Hello dearest readers, I'm just adding a note here to say that I'm taking a bit of a winter vacation. I'll be back in the new year with more Critical Future's stories, but in the mean time, visit tychoish.com and be well. -- tycho garen

SA Thom Busby, ISA; Part 1

A Knowing Mars story, by tycho garen
on 14th August 2008. (commentary)

This is the first part of another excerpt from Matthew Connor’s narrative written in 2597 in the Knowing Mars story.

In early 2542 Taban and Kalian left Earth for the still new Mars Colony. If asked at the time, they would have probably spun some tale about wanting to be on the frontier, about having grown tired of Earth with the growing population, dwindling resources, and the increasingly provincial attitudes. While these reasons certainly contributed to their decision1 to leave Earth, we knew by this time that ISA2 Agent Thom Busby was investigating them for cyber-crime and they left to avoid the surveillance.

This was in and of itself not terribly unusual; the Morgans were known to be active and influential members of the cyberspace community. While they probably were guilty of the crimes as charged, the fact is that most people were easily guilty of at least a dozen such crimes. Anyone who strayed from the commercial or common spheres of the net much was likely guilty of a dozen minor infractions. The fact that they were being pursued for these crimes was sign enough that Thom Busby’s investigation was punitive: it wasn’t possible to legally send people to jail because they were telepaths. In 2541 and ‘42 the general public didn’t know that telepathy existed. Thom Busby’s hostility was clear to Taban and Kalian, the telepath community, and even a mutual colleague–and friend on my part–of Busby and myself: Quinn Dasen. Though we never worked closely, we did interact professionally a number of times. At the time I just thought he was driven enough to be a pain in the ass and too self centered to be much more than a nuisance. How wrong I was.

Matthew Connor, MD
Mars, 2597



Notes:

  1. The fact of the matter is that, at that time most people said that they were at least a little interested in moving off world if you asked them. Significantly fewer were willing to pack up and leave Earth. The Mars colony had been established in the 2480s, but had never attracted the large number of colonists that the instigators behind the project had initially predicted. ↩

  2. International Security Agency. I suppose in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I too was an agent in the research/forensics department of ISA, in the ’40s. ISA was the sprawling Earth-based security, intelligence, and law enforcement agency that had near universal jurisdiction. Far from being a coherent organization, ISA was far too large to consistently secure, know, or enforce much of anything. This made it all too possible for possible free agents like Thom Busby to operate inside of ISA without much recourse for the rest of us. ↩

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  1. [...] excerpt from Matthew Connor’s narrative written in 2597 in the Knowing Mars story. Read part 1 if you haven’t [...]

    Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 15 August 2008 @ 9:06 am

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