A story exploring time travel and societal issues in the wake of 9/11. This is chapter 20. See previous posts for chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19.
One day, for no apparent reason, T2's lottery numbers from the future stopped being the same as the numbers that were being drawn in the present. T2 had been expecting them to start being off here and there, not all at once. Fortunately, by the time the numbers stopped matching, he was obscenely rich.
With housing prices down, T2 bought property after property, setting up rent-to-own deals with thousands of tenants. This and his other business ventures were run almost exclusively by other people. Thomas was handling the AFN competently, and this was becoming a popular news network. Trish continued heading up TAP, with the network's full support.
The TAP crypto token was connected with the Bitcoin network by a software bridge, making it easy for people to swap one cryptocurrency for the other. The Anything Federation Blockchain was many iterations more advanced than the Bitcoin Blockchain. It stored more kinds of data and was energy efficient. T2 felt irrationally proud of this blockchain, which Ana sometimes teased him about. His hope had always been to accelerate adoption of crypto, but it was still too early to tell if he was having any impact.
None of this was on T2's mind as he jogged through the crowd of Occupy demonstrators. He'd been supporting the movement with money and media from the beginning, but had until now avoided its various 'occupations' because he didn't want to be publicly recognized as a member of the one percent. The crowd T2 moved through wasn't rowdy. Some people milled around aimlessly, a few held signs by the roadways for passing cars to see, and the rest congregated around a speaker giving a speech.
The speech was delivered without amplification, a few words at a time. The speaker spoke the words, and the crowd repeated them verbatim so everyone could hear. They called it a 'human microphone,' as it made it possible for speeches to be delivered without need for bullhorns or other devices, whose use required permits in many jurisdictions. T2 found the innovation interesting in that it synchronized crowds in a unique way. But the human microphone delivered words extremely slowly, which meant it was only good for communicating very simple information.
Having passed through the crowd, T2 sat on a low concrete wall on the north side of the government plaza. Waiting for Ana, he watched as a police car pulled up and let a young man out of the back of the car. The young man doddered around for a moment, appearing disoriented. When the squad car pulled away, T2 approached the young man, concerned he might need medical attention.
"Hey man, you okay?" asked T2. "I saw you get out of the squad car."
The man appeared to have trouble focusing. "Cops got me high as fuck," he said. "Then they fed me McDonalds."
Ana arrived in that moment. "Sixty pizzas are on the way," she said to T2. "I had them delivered to the south side, where the crowd is. What's with him?"
"He says the cops got him high," said T2. "I just watched them drop him off."
"So high," confirmed the man. "Like, they picked me up here and brought me to a warehouse down by the airport. Then they made me smoke bowl after bowl while they stared at me and asked me question after question. It was like being abducted by aliens! After that, we went to the McDonalds drive through. And they dropped me back off here."
"That's crazy," said Ana. "For real?"
"Part of why I picked today to come down here," said T2. "I'd heard that police were interfering with demonstrations by feeding drugs to activists and had to see it for myself."
"They are interfering with the demonstrations, aren't they?" said the very stoned man, wandering away, back into the crowd. "That's messed up."
"I handed out about a hundred cards," said T2. "But, to be honest, I doubt anyone will show up tonight."
"Why do you say that?" asked Ana.
"Honestly?" said T2. "Most of these people probably see me as the enemy."
"I'd think some will at least be curious," said Ana.
A few hours later, T2 and Ana stood in the hotel bar they'd rented for the evening, surrounded by a hundred and fifty people. Half the crowd consisted of the collective that ran the Minneapolis TAP node and their associates. The other half had likely found their way there from T2's advertising.
"See," said Ana, as they looked around the room. "They're here and ready to hear what you have to say."
After conferring with the sound guy, wearing a wireless mic, T2 had the music turned off and called for attention. "Hello everyone," he began. "I'm T2 Barabos and I invited you here this evening to talk about our sadly distorted economy and what we might be able to do to fix it."
"Eat the rich!" shouted a man in the crowd.
"Unionize!" shouted another.
T2 laughed. "Both fine ideas if this were still the Nineteenth Century," he said. "But we're not. We're in the Twenty-First Century and I daresay we can do better. Now, make some noise if you think Occupy is actually changing the world."
There was scattered applause and a few shouts.
"Really?" asked T2. "After demonstrations everywhere and 8,000 arrests arrests, that's the extent of your enthusiasm? Wall Street crushed Main Street and got bailed out by Washington while everyone else was left to fend for themselves. I thought Occupy was the people's response to that. Am I missing something?"
"You are the one percent!" shouted a woman in the center of the room.
"True," said T2. "And it's also true that projects like RIP Medical Debt are coming out of Occupy to make a difference. I'm not here to denigrate the movement or tell anyone what to do. What I would like to do is present you with a perspective you may not have heard before."
"We are the ninety-nine percent," said someone, like they wanted to get a chant going. "We are the ninety-nine percent." This stopped when no one else joined in.
"That perspective is this," continued T2. "The legacy economy that we inherited is hopelessly corrupt. But the technology exists today for us to abandon that system and replace it with something far more equitable. Imagine throwing away the entire world of credit ratings and bank mortgages. Imagine making Wall Street irrelevant and building a new economy from the bottom up instead of having the financial sector crush us from the top down."
The crowd started paying attention. For the next fifteen minutes, T2 laid out how his companies could provide infrastructure for a new economy capable of providing a real alternative to the legacy system. He'd done something similar in a dozen other major cities, though the impact of these talks was yet to be determined.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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