Suveron, Prologue (Part 4)

image created with help from LeonardoAI

"Energy profile 2," Lumminaria calmly spoke into the receiver of the mainframe. "Transition begun," retorted the humanoid voice of the computer system. The LED fixtures, which provided the main source of light in the darkness of the cave system, flickered for just a second. The energy management system usually did a more than adequate job of allocating the power derived from the geothermal vents unto the various subsystems under the charge of the cave-dwellers. This time was different than most, however. The battery banks would need to be fully charged for what was to come. "Transition completed," the deep voice concluded.

Luminaria, the slender, stern, raven-haired engineer turned and left the control room. The metal door slid to close behind her, and the scanner which sat adjacent to the door lit back up, awaiting the next individual whose credentials would be verified before allowing entry. As she began her stride through the maze of caverns her group had inhabited for a little under a decade, memories of the past flooded into her mind. One memory in particular dominated her focus: that of her now deceased brother named Cadence. He was a dissident at heart, and just so happened to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Before its reformation into the United American Empire, around the time of the Great Inflation, Cadence had believed he had seen a dire future for his nation. Luminaria's gait halted, and her eyelids shut as she accessed the information that had been stored away for so long.

"Inflation is theft!," Cadence bellowed to the onlooking masses. "You work your whole life, and your savings disappears in a flash. Its a hidden tax. You cannot trust your currency, you cannot trust its issuers! The time to fight back is now! Other options are out there. Save your hard earned wealth and invest it into crypto. The dollar is dead, will you be?" The crowd erupted in synchronized jeers. "But, you may say," Cadence continued, "how can you pay for things without the dollar? To that I say, try paying for them with the dollar! Already there exists an infrastructure for this. You can, right now, buy all of the things you need without the dollar. Other countries in the world have done this, why won't you?" Some in the crowd began to cheer, and continued to record the scene with their phones. Suddenly, Luminaria saw the screen on the phone of the person to her left go blank, and she scanned her surroundings to verify that it was the same for everyone else. That's when the unthinkable happened.

Luminaria then looked on with horror, as armored officers stormed onto the stage and rushed at her brother. The crowd responded in anger and began to charge at the stage. This was anticipated, and a hailstorm of canisters landed into the crowd and began spewing their smoke. Squad cars and riot vans then surrounded the crowd with remarkable speed and coordination. "CEASE YOUR ACTIVITIES IMMEDIATELY AND PREPARE FOR ARREST OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON," a voice boomed. "THIS IS AN ILLEGAL GATHERING AND AN ACT OF TERRORISM ACCORDING TO US CODE." Panic ensued and the crowd retreated from the stage and the smoke that was being spewed out near its base. Some passed out, others fled in the opposite direction of the stage. It was futile, a wall of riot suppression officers had already surrounded them. There would be no escape.

Luminaria's eyes opened, and she continued her traversal of the cave network. She passed through an Agro chamber, with its artificial sunlight providing a nice warm bath across her skin. The final destination, of course, would be the meeting chamber. Her colleagues awaited her arrival and she was naturally a punctual individual. It really was a marvel what they had been able to accomplish. A whole population of nearly 300 individuals living solely underground, it was a modern miracle. When one has an energy source, however, meeting every other need is simply a matter of engineering. Well water was pumped in and filtered, food was all grown with artificial lighting and auto-harvested. Most work, including the mental, was automated. Luminaria had been one of the few to refuse personal cybernetic enhancements and being plugged into the interlink, but she was not shy of utilizing technology, so long as there was still some distance between her and the interface. Biological enhancements, on the other hand, were not off the table. Her mind then flashed again back to the Cadence experience.

She was cold, hungry, sleep-deprived, and on the edge of breaking from weeks of enhanced interrogation tactics. The interrogators had no information to gain from her, seeing as she had not gotten involved with some of the more radical elements of the movement. Other than her brother, she didn't know any "dissidents." She was classified as a domestic terrorist anyways, and knew what that meant. The door to her isolation cell opened, and in came a large man dressed in military garb. She winced, in preparation for another round of rape and beatings. Instead, the man said, "You are of no use to us, foreigner. You are being transferred to a final detention center, where you will be processed and deported," with a gruff voice. "W-what? I'm a citizen," she gasped. "You have my ID." The man cracked a slight smile, "We were unable to verify your identity. Nice try, though." Adrenaline pumped through her again, as another man entered the room. Despite the rush she was still much too weak to put up a struggle, and could barely muster the energy to speak. The two men then picked her up and shuffled her out into the bright lights of the hall. Consciousness drained from Luminaria as the
exposure set in.

When the dollar began its death spiral, it ruffled a lot of feathers. Most Americans believed that their system was ruled by 2 political factions, and that they had an actual voice in their government. The reality was, this latest conflict, was old money vs new. The old way of doing things involved carefully manipulating financial landscapes and engineering economic catastrophes with a particular timing so that more and more wealth could be drained from the lower classes upwards via inflation and boom and bust cycles. The birth of cryptocurrency, however, threatened this old order as new titans began to grow their wealth from early adoption. The response of the state, who had evolved to serve the interests of the wealthy, was too slow at first, though attempts were made to curb the impact of crypto. First, the blockchain itself was contaminated with illicit images, which could serve as grounds for future confiscation of those who downloaded the ledger, but as more and more "important" individuals did so, this ground for confiscation became shaky at best. Then, thanks to a certain strategist who was tasked with finding an attack vector against the "currency" it was determined that old money could get its revenge through its old mechanism: the state. Governments across the globe began buying more and more into Bitcoin, which made its investors, who were a bit naive, gain confidence. Few recognized what was coming next.

It is difficult to bring down cryptocurrency outright, but one well-known potential avenue existed: the 51% attack. The central banking system, and its patrons, saw crypto as a direct threat to its own existence, and acted to garner state support to acquire their 51% share in mining the coin. Naturally this was an expensive endeavor, but old money would be using taxpayer money to do this. Few whales of crypto could compete with a Western alliance and its government puppets. Crypto bros had ideology and ethos on their side, the state had an army of scientists, intelligence agents, and the cloak of legitimacy from the population. The victor was inevitable. Mass adoption of crypto currency threatened financial capital, so while the states quietly bought larger and larger shares of Bitcoin, the next stage of attack was threefold. 1) Build public confidence in the cryptocurrency through state investments. 2) Take control of the ledger and erase the majority of it. 3) Discredit future investment in crypto and criminalize those who push its use as terrorist seeking to steal from the public. It had been very effective, and the result was that the government had public support when coming to the rescue and pushing its digital dollar as the stable coin.

Finally, Luminaria had made her entrance into the meeting room. Her peers were all seated at the table already, with stern expressions on their faces. She took a seat and prepared herself to receive new information from the briefing. Something was about to change, she could sense it.