guard motioned and then appeared ready to zip his mouth until hell froze over.

"I imagine you have a license to carry that thing," I posited, wary of the carelessness with which Godzilla the guard carried his weapon, but I shut up as he ignored me and we set out at a march. Some good the Brady III ban on guns had done, they were more common now than the spybots that were supposed to detect them. It was just that now, little guys like me couldn't legitimately buy as much as a rubber band gun. Not that I was into that kind of thing, I'm a pacifist at heart.

"Your transportation is this way," the guard announced.

As we passed down one glass corridor, I noticed there was an ambulance across the parkway loading a body wrapped in sheets into its rear doors.

"Intruders," Godzilla grunted. As if this explained anything. I mean, you see people being carted out in body bags all the time, but it's usually in the ethnic territories.

"A pharmaceutical company must attract addicts and people desperate for last chance cures at an alarming rate," I babbled to thin air. "That must be what happened." But the guard never broke step nor silence.

Parked at the front of the Ultima complex was a vintage red Viper convertible, circa 1997, its engine rumbling on all 10 cylinders. The hydrocarbon tax alone on that thing would break my salary.

"A loan from Mahdi Ahmadi?" I queried.

"A gift," Godzilla answered and pirouetted to march away.

I tried to protest, but I was quickly left talking to myself. As I drove home gingerly from Ultima, I had the distinct feeling my life was now on a slippery slope toboggan ride that only offered an icy reality at the bottom of the hill. Without knowing quite how I covered thee distance home, lost in thought, I went to sleep wondering how the hell was I supposed to contact the president?

The next morning I was awakened at seven o'clock by a call from the White House secretarial pool, of all places.

"You have been invited to a political fundraiser to be held at the Melissa Alano estate, above Half Moon Bay."

"Don't you usually send engraved invitations to these things?" I asked sarcastically, half awake, "I have an engraved presidential invitation collection you know. And should I wear my glass slippers to the ball?"

My jokes were not appreciated.

"Dr. Heller," the officious secretary responded in her highest sounding tone. "There are people throughout the world who would kill for a personal invitation from the President of the United States for a private audience. There was no invitation sent for the event because you are not being asked to raise funds. I have been asked to tell you that you are being invited as a private citizen, as a friend of the President."

"A friend of whom?? And what would the subject of the meeting be?"

"I'm sure a bright person like you should be able to figure it all out," the secretary replied cold as ice.

"Can I bring a date?" I tried to one last time to crack her fascade.

"No. But I can inform you that the singer Laura Silvan is providing the entertainment for the event. Maybe you'll get lucky and score!" the secretary laughed hysterically, perhaps believing an obnoxious S-O-B like myself had as much chance of charming Laura Silvan as a sewer rat.

As soon as I hung up, I called Laura on her cell to catch her up on what I thought was big news.

"Laura, you won't believe who I have a private audience with?"

"Your tuxedo is on hold at Erik's in the city." Laura already knew the answer. "The event is Saturday, you have two days to rest and be your best. Please don't be late! See you!"

"News seems to travel fast," I mused. "A lot faster than I know how to keep track of." But Laura had already hung up.

Obviously this was no minor barbecue I was invited to. This was the election season and President Williams was on a record fundraising pace running hard for the Progressive slate. He had to be, the uprisings in the autonomous Dearborn Sharia Territory had raised the prospect of real competition from his opponent, moderate Republicrat Sam Houston.

In fact, President Williams entire initiative to create new autonomous territories to stop social unrest seemed at risk. After the Dearborn Autonomous Territory had been set up in the prior Republicrat administration, it had become clear on the Progressive Party blog site Muevete.org that ethnic and social diversity in the United States would require the creation of many more such autonomous areas for the sake of diversity. The billionaire financiers behind Muevete would not be denied.

Originally, President William's and his Progressive Party wrote a Party Platform that only called for creation of the Aztlan Angeleno Territoria, but that soon grew to include the Aztlan Tejano Border Territory, the Pink Pride Bay Area Autonomous City, Greenworld Cascadia Territory, the Murielito-Cuban Reform Territory, the New York Puerto Rican Sub Territory, Minneapolis New Somalia and even the Native Indian Gaming Reservation Dispersed Territory.

Republicrats had originally called this entire idea secessionist, a stopgap measure on the road to multicultural balkanization, but they were rightly derided as racists. The Republicrats soon came to realize that their decades earlier anti-immigrant border wall movement had destroyed their political base and now was no time to go down that same path. So instead of questioning the wisdom of autonomous territories, the debate had devolved towards whether a White Party movement in Montana should be forcibly eradicated, or whether a whites-only territory was also a new potential autonomous region which could be ruled under martial law - sort of a territorial Gulag.

Even as apolitical as I was, I could see there was a real danger that the United States would be drawn into a civil war over the Autonomous Territories Initiative. The government was bigger than ever before, but it's control had been fractured by a multitude of cultural and environmental issues, so there was no accountability, no cohesion. Why pay taxes to a country that denied it was even a country?

Not many laws from the government were worth the recycled Green toilet paper they were written on. With inflation still running at 27% even after the Progressives had brought in a soft money Fed chairman and insttuted Central Bank Digital Currency, it was little wonder things seemed a bit out of control. But I had better things to do than worry about politics, that was the stuff that belonged with Shelley, my long lost blind date from the Women's Studies department. Speaking of whom, I received a call from Shelley as I entered my house.

"Uhm, that isn't my expertise." I responded unsurely. "How's it been going at Women's studies? I haven't heard from you since my accident."

"Your accident? Oh yeah, that accident" Shelley laughed nervously, as if I hadn't experienced eternity in the interim since we last spoke. "The academic study of oppression of women has never been more necessary! But I was hoping you could help me install a new operating system on my VAXRFID, um, for free."

"Sure, I'd be happy to reformat your VAXRFID and install Linax," I replied cheerfully. "But you know that would be illegal," I added. That shut Shelley up.

"Besides," I added. "Peach Computers has industrial spies all through academia who try to get unwary faculty to install their operating system so they can hack their hardware for the Feds. I'm saving you from a trap, there is nothing Peach Computer liked better than to be in control of a university professor's operating system - especially one who is an active National Civilian Security Force cadre member."

"Um, that's OK. See you!" was Shelley's reply. Click! Shelley obviously had ulterior motives for the call.

The VAXRFID had originally been pushed by the tech fossil Bill Gates in 2020 when Covid 19 raged. Gates had been a driving force behind worldwide forced vaccination programs for a decade even before the Covid pandemic. It was Gates who predicted “proof” of vaccination would be needed to allow life "to go on as normal" and the need for an VAXRFID in every American:
“eventually there will be sort of this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global re-opening up.”

It was Gates who was a key financial backer of our mandatory digital VAXRFID identification record which stores vast amounts of data on each person under the skin. It was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who funded the tracking chip's development. After the breakup of Microsoft and reconstitution as the MicroByte State monopoly, leadership fell to nephew Gilbert Bates and the World hasn't looked back.

VAXRFID was of course just the tip of the iceberg of Deep State surveillance. While the networking of humans and machines has incredible promise for improving overall health, the so called Internet of Bodies (IoB) hyper enabled the global surveillance state.

The IoB ecosystem is part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that even pre-COVID the World Economic Forum (WEF) urged governments to harness for its “great reset” agenda.
“One silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Populations have overwhelmingly shown a willingness to make sacrifices” — Klaus Schwab, WEF Director

Following the launch of its “Great Reset” agenda, the World Economic Forum (WEF) made a push for the global adoption of the Internet of Bodies, which enabled the benevolent authoritarian surveillance apparatus we benefit from even today. It allows the government to manipulate human behavior to achieve community outcomes.

An old RAND corporation report had warned the Internet of Bodies might trigger breakthroughs in medical knowledge. Or it might enable a surveillance state of unprecedented intrusion and consequence. But they were just being paranoid.

Long ago, Peach Computers had deployed its algorithm, NeuralMatch, to monitor pMessages and images on user's cells, as well as the whole array of Internet of Bodies devices. Eventually, Microbyte took over the control of embedded VAXRFID skin chips and computer devices after it was designated the state monopoly.

I had reformatted my mandatory COVAID tracking VAXRFID chip with bootleg code long ago, so the Feds got bogus information. I even created a randomized path route that spewed nonsense into the GPS tracker. Hacking is just something software guys do.

The idea of scanning the Internet of Bodies devices for allegedly criminal material originated in China.  In 2008, the Chinese Communist Party required the installation of Green Dam, an intrusive information filtering software. They claimed it was to protect children from corrosive Internet content, but included the ability to scan and block political and religious content. Green Dam also monitored individual computer behavior.

It wasn't until 2022 that Peach Computers followed the Chinese intrusion with NeuralMatch -- doing unauthorized searches of users data drives for "child pornography". Unsurprisingly, the algorithm also seemed to pick up a lot of positives for "enemies of the state". Not only grandmothers looking at baby pictures of their grandchildren, but White Supremacists. A hundred fifty million of them.

While China had had the most sophisticated and extensive Internet filtering systems in the world -- “the Great Firewall” -- Peach's Neural Match was soon far ahead of China. Gaggle, Twister, MicroByte, Facely, and all the Big Tech companies doing business in China who had abetted their surveillance, soon caught up with and surpassed Neural Match in America as well.

After Beijing blocked Gaggle in 2010, the company hastily introduced a censored version of their search engine. In fact, Big Tech firms readily signed on to pledges for Internet censorship, not only complying with China’s well-developed content regulation system, but turning a blind eye to the repression of Falun Gong, Uighurs, and anyone opposed to the Chinese government.

In 2013, the Chinese government was employing an estimated two million people to monitor Internet content. By 2030, Big Tech, acting as a shadow government surveillance network in America, had even more tools to employ to ferret out Wrongthink. When enterprising Chinese citizens started using Virtual Private Networks to circumvent the firewall, the Great Cannon was deployed to intercept communications with any Chinese server not employing cryptographic protections. America's Big Tech followed suit - heck, they wrote the Chinese surveillance code.

America's Big Tech surveillance algorithms now continuously adjust and replace content as they scrape the Internet for WrongThink - especially regarding COVAID. Personally, I believe Internet usage is rightly restricted for individuals who share rumors or lies -- a rumor according to the Department of Justice is anything sent to more than 50 people or shared more than 50 times -- and those caught face defamation charges with up to three years in jail. Three thousand American citizens were arrested this year alone simply because they reported disinformation on the original COVID virus mutation to superbugs. That disinformation even included a death toll caused by overuse of vaccines, and disseminated pictures of dying victims - even doctors were caught disseminating this false information.

I agree with all those restrictions on Free Speech, it would be illegal to WrongThink otherwise.

NeuralMatch became even more important after the health mandate to have VAXRFID chips implanted in every American, to track the progress of COVAIDs. I disabled my chip with code I found on the DarkNet, and some tweaking of the software on my own. I hate to admit, natural immunity seems to have worked for me, just as some heretics had claimed. I caught COVAID, a couple times actually, though less severe each time and only lasting a week or so. The hard part was hiding my illness from snoops like Shelley and her National Civilian Security Force who hunted like pack hyenas for anyone avoiding the COVAID inoculation mandate. In theory, I developed what some theorized was 20 times the immunity, as COVAID mutated to a plethora of superbugs.

That's one of the reasons I'd become involved in fractal encryption algorithms in the first place, to avoid the constant snooping. I was using Java and Open Source running on the Linax operating system, in spite of the government edicts attempting to ban all of them as security risks. Fortunately, the web was originally designed as a distributed network that DARPA hardened long ago against nuclear warfare, so programmers had continued robust development despite attempts to shut us down.

The two days of rest I got was well needed, but it didn't prepare me for the Big Event at Melissa Alano's estate. Once the cute temptress of a hundred Indie films, Alano now played the ageing doyenne of film and theater, and politics. She seemed a bit smarter than all the rest of us, at least that what was what she projected.

The fund raiser was to be held at Alano's Half Moon Bay mansion. Her acclaim as a genius in political theory seemed directly proportional to the amount of money she raised for avant garde political movements du jour, from COVAIDs to starving pandas. She even had her own portal website. Like moths drawn to a flame, movie stars are drawn to political power.

President William's campaign soirées had been without doubt the largest uninterrupted string of social events the nation had ever seen, and the epitome was the one to be hosted by Alano. Elegant mansions, loud with the voices and music of the politically super connected, were like echo chambers for a roaring Niagara Falls of money rushing into the political whirlpool of American politics. The sound of the torrent of money seemed loud enough to drown out the political voices of an entire nation of plebians.