Season 1, Episode 5 - The Boxtops XIX - "Signs of a Counter-Offensive"

Floating towards Cushing State Park was the Greylock, one of the few airships owned by West Narragansett Technical Academy. Commissioned by the old government during the First American War, the new Quinetucket government forcibly dismantled the corporation responsible for building it (and also its monopoly over constructing New England’s air fleet). The Unified Pact demanded New England hand over all of its blimps – some money exchanged hands, deeds were signed and notarized here and there, a couple of deals were made under the table, and the Greylock ended up moored near an old quarry near Androscoggin, New Hampshire, owned by an Academy shell corporation (which also owned the quarry).

As time went on, with the restrictions lifted and Pact attention brought elsewhere, the Greylock served an aerial overseer for much of the Academy’s mining projects in northern New England, occasionally loaned for aerial shows or border surveillance (reports that gunfire from the Greylock helped break up a miner’s strike far up north in Maine at a Dunn Corporation quarry were nothing more than slander, according to the Academy).

But now that his own district had been raided, Stockham decided to move the Greylock around. Considering how old it was, it wouldn’t be do much in a fight when the opponents were something besides lightly armed miners, but to most of New England, airships still seemed like a novelty. It would be a reminder of power as the old, gray blimp lumbered above them, on the way to its destination – observation of the Combat Simulation.

Well, there wouldn’t be that much observation. The Simulation would take place in a forest, after all. But within the blimp were the members of the Rddhi Detection Network and several scientists and clerks from the Support Department, all writing down and analyzing the data that would be shot outward from the battle on the ground. Esther was there, too, overseeing things while Ms. Essex handled all the research flowing back to the Support Department headquarters at the Academy.

Their workstations took up the majority of the blimp’s cabin. Stockham had a private office for himself, of course – while he was interested in the Simulation, the Simulation also provided a great opportunity to take a client out to lunch. And Stockham’s current client was a particularly powerful one.

“Fantastic,” Admiral Zivkovic exclaimed as he wolfed down a mouth of his fourth reuben. “These are fantastic. From Cacciatore’s?”

While Zivkovic sat at the meeting table devouring the reubens Stockham provided for him, the Chairman himself stood near his desk, close to the window, looking downwards into the green expanse - most of it belonging to him - below the airship. “Indeed. Only the best for you, Admiral.”

“Call me Chuck,” Zivkovic said, waving the formalities away. “Outside the destroyer, reubens are man’s greatest invention. I like it, Josiah. Conventional wisdom says that when you’re at a business meeting, always eat with a fork and knife. Don’t want to get the hands dirty. Gotta stay clean at a business meeting.”

He raised a fist. “But no! Men like us, we ignore conventional wisdom. We do what we think is right, cultural norms be damned. Even though my domain is the sea and your domain is the...metaphysical, I suppose...we have a lot in common. It’s why I’ve been answering your calls and why I came here today.”

Zivkovic was a large man in his mid-fifties, his gray naval uniform stretching across his massive chest. His naval cap was just a little crooked, and when he laughed, Stockham could tell it came from deep down in his stomach. An honest man in an increasingly dishonest time.

The Admiral finished his fifth reuben and decided to call it a day (for now). He wiped his hands and grinned. “Alright, Josiah. What’s your business proposal?”

Stockham looked back from the window and raised an eyebrow. “Who said anything about a proposal?”

“You’ve been buttering me up,” Zivkovic simply said. “Even an old sea dog like me can tell. No man takes another man out for dinner multiple times unless he’s truly desperate for friends, wants something from him, or swings that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I don’t swing that way, and you don’t swing that way, and you don’t strike me as a man particularly desperate for friends, so therefore...”

“I must want something from you,” Stockham concluded, amused with the admiral’s way of speaking. “But the same applies to you. I know you said we’re alike – but I’m sure you have plenty of friends. You must want something from me as well.”

Zivkovic grinned wider. “So, who’s going to ask first?”

Stockham chuckled. “Admiral Charles Zivkovic, rotated from sea service back to land following the First American War. Served on the advisory board for the Arnold Family shipbuilders...and now you’re chief of the Navy’s Intelligence Department.”

Stockham gave him a serious look. “I take it you must know something about these sailor shootings.”

Zivkovic's mood instantly blackened. “Speak wisely here, Josiah.”

Stockham struck a cigar, letting the smoke hang in the air for a moment as he took it all in. Zivkovic eyed him the whole time, clearly on-edge for all the world to see.

“What if I told you I might have a solution to your sailor problem?” Stockham said, his voice calm.

Zivkovic rubbed his chin, his eyes still narrowed. “I’m listening.”

Stockham raised a hand. “Tell me about this issue from the beginning. If we’re going to work together, I want to know everything there is to know.” He gave the Admiral a businessman’s smile. “Well, eventually, I can learn everything. Right now, I'd like to know a little bit more about the ideology infecting your sailors.”

Zivkovic exhaled in disbelief. “I don’t owe you anything, Josiah.”

Stockham raised an eyebrow. “I come from the Experimental Technologies Division. Connecting dots was and is my livelihood. You want help with the sailors, help I’m willing to provide. But I can tell that you want something more than that.”

The Admiral raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think that?”

Stockham grinned, smoke trailing from his mouth. “The fact that you keep meeting with me. Your body language in all those meetings.” Stockham knew he had him. “The fact that you bring up the Dunn Corporation in every meeting we have.”

Zivkovic grunted, but didn’t deny it.

Stockham nodded. “You want two things – help with the sailors and help with the Dunn Corporation. I heard there’s some Rddhi involved with your sailors. Cambridge and the Institute are far too closely tied to the Army and the State Police – you want someone independent. That leaves me. In contrast, I just want the one thing – to aid you in your investigation. Give me some details first, and then I’ll offer you what I know.”

Zivkovic grumbled, crossed his arms and looked away, but he ultimately relented. “Alright, Josiah. But none of this information leaves this room.” He gave him a sharp look. “None of your Rddhi users are listening or recording this, correct?”

Stockham gave him an easy look. “Of course not. Anything within this office stays in this office.”

The look on Zivkovic’s face suggested he didn’t quite believe that. Nevertheless, he continued. “The Army gets first pick at potential recruits. That’s how it is for everything, ever since Dietrich became the Secretary of War and got the upper hand at Presidential General Headquarter. The Army comes first for budgets, first for research projects, first for propaganda, first for recruits. The Navy gets everyone left over. A lot of them are young men coming from farmlands and mill towns and inner city districts. These recruits don't got a lick of education in 'em. They're like blank pieces of clay, ready to be molded. But despite the Navy’s best efforts, they can be susceptible to propaganda outside of our own.”

Zivkovic shook his head. “The Navy’s different. We can keep a close eye on our on-shore personnel and Marines, but a lot of sailors show more loyalty to their ship’s captain. Similar to how Military Police-” Zivkovic said that with venom, since the Navy or even the Army had high opinions of that auxiliary paramilitary force - “can be more loyal to their district commander than Commandant Hill, or how borderland Army soldiers can be more loyal to their own commander than Dietrich. I’d keep a close eye on General Marco if I was him. There’s going to be problems at Champlain, mark my words.”

Stockham kept quiet, smoking his cigar, letting the Admiral tell his story.

“But anyway, we give a thorough screening to all of our captains, but some of them, especially the ones stationed up in Maine, get away from us. The sailor who shot this Squanto Bank manager was a member of a five-man PT boat up in Levett Bay. We rotate ships around to keep an eye on them – unfortunately, when we brought this PT boat back to Narragansett, they brought centripetalism with them.”

Zivkovic also that word with venom. “Forget the Unified Pact, centripetalism is the greatest danger in the world. All of South America will fall to them, and after that, what’s stopping them from making their way up to North America? They’re already infesting us. I heard about your trouble with centripetalist smugglers in your district. When their South American armies march northward, there’s going to be a sizeable fifth column ready to rise up and aid them.”

“So, your sailor got infected with centripetalism, and this made him act out and shoot a bank manager?” Stockham surmised. “Have you investigated the other members in his PT boat?”

Zivkovic nodded. “Aye. We interrogated the lot of them. Typical bastards – they love New England, but not the current way it’s run. Spoke about oligarchs and tyrants and the need to tear it all down. And then...”

When Zivkovic looked reluctant to speak, Stockham took a puff from his cigar.

No need to push the honest Admiral to talk – he's the type of man to keep talking once he got on a roll.

“We managed to interrogate a number of safehouses out of them,” Zivkovic admitted. “We sent operatives to investigate, but most of them came up with nothing. At one of them, though...they were ambushed by a Rddhi user. All of them were wiped out.”

Stockham kept a neutral expression on his face. “I heard there were traces of Rddhi usage near the site of the murdered bank manager.”

Zivkovic fumed. “We heard as well! But by the time Naval Intelligence operatives got there, the Military Police blocked off the whole thing and said it was an Army investigation since it took place in a military district! Imagine that, not able to investigate a crime by one of our own. Damn these fools at General Headquarters.”

He rubbed his temples. “We did hear about potential Rddhi involvement, and of course, we deployed some of our own to raid the safehouses, but you know just as well as I do that the Navy doesn’t get a whole lot of users.”

Stockham grinned. “Of course. Most of the users you get are mine, after all.”

An interlocking series of corporations, academies, politicians, and military men ruled New England. Cambridge Rddhi users went to Cambridge University, Institute High School Rddhi users went to the New England Technological Institute. Afterwards, they had a mandatory conscription period, but for the majority of users, that meant a comfortable position working in an Army research lab, or an Army barracks near resort towns in the White Mountains, or Army outposts near Army, Cambridge, Institute, Squanto Bank, Reed family, Arnold family, or Presidential Administration-owned quarries, mines, forests, mills (and mill towns), docks, and airfields.

All positions were well-paid. And once the conscription period ended, those Rddhi users had a golden parachute waiting for them that would gently land them in an even higher-paid position within the government or Army or a corporation or their respective alma maters.

In contrast, Rddhi users from the Academy – which didn’t have a college attached – went to the Presidential War College, where they rubbed elbows with the common(ish) man and were reminded that they were cogs in a vast machine, rather than people with superhuman abilities. After graduation, Academy Rddhi users served in borderland units or the Navy or guarding the facilities of lesser, newer corporations, such as Dunn. And after conscription, they had perhaps a bronze parachute that would take them back to the Academy, or to Dunn, or overseas (assuming they had the wheeling-and-dealing ability to get the Presidential Administration to lift the ban on out-of-country travel for Rddhi users - or had Stockham do it for a price). And the lowest-ranked users - the Class 1 Elementals, those who could only bend spoons - got no parachute at all, since, at the end of the day, being able to merely bend a spoon doesn't exactly make you more valuable than the average person.

Of course, that was a general rule, and some Academy users made it big, and some Cambridge and Institute users could only afford to buy a few condos instead of a dozen. But the Academy, Dunn Corporation, and the Navy did seem like outsiders to the current oligarchy - Reed, Cambridge, Army, Presidential Administration, Institute, State Police, Arnold - running the show in New England.

Many Rddhi users did live wealthier lives than the common man, achieving a level of financial security the average New Englander could only dream of. But that was neither here nor there.

Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps this class divide – Rddhi vs non-Rddhi, proletariat vs the oligarchy, the common man versus the Rddhi-capitalist oligarchy – was central behind sailors shooting bank managers and bombing buildings.

And there were a variety of movements that could make use of such a divide.

“Tell me, Admiral, when these sailors said they needed to tear it all down, what exactly did they meant by that?”

Zivkovic didn’t understand the question. “You know. The usual. Create a world for the common man and destroy wealth and something like that.”

Stockham ruminated on that, thinking on it with each puff of smoke. “Did they mention what would replace the world they just tore down?”

Zivkovic shrugged. “I just told you. A new world for the common man. No gods or masters and a man chooses while a slave obeys or some other feel-good phrases that ultimately mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.”

Unsurprisingly, he's certainly biased about the whole thing. Perhaps I can use that to my advantage.

“No phrase means nothing,” Stockham corrected. “Or rather, no phrase has any meaning at all until we give meaning to them. So, while these words mean nothing to you, they mean something to your sailors. These sailors...they want a world ruled by the common man?”

“That’s what I keep telling you.”

Stockham grinned. “And that’s where we have our first dot. Centripetalism doesn’t call for that at all.”

Zivkovic rubbed his chin. “I was never one for political philosophy.”

“Centripetalism is based on the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king,” Stockham explained. “Tell me, does rule by a king sound like rule by the common man?”

“No,” Naguno had to admit.

“According to Plato, the philosopher-king is the elitest of the elite, raised from birth to be sound in body, mind, and soul. The average man knows little, wouldn’t you agree?”

Zivkovic scratched his head. “I guess so. I know literacy levels in those northern mill towns aren’t exactly the greatest.”

“The argument goes that only a man who knows everything is fit for rule. And because he knows everything and has seen everything, he also knows he must rule benevolently. Without the chains of democracy or the temptations of an uneducated tyranny, the philosopher-king rules justly for the benefit of all. With an elite vanguard as his bodyguard and potential successors, the state ruled by the philosopher-king finally achieves the true ideal of benevolent dictatorship. One ruled by law and order and justice. That is the only way to create a world of happiness, according to them.”

Zivkovic ate another reuben, needing the excess brain food to process all this. “Right, right...so centripetalists like dictatorship by an elite, and our sailors like rule by the common man. But our sailors our common men. Why would they want a philosopher-king to rule them?”

“Two reasons,” Stockham explained. “Centripetalism promises a utopia where everyone rises to their ability. But promises often don't hold up to the realities of man. Look at East Africa. Centripetalism is a technocratic autocracy where merits determines your stature. By definition, some people have less merit than others. The uneducated - or rather, those considered uneducated by the rulers setting the criteria for education, would be left out of the process. But the theory sounds good on paper."

He shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe they really could implement it fairly. Stranger things have happened. East Africa transformed from a region of squabbling, petty dictators into a technocratic power with a nuclear program on the shores of Lake Victoria."

Zivkovic didn't seem surprised to hear that. East Africa's atomic weaponry program was never officially confirmed, but a widely held theory among the political circles of the world. Another reason to make it a pariah state.

“I see," he said. "And the other reason?”

Stockham shrugged. “Because it got there first. The people were desperate for a new system that could uplift them from their daily struggles under tyranny. Had the ideology of your sailors arrived there first, the people would’ve adopted that. But centripetalism arrived first, and that’s what they got. And those nations in South America, reeling from the aftermath of devastating warfare, they needed an ideology as well. They saw the success of East Africa and made centripetalism their own.”

Stockham paced around the room, wheels of thought in motion. Dot-connection, in real time. “But your sailors haven’t mentioned anything about a totalitarian system ruled by a benevolent philosopher-king who knows what’s best for them. They want to tear everything down and want to create a state ruled by the common man.” He grinned. “Or do they even want a state?”

Naguno rubbed his chin, then remembered something. “They did mention an end goal of returning man to his original nature, one not ruled by states." He motioned with his hands, feeling the reuben providing him with energy to think. "What did the captain we interrogated say? Factory workers with factory workers, shipbuilders with shipbuilders..."

Stockham snapped his fingers. “And there you have it. Their ideology is something akin to what was known as syndicalism. In our present days, the Dorrist Society carries its torch.”

“The who?”

"A secret society named for the man who smashed the 19th century oligarchy of Rhode Island." Stockham moved over to his desk and pulled out two letters awaiting him within a drawer. He eyed the Admiral's hands - no reuben grease could get on something like these - but they were clean, so he handed them over. Zivkovic looked over each one.

"The one on the right was found in the home of a would-be assassin who spoke of the same worldview your sailors did," Stockham explained. "The one on the left is a letter passed around during the end of the First American War when the old oligarchy fell."

Zivkovic groaned - based on intelligence gathered by his Technical Servicemen, Stockham knew the old admiral wasn't much of a thinker. "I'm looking at the passages you annotated," he said. Then his eyes widened. "I see...these letters use the same phrasing, right down to the exact same sentences."

"The Dorrists were one of the many revolutionary groups active when the First American War ended. They proved to be too extreme - or perhaps the Quinetucket government was too moderate - and ended up being purged. Some holdouts became active again when Pulaski took power, but the new Military Police forces smashed the last of them. If you look up the Act that founded the Military Police, the Dorrists are among the many revolutionary groups cited as the reason behind forming permanent Military Police groups to look over 'unstable' areas."

Zivkovic handed the letters back to him. "So, these guys are the ones recruiting my sailors?"

Stockham nodded. “There are two factions working to recruit the downtrodden of the city – the centripetalist Second Restorationists and the Dorrist Society, who follow some sort of working man's revolutionary belief. It's a lot more grassroots and decentralized than a Restorationist philosopher-king. I suspect the various cells and members of the Dorrists possess the same umbrella of ideas, but the details might vary from group to group.”

Stockham snuffed his cigar. "And now, I'll admit something to you in return. There are spies in my school. And I believe these spies working with the Dorrists. The Restorationists we’ve encountered have been cold and calculating, following a clear, long-term plan. There’s a method in their madness.”

Stockham thought of the attempted kidnapping of Esther and the attempted assassination of himself. “These Dorrists appear much more ad-hoc, committing uncoordinated acts of violence. Nothing changes from the single murder of a bank manager. There doesn't appear to be an overarching plan from the top.”

He looked the Admiral in the eyes, laying everything on the table. “I believe I can help cure your Navy of this growing infection. And, in turn, that’ll help cure my Academy. Let me in on your investigation, and we can cleanse both of our organizations entirely.”

Zivkovic stared right back. “And I suppose you want something beyond that?”

Stockham laughed. “You do, too. You want a rocketry contract from the Dunn Corporation. I want allies in the Navy.”

After a moment, Zivkovic’s eyes relaxed, realizing Stockham knew everything already. “How’d you know about the rockets?”

“I heard the Army just secured a major contract with the Reed conglomerate for developing rocketry systems. And since the Arnolds are in decline, I heard both the Army and Reeds were able to pressure them into cancelling their planned rocketry research.”

Stockham took a puff from his cigar. “The Dunn Corporation, outside the oligarchy and working with Academy researchers, isn’t bound by such pressure. At least, they won’t be once I get some money moving. I’ll be the broker between Dunn and the Navy.”

Zivkovic’s eyes narrowed Stockham laid out his scheme. “The Academy gets some, let’s call it, R&D contracts from the Navy. In turn, the Academy will invest heavily into Dunn rocketry research. We find our Dorrists in the meantime.”

“So, you wish to bind the Navy, your Academy, and Dunn Corporation,” Zivkovic surmised. “Sounds a bit like the ruling oligarchy, don’t you think?”

“We’re the next generation,” Stockham answered. “For too long, we’ve been pushed around because we lack allies. Oh, your Navy is allegedly part of the oligarchy, but all that money’s going to the Army. Let’s get some money moving your way. Let’s get some power moving your way. You want rocket-weaponized ships since Amien reduced the naval budget and you can't afford any more aircraft carriers after the Moosilauke is completed. And because current naval research suggests the aircraft carrier might be obsolete.”

After a moment, Zivkovic had to laugh, the sound emanating deep from his large stomach. “I see why you rose through the ranks of the Experimental Technologies Division. You know far more than the chairman of a school should. Though, I suppose you run something far larger than a school.”

Stockham held out his hand. “Deal?”

Zivkovic placed his beefy hand into Stockham’s, a firm grip on both sides. “To the counter-offensive,” he declared.

Stockham grinned, full of ambition.

“To the counter-offensive.”