Harold learns about life, death, birth, crime, and punishment.
Harold realized that while the history was important to him, what he really should be asking about was the policy and the way things were done here. He wanted to know about the governance and the social safety net, policing, and more. Still, he couldn't help wondering more about the history.
"There's so much I want to know," he said to Ku.
Ku nodded. "I'm sure and as you can imagine - there's a lot I'd like to ask you about. However, given the circumstances, I'm not sure that we should waste any time. Wait...I've got an idea." He stood up and moved to a large bookshelf. He pulled a thick tomb from the shelf. It was a beautiful book with hand tooled leather binding and gold gilt title. In fact, most of the books looked like they had been made by craftsmen - though there were some he could see with the old paper and cloth bindings Harold was used to.
Ku handed the book to Harold. 'The History of Hawai'i after the Fall'. He returned to the shelf and grabbed two more volumes. 'Mutual Nations and the People Who Make Them' and 'The Unusual Culture and History of the Republican States of America'.
"I wrote that one about the RSA," Ku told him. "These will give you a lot of the answers you are looking for - and the RSA book should help you to keep your cover - which, by the way, is something I highly recommend you do. Time travel is - problematic and while I'm willing to take the chance of teaching you about the future - I don't think you should let people know that you come from the past. It could disturb the delicate balance we live under."
Harold nodded and took a sip of the whiskey. He put the three books in his satchel - they pretty well filled it up but he was glad to have them. "I'll return these when I'm done with them."
"If you wish - that would be nice. For now, however, they are yours." Ku was smiling in a big way. "Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"
Harold shook his head "I don't mind, but I'm afraid you'll probably find it rather boring."
Ku laughed. "Nothing could be further from the truth. Okay, first question - How old are you?" Harold was surprised by the question because it seemed so banal and unimportant.
"I'm fifty-two," Harold said. Ku's look of complete surprise was not the reaction he had expected.
"You're barely an adult," Ku laughed..."I'm sorry, no offense. I sort of expected but didn't really believe it would be the case. Whatever you do, don't tell anyone else your age - especially Klee, if she finds out she's older than you, you'l never be able to get away with anything."
"Klee?" Harold said. "There's no way. She can't be older than me. She's a young woman. I'd bet she's still in her early thirties at the latest."
Ku laughed more. "I'm sure she would love to hear that, but you are completely wrong. She's turning seventy-five tomorrow." This completely blew Harold's mind.
"Seventy-five years? Are we talking dog years or something? Did solar years get shorter? A year is still three hundred and sixty five days, right?"
Ku waved his hand. "Yeah, yeah...same years now as before. The treatments though, they have gotten very good and we've managed to shave off a bit of the genetic decay that used to age people prematurely. Guess how old I am."
If Klee were seventy-five, Ku must be ancient. Harold would have guessed that he was in his late fifties to early sixties but now - he decided to guess extreme so as to avoid offending his host.
"Two hundred?" It was far higher than he believed possible.
Ku roared with laughter now. "I see what you are doing there. I won't torture you. No, I'm not two hundred but I'm nearly half of that. I'll be ninety-seven next June." This was inconceivable to Harold.
"Well, you certainly look younger than that." He didn't really know what to say. All the history and culture and time travel had been shocking but the fact that he was talking to a man who was nearly a hundred was the hardest thing for him to accept so far.
"Do people still die?" Harold asked.
"Oh, yes. Of course they do - most people are happy to live for a century but some decide to push on. There's only so much that we can do to stop time. The oldest in our society tend to be in the one-forties but I've heard that the Chinese sometimes push it further than that. After a century, the body just starts to decay and go downhill - that's unbearable for most people and they choose to pass."
"So is dying a choice for most people?" This was an astounding idea.
"The choice is whether to die while they have all their functions working or whether to live with degraded functions. Most people choose the former."
"I haven't seen many people who look like as old as we do," Harold remarked.
"That makes sense," Ku told him. "Most people prefer to cling to the blossom of youth. I've decided to let my age show." It was a remarkable statement from a man who looked nearly half a century younger than he actually was. "And that reminds me - we should determine an age for you. My suggestion is that you go with something like eighty. That makes you older that Klee but since everyone knows the RSA doesn't have as good a treatment regimen - that will sound believable given how you look."
"So how old is Brian? Is he like seventy-two?" It sounded ridiculous, but he had to ask.
Ku shook his head, "Nope, Brian is a pup. My little sister had him when she was sixty. He's only barely in his thirties." Had he not been a man who had somehow gone to bed and traveled through time, he wouldn't have believed a word of it. Sure, Brian's age was believable but becoming a mother in the sixth decade? Astounding.
"I have some more questions for you.." Ku said "Did you use," he made air quotes " 'social networks' ?" Harold briefly allowed his thoughts to wonder what other hand signals and gestures had survived the passage of time.
"Sure, " he said. "Everyone did. You almost have to use them. I probably used them less than most people after the first ten years - something about them started to really feel creepy, but in 2020 you pretty much had to use a cell phone, social networks, email, and the internet."
"You had a choice and you still used them?" Ku seemed shocked by this idea. "Why would you do that?"
Harold knew that social media and social networks were having a bad effect on his world and the people who lived in it - but Ku's reaction seemed pretty extreme.
"I don't understand," Harold said, honestly "I think I need more information. Tell me what you know about social networks - maybe we aren't talking about the same thing."
"The privacy apocalypse," Ku said. "The data vampires. The control systems." He said these things like he had said 'the pulse' - they all sort of made sense to Harold but not in the way that Ku was obviously intending them - as cultural tropes that everyone understood as a sort of shorthand for an era - much like in Harold's time they would talk about 'robber barons' or 'the 1%'.
"You have to explain further," Harold said. "I was born in the dawn of the digital age. Where I was yesterday, Facebook is only a teenager and the internet isn't old enough to have become a doctor yet."
Ku still looked surprised but he tried to explain "The pulse happened a couple centuries ago. We've been living without the sort of electronic network you are talking about since that time - we have tech, but it's very different - and as you might have noticed - we don't allow ourselves to be constantly monitored or surveilled. We use smart buildings, smart roads, smart tech - but that data is under very tight control because of what happened in your time - or, in the time shortly after your time."
"What happened?" Harold asked.
"What didn't happen would be a better question. People were completely exploited and manipulated. It's how the Trumps came to power, it's how the Republican States were born, it's how the suitcase bombers were made, it's how people watched passively or even helped while their neighbors, friends, and coworkers were marched into death and slavery camps. There were cases where rogue data-tech convinced parents to kill their own children - and that's not even the worst of it. People were manipulated into poisoning themselves, destroying the environment, ignoring destruction happening right before their eyes....and, pardon my surprise - but I'm just amazed that at the beginning you just accepted it, let it happen, embraced it. I mean, Facebook - come on - it's like the foundational strength of the RSA..and you mention it like it's a cooperative or a shared industry."
Harold didn't know what to say. "We didn't know. It all happened so fast. There were people who sounded the alarm but most people didn't listen to them. So there are no phones here, no laptops, no internet? I've seen some tech - like in the cafeteria this morning...for coffee.."
"The pulse changed everything. I guess I need to tell you more about that. Essentially, every day the entire planet is blasted with a super EMP. It's been refined over the years - so it doesn't do any damage to people like the old ones did - no cancer or lymphoma from it - but it still fries any circuitry that gets exposed to it. Any memory or silicon data that isn't shielded gets fried."
"But Brian said they still use a lot of electronics and hand held devices in the RSA..." Harold was almost sure that was what he had heard this morning. "How do they do it?"
Ku sighed. "We're not completely sure. We think they have built underground bunkers and they force everyone to either leave their devices or take themselves into them when the satellites are passing overhead."
"If you have satellites, why don't you look?" Harold was a little surprised to hear there was still space tech up there - but on reflection - he was in the future so he should have expected it.
Ku looked at him askance, maybe to see if he was joking. "We wouldn't use our technology to violate their privacy that way. They can do as they want."
"But you mentioned they are using control systems to control their population. Doesn't that kind of make it a responsibility to find out."
Ku shook his head. "You really are from the past. They would do that, they would violate our rights, they would violate our sovereignty, but that doesn't make it right for us to do the same. We give them ideas, we try to find out what we can from those few people we encounter, we have tried to send people in to observe - but we would never watch them from space. Never."
"Do they watch you? Aren't you worried about space weapons?" It was a serious question but Ku brushed it off.
"They don't have access. We won't let them. The mutual nations have complete autonomy and authority in space and we don't let anyone else up into orbit."
This was an astounding revelation to Harold. "How do you stop them?"
"If something shows up in space and we haven't sent it, we destroy it. We have a treaty among the mutuals. Everything up there has to comply."
"Doesn't that violate their rights to go there?"
"Of course not. Space covers everything. they can have their own land but the air, the water, and the space around our planet - that is not available for claiming or utilizing outside of the Commons Treaty."
"What if they want to go to another planet?" Harold was genuinely curious.
"We'd be glad to help them. They've tried before but they won't take our assistance and frankly, it's not the kind of thing that can be done by just one country or nation - it's too big."
There was an arrogance about Ku’s answer that set off alarm bells in Harold’s head. In his own time, he had been a firm believer in pride goeth before the fall. Meaning that when someone said something with as much conviction as Ku just had, Harold’s impulse was to think they were probably wrong. Harold wanted to ask more questions about space but he was more fascinated by trying to understand what he had already seen.
"So there are no laws here? No police?" It seemed unlikely.
"That's right," Ku told him. "You can do what you want. No one will stop you."
"What if I want to smash this glass? Or break a window? Maybe throw the glass through the window."
"You can do as you like, but I don't know why you would want to do that."
"No one would stop me. Would I get a ticket or be fined?"
"No one would do anything. I suppose we would clean it up if you didn't and fix the window but aside from that..."
"Okay, I kind of understand that robbery and property crime don't exist because anyone can have what they want but what about crimes of violence or passion? What about deviants? How do you protect people?"
Ku took a sip of his drink. "How did you protect people?"
"Well, we had jails and police. We had a whole system of laws and punishment."
"Did that protect people? Were they safe? I've read about your time, it seems there were a lot of murders, a lot of awful things people did to one another...maybe I read false accounts...didn't those things happen?"
Harold was stuck. "Yes, of course, but it probably would have been worse...I mean, well this isn't really what I believe but I'm sort of trapped by my own indoctrination here....No, people weren't safe in my time. The laws and police didn't stop terrible things from happening to people...but, do you just let people murder each other? I mean what happens to child molesters? What about rapists?"
"These things do happen. In my life, I've seen some of it. My daughter was sexually assaulted by a man when she was still in her teens..."
"What happened to him? I mean, I'm very sorry that happened. " Harold realized he was treading on a traumatic event.
"Well, she told me about it. I asked her what she wanted to do. She was angry and dealing with the emotions and I tried to give her the space she needed."
"Was he arrested? Did he go to jail?"
Ku looked at him like he was crazy. "Of course not. I thought about it for a few days and then I killed him."
"What? You just killed him? And that was it?" Harold was astounded.
Ku was looking serious as he explained "No, of course that wasn't it. I went to the man's family and I explained what he had done. His mother told me that it wasn't the first time he had been involved in such a thing - something my daughter had already told me. Then, after considering the circumstances, I drafted a letter to his family and told them that I planned on killing him. This gave them the chance to warn him so he could either leave, possibly come after me, or maybe the whole family would come after me. It could easily have led to a long bloody feud if it had been handled incorrectly. It turns out that they knew it was a problem and they didn't even warn him. I didn't let him suffer, but I couldn't let him continue to do such things."
"There were no consequences?" Harold could hardly believe this.
"Of course there were consequences. I live with it. I always have to wonder if maybe there was something I could have done differently. His family lives with it."
"What if they'd have come after you?"
"I have a very big family," Ku said in a way that made coming after him sound impossible. "Given the circumstances, no one would have called coming after me justified. They knew that and they were complicit in it. They probably should have done something about him after the first or the second incident."
"Okay...but what about a non-justified murder...that would be different, right?"
"We have had feuds," Ku told him "Eventually someone has to have a better nature."
Harold remembered the adage Klee and Brian had used in the stairwell... "Appeal to your enemy's better nature, eradicate them if they don't have one." Apparently, these were not just empty words.
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