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Jul. 5th, 2007 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walk_insThere is a hierarchy of man as old as the species. The hierarchy will always propagate itself. The structure of it is simple: there are winners, and there are losers.
The structure is simple. The consequential effects of the structure are more complex. Some men believe that it is the right of the winners to run roughshod over the losers. Better men believe that it is the responsibility of the winners to improve the losers, once the losers know what they are.
Senator Fred Atwood is one of these better men.
The losers must know who they are, he believes, before any improvements can take place. It is also the responsibility of the winners to teach the losers. Ten years ago the border planets lost a war; ten years ago Fred Atwood helped to win that war.
Losers can't help themselves. They're losers. That's how history repeats itself. If losers try to help themselves, they perpetuate a situation that obviously isn't working. If the situation was working, the losers wouldn't have lost.
Atwood has seen no evidence that the losers know what they are. Therefore -- they must be taught. Therefore -- Gabriel Tam's IIGA is both misguided and dangerous. Therefore -- Tam is a threat, if he can make that legislation go through despite the best efforts of Atwood and his coalition.
Therefore: it's time to think about neutralizing that threat, in the best interests of the future stability of society.
Atwood is a guardian. Tam represents the mob at the city gates.
The only thing a mob understands is force.
***
The house is largely as his wife left it -- three women are very well-paid to keep the dust out of the parts of the house that Atwood does not use. (He has information on their husbands, their mothers, their children. They know what he has.)
Tonight Atwood hangs up his coat and goes down the hallway to an unassuming door with enough security protocols to choke a horse. Entering the codes doesn't take him long enough -- if he does not have to consciously think about what they are, they've stayed the same for too long a time. He'll change them tomorrow.
In the corner of his real office, his private office, there sits a cabinet with yet more locks on it. These codes he changes weekly. Once inside, he reaches one arm into the very back corner, feeling for the little node --
"There," he breathes (puffs, really), and a very thin panel clicks out from the cabinet's side. Atwood draws out the file, closes the panel, and closes the cabinet.
He spreads the contents of the file on the table -- the one that looks like it belongs in a war room -- and pauses to consider them. Image captures and vid captures. Medical records. Transcripts.
"The question," Atwood says to the empty room, "the question at the moment -- who is more dangerous? The father? Or the daughter?"
He brushes aside a document detailing a night's fit of psychotropically induced monologue, and looks down upon the image of a pale little girl with smudges under her eyes. In the capture she looks like a caged animal.
"You can't bargain," he says slowly, "with people who think they're righteous. Who think they have a mission."
Atwood reaches out and presses play on a vid capture with the side of his thumb.
"There's something wrong," he recites, with all the decorum of a deacon in his church, "with the body politic."
The structure is simple. The consequential effects of the structure are more complex. Some men believe that it is the right of the winners to run roughshod over the losers. Better men believe that it is the responsibility of the winners to improve the losers, once the losers know what they are.
Senator Fred Atwood is one of these better men.
The losers must know who they are, he believes, before any improvements can take place. It is also the responsibility of the winners to teach the losers. Ten years ago the border planets lost a war; ten years ago Fred Atwood helped to win that war.
Losers can't help themselves. They're losers. That's how history repeats itself. If losers try to help themselves, they perpetuate a situation that obviously isn't working. If the situation was working, the losers wouldn't have lost.
Atwood has seen no evidence that the losers know what they are. Therefore -- they must be taught. Therefore -- Gabriel Tam's IIGA is both misguided and dangerous. Therefore -- Tam is a threat, if he can make that legislation go through despite the best efforts of Atwood and his coalition.
Therefore: it's time to think about neutralizing that threat, in the best interests of the future stability of society.
Atwood is a guardian. Tam represents the mob at the city gates.
The only thing a mob understands is force.
The house is largely as his wife left it -- three women are very well-paid to keep the dust out of the parts of the house that Atwood does not use. (He has information on their husbands, their mothers, their children. They know what he has.)
Tonight Atwood hangs up his coat and goes down the hallway to an unassuming door with enough security protocols to choke a horse. Entering the codes doesn't take him long enough -- if he does not have to consciously think about what they are, they've stayed the same for too long a time. He'll change them tomorrow.
In the corner of his real office, his private office, there sits a cabinet with yet more locks on it. These codes he changes weekly. Once inside, he reaches one arm into the very back corner, feeling for the little node --
"There," he breathes (puffs, really), and a very thin panel clicks out from the cabinet's side. Atwood draws out the file, closes the panel, and closes the cabinet.
He spreads the contents of the file on the table -- the one that looks like it belongs in a war room -- and pauses to consider them. Image captures and vid captures. Medical records. Transcripts.
"The question," Atwood says to the empty room, "the question at the moment -- who is more dangerous? The father? Or the daughter?"
He brushes aside a document detailing a night's fit of psychotropically induced monologue, and looks down upon the image of a pale little girl with smudges under her eyes. In the capture she looks like a caged animal.
"You can't bargain," he says slowly, "with people who think they're righteous. Who think they have a mission."
Atwood reaches out and presses play on a vid capture with the side of his thumb.
"There's something wrong," he recites, with all the decorum of a deacon in his church, "with the body politic."
