As of the afternoon of Sunday, November 19, 2017, I'm sitting at 32,184 words written of the 50K required to 'win' National Writing Month. I'm averaging around 1,700 words a day, which gets me across the finish line on 11/29. Only not really. I'll have 50K words written, but this story will be far from finished. The challenge for me will be two fold: finishing the rest of the rough draft and then doing re-writes.
I already know that I need to fix things. My villain is turning out to be someone quite different than the one I set out to use. This is a real issue as I wrote the climactic fight scene first. In the past, I've tried to be a bit more linear, starting at the beginning and slogging through to the end. Unfortunately, I realized at about 30K words that I had no idea where the story was going. I had all kinds of characters and a large problem for them to work on, but I did not know how the problem had originated or how it could be fixed. So this time, I thought that I'd solve the problem first, then figure out how the characters got there. I'm not sure that it's better, but I can say that the Scrivener writing software absolutely ROCKS for non-linear story telling. I highly recommend it.
So what is the central conflict? Read on.
As this is an exercise in imagining a world in which Universal Basic Income has been implemented in a techno-centric way as much as it is me getting my word on, the conflict needs to revolve around exploiting UBI. Sure, all of the standard stuff still happens: crimes of passion, vandalism, breaking and entering... all of the common codes heard over a police scanner. But stealing money might become more difficult under the system that I tried to build: a combination of embedded IoT, crypto-currency and its attendant Smart Contracts.
But if there is one rule that I've learned so far in this life, it is that if there is a way to cheat the system, people will find it. Even if it takes more effort than working the system as designed. So, if there is a chip embedded in people's palms that is locked to their financial accounts and uses biometrics for second level verification, then what new ways can the system be gamed?
Credit Farming Cults
The first idea that I came up with is Credit Farming Cults. Here, a leader convinces people to transfer their monthly income to him/her instead of using it to live. These can be anything from Jim Jones' People's Temple or the Branch Davidians to something larger and more distributed like The 700 Club and its ilk. Even actual slavery.
Tracking and correcting this should not be too difficult as the Smart Contract will show a transfer to the leader on a regular basis. Proving that the leader has 'forced' this transfer or that it violates the purpose of UBI runs into problems. Should it be illegal to spend the money given as UBI for something other than food and shelter? If that's the case, then why not get rid of the medium of exchange and deliver the basic food and shelter instead? I don't have an answer here, but it is an interesting question for UBI.
Palm Pirates
Another way to game the system is to hack off hands and empty accounts. This gets a bit tricky on two fronts: everyone can see where the money is going and with the biometric verification. If the system is looking for the palm to have a pulse, then how do you get it to work if it is a disembodied hand?
This is the method that I'm initially exploring. It requires a life support system, but I don't think that puts it out of the realm of possibility, just that it requires a level of initial investment for the equipment.
Motivation
The other side of crime is motivation. As the goal of this project is to explore UBI, I want the motivation to be connected to UBI as well. So, aside from the wanting-more-than-your-fellow-humans thing, why else would someone go around hacking hands off?
The answer to that came from any one of a number of on-line conversations around UBI. All of them can be summed up as, "What's to keep people from just sitting and doing nothing? Where is their motivation to do something with their lives?"
[The answer here is two fold: first, are most of today's jobs 'doing something with your life'? I would hazard that the vast majority of McJobs and cubical grinding/call center position are not that. Secondly, if UBI really is basic, then the motivation is to be more than that.]
With that complaint in mind, I want a serial killer who is removing the people that he/she feels do not deserve UBI. That are not doing anything with their lives. Of course, he or she knows what to do with their extra income, so not only do they kill them, but also harvest the victim's hand for some grand project. I'm aiming for something actually laudable here, like space colonization or disease eradication or longevity treatments. A villain whose goals are entirely self-serving is boring. Especially if they are killing people for being short sited.
The really interesting part in all of this, for me, is how this is evolving in the actual writing of it. My hero is beginning to be the defendant of an increasingly fascist system. But more on that next week.
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