Chapter 3 Facade
Darren-Amber D1
In the 2130’s, the greatest challenge and focus of the people at the bottom of the food chain had boiled down to this: how to increase their SIN Score. The higher someone’s SIN Score and therefore social class, the more invisible they were to all the social restrictions. That was the only chance at relative freedom.
Electronic or physical tampering with, or removing, a SIN Chip from themselves or anyone else was illegal and had severe consequences—usually immediately transfer to a State Labor Commune as a temporary slave, to live, work, and produce any number of the long list of products manufactured and sold by the government. Prisons had long before been abolished and replaced with the labor communes.
Darren and his pregnant wife, Amber, had just finished buying some baby clothes at a yard sale down the street from their flat. They lived in a large apartment complex. Their SIN Score had not allowed them to purchase a house, not even in the Hardship Program. But they had a dream of getting out of the apartment flats after their baby was born.
As they walked back toward their flat carrying two bags of used baby clothes, Darren started his planned dialog to convince Amber of something he’d been thinking a great deal about lately. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “We’re never going to be able to rent or buy our own house, have a car, get new clothes from a store, or afford to shop at the fresh food markets unless we do something drastic.”
Amber looked over at Darren. She’d heard his complaints about “the system” ever since she’d known him. It was always the same basic argument: the system sucks and he had an idea how to fix it for them. She appreciated his relentless hope for a change. But he was dreamer, a talker. Nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed.
But she wasn’t going to discourage his dreams of freedom. “Yes?” she said.
“A guy at work told me a story about the Silicon Facades in the early 2000’s,” he replied. “Long before the SIN Record was even an idea, people used to populate their own electronic record any way they wanted. You could have your own websites and add anything to them—writing, pictures, videos. You could even upload those things to a bunch of other websites. Not only were you free to do it, but it didn’t cost a dime. You could put on any face you wanted the world to see. That was the Silicon Facades.”
Amber had never heard of any such of thing. This was interesting. She listened intently.
He continued, “So even if you had some negative pieces in your record back then that you couldn’t make go away, it didn’t really matter because you could add unlimited positive records.”
“So?” she asked.
“So, if there had been any automated algorithms to create a Score for you like there is today, you would have had the power to skew the averages in your favor,” he said.
“That makes sense,” Amber replied, “but I don’t see how anyone could do that today. People at our level don’t even have access to the Line.”
“Not directly,” Darren quickly added, “but SIN Chips are receivers as well as transmitters. They’re programmed to receive specific data and transmit it to the scanners to add to the government’s database. Some of the data is received from our bodies like heart and breathing rates, and blood profiles. Data is also received from our physical location, our purchases, and other transactions.”
Darren continued. “If we were to carefully feed extra signals to the Chip, favorable ones, but not a deluge which might be too obvious, then over time our SIN Score could be improved.” He looked at her.
Not looking at all impressed, Amber thought for a moment. “In theory,” she began, “that makes sense. But how would you know what amount of data is enough, or too much? And what type of data? One mistake and you would be sent to a labor commune.” She touched the palm of her hand on her belly. “Our baby is going to need a daddy around. You know what happens to single mothers. They’re D4.”
Darren nodded. The class D4 was the lowest people could sink to. The government had the audacity to consider single mothers dirt. It didn’t matter if the father skipped out. The female was still held to blame, she should have picked better, shouldn’t have spread her legs, whatever.
In general, the levels went like this:
A1 = Elite male (top 5% SIN Score), married
A2 = Elite female (top 5% SIN Score), married
A3 = Elite male (top 5% SIN Score), single
A4 = Elite female (top 5% SIN Score), single
B1 = Male (top 20% SIN Score), married
B2 = Female (top 20% SIN Score), married
B3 = Male (top 20% SIN Score), single
B4 = Female (top 20% SIN Score), single
C1 = Male (top 50% SIN Score), single
C2 = Female (top 50% SIN Score), single
C3 = Male (top 50% SIN Score), married
C4 = Female (top 50% SIN Score), married
D1 = Bottom 50% SIN Score
D2 = Bottom 40% SIN Score
D3 = Bottom 25% SIN Score
D4 = Single mother or Bottom 15% SIN Score
The SIN Score was also adjusted to account for population size so that eighty percent of the population was in the C and D classes. Not only that, but in the C and D levels the government incentive was for them to stay single and not have children.
Single mothers had the most difficult time financially and socially. As a result, they most often had no choice but to literally whore themselves in some way in order to afford to raise their child. The only other option was to give the baby up.
There were no adoptions, though. Single mothers either kept their child, or gave it to the State to raise, own, and use in a labor commune. The labor communes were typically the most profitable businesses in the State.
The government rewarded single mothers who, through the Class Advance Incentive, turned over their child to the State for labor commune use. If a mother gave her child to the State, she could jump up to a C2, the minimum required for the “Hardship Program” as well as a host of other social benefits. This was a huge social leap.
Couples who, through the Class Advance Incentive as well, willingly gave up a child to the State were automatically bumped up to a C1 level, another huge incentive.
As a result of the Class Advance Incentive by the government, many single and married women purposely got pregnant in order to give the baby to the State and jump to a C1 or C2 level. In fact, this had been going on for two or three generations. Young girls were raised by their parents knowing they had the option later on to have children to move up the social classes. There was little emotion or remorse. It was just a sad fact of life by that point in time. Not everyone bought into it, though.
Darren and Amber were D1’s as a couple. Couples’ SIN Scores generally became the average of what each one had prior to marriage if there was wide separation between their classes. Before meeting Amber, Darren had been a B3. Amber was already a single mother, a D4 when he met her. As a new couple, they become C3’s. But after Amber got pregnant with Darren’s child, they were bumped to D1’s. In the lower classes, becoming pregnant and having a baby dropped people even lower.
As they reached their apartment building, they quit talking about how to manipulate their SIN Records and instead talked about their clothes purchase and what a nice day it was. Microphone transmitter “Mites” were everywhere in public buildings, parks, sidewalks, apartments, even on them much of the time if they weren’t careful.
Mites were but one mass produced item made for the government by labor commune slaves, for government use only. They had been designed and perfected by labor commune slaves decades earlier. Barely larger than a grain of sand, but a fifth the weight, they were routinely sprayed and sprinkled by the millions every day into public areas and carried home like ticks by unsuspecting human transports.
Mites weren’t a secret. Everyone knew about them. But because they were so small and so plentiful, it was nearly impossible to ri
d yourself or your apartment of them. A shower could effectively remove them from your hair. Washing clothes would “kill” them. But the ones that fell all over the apartment were tough to get rid of, though people had generally become cleaning fanatics as a result. The ongoing joke was that and C and D class were the cleanest people on the planet.
The Mites had a life span of only about a week once activated by an inaudible high frequency signal. But because they were constantly being dropped everywhere in public, a new batch was always being transported home from people’s excursions out and about.
Despite the fact that the Mites were transmitting conversations to the government, no one was actively listening to every conversation. But they were recorded. Government computer algorithms searched for matches in a long list of key words. Repeated hits on key words would certainly get noted in a person’s SIN Record and could eventually affect their SIN Score. Ongoing offenses would get their conversations eventually listened to. Depending on what someone might keep talking about, there would be consequences.
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