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Five

Five foxes attempt to take over the world and everything goes terribly.

CW: Everything goes terribly
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KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

CHAPTER 1 - Introduction

Once upon a time, there were five foxes. One was white, one was red, one was blue, one was green, and one was black. They got together and decided that they would rule the world. They couldn't agree on a way to take it over, so they decided that each of them would come up with their own plan and try to take over a continent. Whichever fox ruled his continent first would have his ideas used to take over the whole world.Once upon a time, there were five foxes. One was white, one was red, one was blue, one was green, and one was black. They got together and decided that they would rule the world. They couldn't agree on a way to take it over, so they decided that each of them would come up with their own plan and try to take over a continent. Whichever fox ruled his continent first would have his ideas used to take over the whole world.

CHAPTER 2 - White

White journeyed to South America, called by the dance and rhythm. Knowing that music could make you get up and move, he thought he would investigate what else it could make you do. He studied the psychology of sound and music; he kidnapped people off the street and stuck them in FMRIs so he could watch neuroperceptual brainwave entrainment. Note by note and neuron by neuron he crafted songs that were simply irresistable.

To refine his technique, he rented out halls and threw open the doors for free rock and Afro-Cuban jazz concerts. He threw out crowd toys-- giant beach balls, glowsticks, anything that people could play with, each hiding monitoring devices of his own design, and investigated crowd dynamics and how best to plant a suggestion. Could he make them cry? Could he make them fight? Could he make them buy disgusting tamarind soda?

Forget dependence on the flighty temperaments and foibles of inspired 'composers' who seemed to spend as much time getting STDs and taking drugs as they did composing-- White could stir the passions and fire the soul, bring tears or ecstacy with sound crafted by measurement and analysis!

He unlocked every secret way to make a melodic line flow along a neural fibre.

He could make them march in lockstep beat, when they thought they danced to Salsa heat. He became #1 in every market he entered whether broadcast, CD sales, or downloads.

Everybody listened to his songs. They danced like marionettes on his guitar strings as he planted commands. This was nothing like the silly backtracking people used to be afraid of with heavy metal, no. This was bold! Whether a whisper or a shout, his message was never hidden. With the song flowing around it, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. All the creatures under his sway felt as if he'd looked inside them and commanded them to enact their own deepest desires.

He could set a rush or boycott on any commodity. He could get people to up and move to Rio or drop everything and enter medical school. Distributing different songs in different areas he started following economic trends, stabilising production and shaping demand until the two met. Any run down slum was flooded with a volunteer force of the young and donations of material to build and improve. Everyone studied, hammered, cooked, ate with his sound running through their mind; whole streets were filled with smiling, delighted people, not even realising they were all walking to the same rhythm.

White was just as vulnerable as those over whom he held sway. He performed most of his own music-- he couldn't get enough of the thrill of feeling the audience in the palm of his hand, swaying and moving as he played. And like any star, he had his own hangers on. And then, one day, at an intermission, he asked one if they could scratch his ears. By some terrible carelessness, that request was picked up by a live microphone and mixed into the loop he had going over the intermission to keep the crowd tuned to a fever pitch of psychic compliance.

And they all heard it. Over and over.

They all rushed the stage, pouring around him, hundreds of people, all scratching his ears, petting his tail, rubbing his shoulders... Some people say he died, crushed by the stampede. But I was there. I was there just yesterday, and I saw him, still there, his eyes glazed over, wagging his tail, panting, smiling, all thoughts of world domination lost. He's been in unthinking, unknowing bliss for the past eighteen years. And that is why the economy of Bolivia is in such trouble: The entire population is busy petting him!

CHAPTER 3 - Red

Red is the colour of war.

And that's just what Red chose.

Red knew that force and fear were the only ways to rule, but any army was still a sum of individuals. A moment of cowardice or compassion, a bit of laziness in securing an area, forgetting the details of a plan: any of these could lead to defeat. The army must be but an extension of the general.

And so, Red spent first days, then months, then years working on terrible engines of destruction. He built huge, metallic beasts with laser eyes, titanium fangs, and tungsten-carbide claws.

Each was a Von Neumann replicator. One could burrow into the ground, and, an hour later, five would spring back up from the hole-- ten if it found a rich enough deposit of iron.

Each had just enough intelligence to perfectly execute the will of the mind controlling it.

But the real secret was not the power of their claws, the way they could rip steel with their jaws, the burning of their eyes... The key was the control. Red would lie safe, locked away in his underground bunker, wired into the master machine. His every neuron carefully monitored, sensory information being fed back into the brain stem, the thalamus tickled to a fever pitch of excitement, adrenaline flooding his synapses, sharpening his already keen and merciless intellect to a razor's edge until the predatory urge and strategy were at the forefront of every thought.

It made him the very best of what he was.

Each machine was wired directly into his brain, as if part of his body. The systems on-board worked to carry out any desire with a minimum of instruction. He could kill as easily as you snap your fingers, destroy a city as easily as taking a step, hold a perimeter as easily as fold his hands--- counter an attack as if swatting a fly, almost reflexively.

The invasion began.

His consciousness spread outward from his initial invasion point in Poland, extending along the geometric lines of battle. Woven into his awareness was the surrender or defeat of every enemy. He saw through a hundred eyes, a thousand, the sensation like stretching, growing to cover the map.

Forces spread too thin? Replicate.

A foe isn't falling soon enough? Replicate.

Each replication filled him with a rush of power; what he started to think of as his body grew stronger and more unstoppable, overshadowing more and more of the earth.

After Germany fell, Russia finally managed to break through Red's lines, Britain pinning him from the other side, both isolating him in central Europe.

Red's army had grown so huge that there was little left of his brain that was not completely devoted to the direct management of the war machines.

He was angry and possibly mad.

No tricky strategies or cunning plans now: he could grow, expand, rip, devour... destroy.

He replicated his forces over and over, the only thought in his ever-diminishing mind being to eradicate everything around him without consideration.

At some time in the fight, his mind was lost altogether. The last fragments of intellect and personality were repurposed to control the army.

There was no Red left to know why he had started his war.

England and Russia surrendered, their armies exterminated to the last man. That made no difference. The last echo of Red, his wish for eradication, expanded outward, every city levelled despite surrender and every last creature, down to the smallest protozoan, hunted down and killed.

And that is why Europe is completely empty of life, except Red, far below the ground. The machines patrol and hunt the barren waste in hopes of one more target. Even hundreds of miles off the coast, you can hear their howling, their iron voices filled with bloodlust and, perhaps, despair.

CHAPTER 4 - Blue

Blue went to Africa, and there he saw corrupt governments, allegiances to families, small states, one clan or another, civil wars, ethnic cleansing. He regarded the whole as a disorganised and untidy mess: all those people dividing the world and thinking their part was the most important.

What they needed was unity.

At first, he tried a direct approach. He spoke to those in authority, recruiting one group, getting them under his leadership, and promising them technology, agriculture, drinking water, and medicine. And as he started delivering on his promises, they did all he asked!

But, when he recruited the people next door, both ended up hating him.

"Obviously," thought Blue, "My approach wasn't direct enough."

So Blue went off to his laboratory. He studied the mind, researched the brain, tapped into it and made it do a really neat trick. He took that trick and packaged it up as a virus, and that virus would infect the brain and rewrite its DNA: Not to make it easier to control, but to make it telepathic. Completely telepathic.

There was to be none of this nonsense of everyone having cheap radio transceivers in their heads that just let you do the trick of talking without moving your mouth like you see on television; each mind was to be totally linked to all others, all individuals fused, all memories shared with no distinction as to where they came from.

Blue got a small crop-dusting plane and started spraying his virus all over the continent. It infected people quickly enough, but the links formed slowly, spreading outward and joining up.

Each village would become one mind, all the hopes and hatreds of each individual magnified a hundred- or a thousandfold. And many villages annihilated eachother in wars lasting a single day. But soon the villages linked, coalescing into single beings, sometimes in the middle of a battle. Then counties and provinces and states and nations all unified.

And something strange began to happen.

Not only did the linked populations no longer fight, but individual mortality and worries faded away in the face of the immortality of the whole.

Entire nations would plough their fields and eat the simplest fare contentedly while silently pondering philosophical riddles. They'd build huge communal halls singing glorious polyphonic, polyrhythmic compositions, swinging their hammers in rhythm. The entire nation of Chad, after sowing a crop just enough to feed itself and have seed for the next year, spent the next week playing tag. Mali and Kenya took turns putting on ever more original interpretations of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" for eachother, the collective creativity, passion, and experience of millions of minds all channelled into every performance.

The countries linked, two by two and three by three, until a billion minds were joined in one. Africa, a single mind, was murmuring to itself in perfect contentment. Its imagination soared, the being, silent, dreamed stories and poetry. It solved the hardest mathematical problems; it contemplated Grand Unified Theories advancing physics a hundred years in a day. The silence punctuated only by the sounds of work or play, until all of a sudden the mind would burst into song from a billion throats and instruments played by as many pairs of hands.

The link complete, Blue, the only individual left in the continent, infected himself with a modified version of the virus. And then his intellect reached out, finding the collective soul of Africa all around him. His consciousness flew like a key into a lock, prepared to become the mind's I, the ego and directing force of the whole being.

Blue felt the tremendous intellect around him, seeing memories and thoughts, yet not absorbed, a mental shield of sorts holding him separate. He felt himself the centre of intentionality and willed Africa, now himself, to start building roads, machines, rockets, everything... and nothing happened. A huge and powerful thought washed over him: "I could, but why would I bother? My bodies have enough to eat. They experience no discomfort. Why would I wish to busy myself with futile endeavours rather than play and contemplate?"

And as he looked into the thoughts of Africa, he saw it looking back at him, aware of his presence even if it couldn't see inside his mind. Resisted by his own creation, angry, afraid, he told it of his plans, of what the people had been before, what they were now, and what they could be with his leadership!

Africa wasn't angry.

Africa wasn't thankful.

Africa thought he was a joke.

It overwhelmed him with a torrent of condescending amusement a billion strong, while laughter poured from a billion mouths.

The entire continent of Africa laughed at him, and with the magnified power of billions of intellects and their years of experience, explained concisely, irrefutably, and crushingly exactly how foolish and petty the idea of world domination or the striving for power of any sort was.

Blue was mortified and ashamed. His life's work had laughed at him and called him a fool, and it had been right!

Seeing the contentment and freedom Africa enjoyed and the powerful chains of reasoning and plays of fancy all around him, Blue broke the shell around his psyche and plunged into the single mind to be absorbed into the brilliance.

And that's how it is now. I was there and talked to Africa last week. It sang me Blue's favourite song, embellished with harmonies he could never have imagined, the tumultuous and beautiful sound resonating throughout what seemed to be the whole world. It will continue to be sung long after Blue's body dies of old age.

CHAPTER 5 - Green

Green went to Asia, and he sat and watched and drank tea.

Green drank Chai in India and watched the vestiges of the caste system holding the people in check. He saw the veneration of the Hindu pantheon and ritual tying lives together.

Green drank Matcha in Japan and saw Shinto shrines and thousands devoting their lives to meditation and contemplation to reach their ideal of Enlightenment.

Green drank Oolong in China and saw the way Chairman Mao was still venerated after so many years.

Green studied history from around the world; he saw the power of the Vatican, the cross and crown built on the legacy of one man. He saw the Northern kings claim their descent from Heimdal. He saw the Roman emperor as both the high priest of the state religion and a god, deified in his turn after death. He saw the Muslim faith and the powerful nations that sprang from it to sweep across the near East, again from the legacy of one man.

Green thought to himself, "I don't need to fight. I just need to catch these people by their souls and they'll fight for me. Why would I want their fear if I can have their adoration?"

So he studied the religions of the past and present: everything from Ayyavazhi to Zoroastrianism. He picked what he thought was the best of each, custom designed to be as appealing to his target culture as he could make it. It was brimming with love and forgiveness, promises of power, freedom from death, a hint of guilt and a dash of shame just to bind the masses even tighter. He added some spectacle and a few simple rituals and then went out, clothed poorly and speaking humbly, spreading his message.

He spoke eloquently, offering forgiveness to the guilty and hope to the oppressed. To the rich and poor alike he hinted at material success for the virtuous. A touch of cold reading and everyone he spoke to thought he could see into their hearts. Through stage magic and trickery and a bit of suggestion, people believed he could heal their ills.

God on earth? Maybe. He knew enough not to claim it. Drop a few hints and let others connect the dots. If you say you're god, people ridicule you. Say you're not and they'll abandon you. Leave the question up in the air and they'll follow you everywhere.

And they did follow him. Some curious, some jeering, some adoring. He spoke to them all with kindness and passion. His eyes shone, his voice drew them ever inward, now soft as a whisper, now commanding thunder. Green filled their heads with eternal rewards and splendour unending, with peace and contentment, with an end to fear.

The throng grew greater and greater; his custom-brewed psychic poison infected and influenced them beautifully! Some governments persecuted his followers, but they remained loyal and steadfast through whatever torments they endured.

And that just earned him more followers! Any belief that could inspire such devotion must be true! Only God could give such peace.

Green began the second phase. They built great temples in his honour. Now it was time for the theatre and song and services to swell the heart and fire the soul, bringing throngs to feel the divine, ensuring their continued faith.

His disciples marched outward, some humble and kind as their master had been, exhorting, pleading, promising, winning the hearts of any they met.

Others marched with guns and bombs, not to bring fear, they said, but to overthrow the states persecuting their brethren. And he was always sure to balance just right: never condoning their actions but addressing them obliquely, claiming that institutions of evil were to be resisted but people were ever to be loved. He cast out any who harmed an innocent.

The nations, weakened by his words from within and attacked by the faith militant without, soon collapsed, and their people all came to his call. Green's words were unquestioned throughout the whole of Asia.

His every word was law for four billion people, but how could he manage that many? They may have thought he was God on earth, but he knew he was just a fox. And so he built a hierarchy: priests and higher priests and highest priests all with their own functions and domains, each communicating and interpreting his will, each blessed with just a little hint of his divine cachet to dole out to his worshippers.

It's really not that hard to twist the word of God to mean the opposite of what God meant.

And his church grew greater and more powerful, every person in the continent loving him with all their hearts--- or at least the image they had been taught. Any who didn't? A swing of an axe or the pull of a trigger could deal with those.

Green tried to put a stop to that. And it's ever so inconvenient when God pokes his nose into the running of a church, stopping it from doing what must be done in his name. And so they took him and when lightning failed to rain down from the skies to smite them, they locked him in a cell, and calmly decapitated him one night. He was so surprised and saddened that he didn't resist. He just lay his head down silently, tears in his eyes.

When I was last in Bangkok, I saw the shrine they built on the place where Green, shining, rose bodily into heaven.

At least ten-thousand people claim to have seen it first-hand.

CHAPTER 6 - Black

Black went to North America. And there he saw technology used to satiate every desire, with money running the whole machine. He figured he could do that better than they could, and so set to work.

He perfected fusion, long a dream, and set up power stations along the coasts, using the energy from fusion to electrolyse sea water to get more hydrogen to fuse. He made the dream of superconductivity come true, as well, and transmitted his power free of loss around the continent.

Having a complete monopoly on the cheapest, cleanest power there was, he had the energy budget of the entire nation pouring into his coffers. He drove the need for coal and gas to near zero and increased his revenue further when he offered a subsidy to anyone wanting to replace their gas heat with electric.

With almost no overhead, Black used his wealth to get the best government money could buy. The corrupt he bribed outright, the noble he swung to his way with promises of campaign contributions. He appealed to the left wing with policies to shrink the carbon footprint to near zero. He bought out the competing power companies and renovated their plants into playgrounds, then pushed for and got legislation to ban the use of oil or coal for energy production.

Who's going to want to break up the monopoly that solved global warming, the energy crisis, and foreign oil in one go? Nobody was in a hurry to, and a few words and millions passed to the right wing ensured that, in the name of the free market, nobody ever could. Slipped in was the stinger, a slight change in contract law.

In buying power you signed a contract the terms of which could be changed every time you made a payment. You could go read the terms on BlackCo's website, but who ever bothers to read those things? He targeted businesses at first, any that tried building competing power generation systems soon found themselves with no power with which to build or design anything. You couldn't get gasoline. Coal powered generators were illegal technology. Any attempts at competition were quickly quashed, and the government did nothing. It's a free market, after all.

Black turned his attention to nanotechnology, building tiny machines for work and fabrication, and applied some to agriculture. With such small tools sown into the fields along with the seeds, sustainable, pesticide free agriculture became a reality. And through genetic engineering, his yields were five or sometimes ten times as much as any other farm. Unable to compete, they quickly folded and were bought out. This was facilitated by a bit of regulation banning anything but Black's farming techniques--- in the name of the environment, you understand.

And so it continued, on and on, with Black improving upon and subsuming any other industry. The government quickly became a rubber stamp in his pocket, and he even started deconstructing that. He had his own security force, so why would he need the police or the millitary?

A few people were unhappy having their lives managed by a huge corporation over which they had no control, but anyone who was too pesky about it was given the chance to spend a week without power... or food... or anything else. No one else minded; they were healthier and richer with more leisure time than they'd ever had before. Everything they could want was dirt cheap and of really good quality, too!

But Black wasn't happy. He was ruler of an entire continent, and ruling the place was boring! Building machines and solving problems was a lot more fun than managing people could ever be. So he built another machine. An AI to control the all the other machines and the people, too.

This AI does not turn on its creator. It was designed to be rational. Being vindictive is not rational. It did exactly what it was programmed to do. It found the best way to maximise the happiness and capability of the population and to improve the functionality of the infrastructure and society. It built another machine to handle the day to day governance of the city, since the AI would have rather built things than manage people, too.

It analysed society and decided the best way to fulfil its directives was to build a better person.

There was no need to bother with money, no scarcity left. But any time Black had tried to eliminate the economy, people started acting crazy. The AI engineered out the drives to acquisitiveness, the inbuilt need to hoard against possible future scarcity, and the tribal instincts of us versus them. It gave its creations higher intelligence and longer lifespans, creativity, perfect pitch, and any gift it could conceive.

The AI forbade breeding. No need to make more of the old model when you have a new one. Though, rather than making it illegal, the AI mixed anti-conceptive agents into the water.

People didn't know why they couldn't conceive, at first. But when they went to a doctor, they were given a child made from their own DNA, but enhanced to be healthy, bright, kind, loving--- and with every parent given the perfect child, nobody complained about them coming from a laboratory.

One day, Black arrived to find that he no longer had access to any any machines. The AI informed him that he had been replaced. Angry at first, he was soon introduced to his own replacement: a clone of himself with all the second generation modifications. Confused, and stymied, then oddly admiring, he found before him the very best of all he'd ever hoped to be. With nothing left to run, he went home and retired. Outstripped in his design abilities, Black devoted himself to music and catching up on all that reading he'd put off.

And the second generation created the third. New possibilities for improvement the first had never dreamed of were coalesced into the quest for perfection. The third created the fourth. The fourth created the fifth...

And so it goes on, people and AIs cooperating to improving themselves step by step, faster and faster. People come to their adulthood and find an alien world around them in just ten years. Then five. Then one. And maybe in a day?

Anyone who wants to live for millennia can, but with the only guarantee being that one will be a relic or even a dunce in a world one can't understand, nobody bothers. Few even live out their natural spans.

Black is still alive, though. He's happy, mostly. A little scared. A little confused. He has a wondering pride as he sees the very latest generation, beings of intellect he would never have imagined and passions he could never fathom.

And all he can think is: "Did I do that?"