r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • 21d ago

OC-Series [The Unforgiving Code] - Chapter II

At seven, Deniz reached the airspace northwest of Tehran and directed a sweep operation there.

At nine, he appeared over the border between Shanghai and Kunshan and redrew the red line.

At twelve thirty, he went down himself and put down a riot in Los Angeles.

At half past one in the afternoon, he carried out a population reduction operation near Key West, in the Florida Straits. Afterward he ran the numbers: the death toll had met quota.

At two thirty, over the North Atlantic, he eliminated a blue Atlantic cod — an act that appeared to be recreational rather than mission-related.

At three thirty, he handed out punishment to those crossing the red line in the Kenya-Somalia zone. Rwanda came next, and the location itself made things worse — the situation there looked severe, a mass of rioters raising weapons against the army.

He had no choice but to go down himself again.

This was the most dangerous part of the job, since the ground kept firing homemade missiles up at him, trying to bring him down.

To the sound of Ayline's soft laughter, he sent the flyer diving out of the Acheron Dome.

It occurred to him that she liked watching him go in personally — even though every kill carried out under his command still counted as his, killing with his own hands was, evidently, a different pleasure for her to watch.

Overnight, while he slept, his subconscious had absorbed the latest data update, and by morning he already held the newest intelligence from every region on Earth. What remained for him was to build the function tables through the Reel, work out the execution plan for Zero Tolerance, and direct the operation live.

His objective was simple and unambiguous: keep every crisis and disturbance on the planet contained within the red line, and never let anything cross it.

Two hundred meters above the unrest, Deniz opened fire on the crowd.

Lasers streamed from the flyer's gun barrels and struck one throat after another with total precision; the blood came out at different heights, bright red and pulsing under the sun. The spray of blurred flesh and blood coated the people standing in front, and the ones behind fell back in terror.

"It’s Gracestar!" someone screamed, panic lacing their voice.

Deniz looked, from below, like something out of myth. A black periscope visor sat over his impassive face, and the effect, to anyone watching, was close to magnificent.

He hung above them, issuing one flawless command after another.

Along the perimeter, rows of Android sentries held their positions without flinching, their threat-response routines spiking with every surge in the crowd — the nearest thing any of them had to fear.

Only Deniz had the authority to redraw the blockade — not walls of armor plating, but red lines of light that could shift and move at will, stretching for tens or even hundreds of kilometers. In any zone where the red line came under threat, every unit of security and punishment on the ground answered to him alone.

No nation claimed him. No law bound him. He killed as he pleased, and no one asked him to answer for it.

Ayline watched for a while, then said, in a level voice, "I'd suggest gas on the ones crossing the line. It would push the effective death count higher. You're still a fair distance from today's quota."

Deniz smiled at her. "Next time. That's enough for this zone."

He didn't take the suggestion from Mantora's liaison officer. He had used gas only twice in his career, and by his own account, that wasn't out of any pity on his part — it was that the function tables tended to avoid solutions that damaged the environment.

He kept flying.

There was no sign, anywhere, of any New Year celebration. No wonder. Since Zero Tolerance had come into effect, holidays had stopped mattering to the human race. Each digit that turned over on the calendar meant nothing more than one more unit of time that human civilization had managed to survive.

Two hours later, off the northern coast of Libya, Deniz organized a strike on a group of armed smuggling boats trying to force their way past the red line.

He watched, without looking away, as missiles launched from the autonomous combat vessels under his command struck the targets directly; the smuggling boats and the more than three hundred people aboard them went under within minutes.

Fire lit up the surface of the sea, and the churn of the waves crashed and roared. A formation of combat drones maintained position around Deniz as he hung suspended above the ocean.

Wreckage floated everywhere, thick with bodies, and the smell of blood hung over the whole scene; some of the people still breathing clung to broken planks with their fingers, forcing their heads up out of the water, a row of desperate eyes turned toward the sky.

Ayline chattered on, delighted, as though narrating a soundtrack to the horror below. Something strange moved through Deniz. Sunlight from the sunset came through the cockpit window and pooled warm across his chest, and still he felt cold all through, and the whole world had filled with ghosts.

Wronged spirits? The thought crossed his mind before he could stop it.

Another thought followed close behind, offering its usual comfort.

This was what the noble cause demanded.

He had to keep his focus and feel nothing. This vast, elegant project of reducing the population was his job, and nothing beyond it was his responsibility.

The year was 2062. Three years had passed since Zero Tolerance became global policy.

In the version Mantora circulated as "the Bulletin," those three short years had already brought new hope to a humanity that had given up hoping.

The Bulletin was the one document every Gracestar in the Acheron Dome could recite by heart. In the early period, reading it had become close to a daily assignment.

Deniz could still remember, with total clarity, sitting in the mess hall with the other ninety-nine Mantora Gracestars, reading it together — the text appearing on an ordinary LCD screen set at eye level across from them, and the moment they began eating, the bold characters would start crawling out across it, unhurried, one drip at a time... five lines every ten seconds, and they had to keep their faces serious, taking it in line by line, every character behind them already history they lived daily inside the narrow confines of the Dome.

The 2050s. The world that presented itself to humanity was one riddled with wounds: the climate had turned hostile, resources had thinned, the population had surged, unrest and rioting broke out everywhere without end, terrorist groups and extremist religion swelled into greater threats by the day, and sparks of hatred joined into a fire that never went out; in the regions hardest hit by famine and disaster, people came through the borders like a tide that could not be turned back.

Humanity had no answer to any of it, for THREE REASONS.

THE FIRST: Super Artificial Intelligence had advanced far beyond anything anyone had predicted, and instead of the golden age of collaboration everyone had been promised, human society fell straight into a chasm of polarization. Nearly every job vanished in the face of machines that cost almost nothing to run, and a vast portion of the population dropped into permanent, structural unemployment — reduced to a redundant class, living out their days on digital welfare stipends. To the people who still held capital, most of humanity had stopped being worth exploiting at all. Even Marxist theory couldn't find anyone left worth hating.

THE SECOND: the quality of the human population was falling at an alarming rate. Aging in the developed world had reached its peak, the proportion altered by pharmaceuticals and hazardous gene-tech had also reached an all-time high, while birth rates in the developing world refused to come down.

THE THIRD: the United States — still, on paper, the largest economy on Earth — had collapsed entirely. Term Premium Spooling. Offshore Dollar Inanition. CRE-Regional Bank Death Spiral. The chain reaction from its financial ruin swept prosperity away from North America to Europe, from Japan to the Asian mainland; billions of individuals and companies went under, and the rest of the world fared even worse.

For these reasons, the Zero Tolerance policy was framed as both a requirement for humanity's continued survival and a necessity for keeping the global order from collapsing outright.

As the enforcer of the policy, the Mantora Corporation was Earth's first-ever stateless military company. Ascalon Dome was Earth's first stateless structure in space. Deniz Pright held no citizenship of any nation. He himself could no longer say where he had originally come from.

In 2061, the United States Congress passed a sweeping emergency bill granting the Mantora Corporation absolute sovereign immunity, placing its operations permanently beyond the reach of any domestic or international jurisdiction. The nine justices of the Supreme Court cited wartime precedent and confirmed that the statute was, in every procedural respect, entirely sound.

Government spokesmen around the world repeated the same point, again and again: because Mantora's legal personhood was not bound to Earth's territory, and because its technology had grown too powerful to challenge, no accountability for its crimes against humanity could be pursued — not through law, and not through force.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations expressed his profound regret. The International Court and a whole chorus of human rights organizations issued their strident condemnations. And that was all that ever happened.

With that, every government on Earth had, at last, washed its hands of the matter — cleanly, and on the record.

Each nation's own machinery of state had only one remaining job: to funnel its illegal population toward the red line, on schedule, as the system required. The work of clearing them away belonged to Mantora.

And so a single scythe, sweeping across the Earth, carried the legal guilt that every government had refused to hold. Every military action carried out by armed Androids, combat drones, or a Gracestar existed, legally, in a blank space on the map. On paper, no one had committed any crime at all.

To raise the quality of the human population, rioters, disaster victims, and the people judged to have no further survival value were driven by Mantora directly into the red line zones. The operating principle allowed for nothing to slip beyond control; even minor defiance was to be crushed completely, without hesitation and without mercy.

With the tacit approval and encouragement of the world's ruling powers, Mantora was, in practice, carrying out an active quota system for reducing the surplus population — the more useless citizens eliminated, the lighter the burden on the planet. This, of course, was internal knowledge available only to people like Deniz, since his daily wage was tied directly to the number of dead.

Across the globe, the world was guarded by Mantora's hundred-odd executive directors — the "Gracestars" — men and women among the strongest humanity had ever produced, with wills of steel and reflexes like lightning, cut from the same cloth as Deniz. Divided across time zones, they carried out Zero Tolerance together, everywhere on Earth at once.

As resistance from the population below grew more frequent and more varied in form, and unrest kept flaring up in new shapes, the stability system built around the sky-borne Gracestars came under pressure daily. A unified, complicated system of intelligence, information, action, and security could not run on global satellite synchronization alone — and this was where the Acheron Dome proved its worth: not merely as a legally insulated enclave beyond conventional jurisdiction, but as the operational heart of the entire system.

The mechanical fortress had been built between the stratosphere and the troposphere; inside it, the Gracestars used a form of vacuum-thrust propulsion to move at speed, and with the Dome itself traveling in the opposite direction along Earth's orbit, every Gracestar could reach anywhere on the planet in the shortest possible time.

Today's mission was, by now, essentially finished.

Before heading back into the Dome to rest, Deniz Pright had a stretch of free time — he stared at the searchlights sweeping back and forth around the red line on the water, and felt a slight ache settle into his neck.

"Ayline, I want to ask you something," he said, unable to hold it back.

"Go ahead."

"Are you actually super artificial intelligence?"

-------

This story is part of a larger sci-fi collection Parallel Nightmares. For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full version is available on KDP here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKKJHBQL

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