Up The Tower by J.P. Lantern Page B

therefore, in this time, power). Giving an entire city even fractions of a percent of a Share would make those denizens more wealthy than the rest of the continent combined. Today, we would find such extravagance thoroughly obscene; but, it is difficult to sit in judgment of another time.
    The only real effect either corporation could hold on any population was on the city’s poor in Junktown, between the highway rings of the Divide and the long Mississippi Dam. Certainly, the corporations didn’t need the poor’s popular opinion—where was their money, their power? So, the poor became a tool—they were to be used to scare the affluent into doing what the mega-corps needed.
    Weapons were distributed amongst the lower class, and seminars organized on how to use them. Steel and plastic-eating bacteria were released in their living areas to degrade their slum conditions and make them that much more desperate. Plagues were created and medicines offered.
    It was this last tactic that actually won the bidding war for Tri-American. They did something very crafty. Through a series of probably-very-brave counter-intelligence missions, they found out the nature of Groove’s cures and remedies—they knew, in essence, what Groove could and could not handle when it came to disease. With this knowledge, they unleashed a plague on the populace which had no actual cure that Groove could provide.
    On the surface, of course, the new affliction looked like your standard blood plague, boiling the body’s t-cell supply. Caused lots of bursting sores and ruined skin, a nasty business. Kendra Muldone, a journalist of the time, explains:
    There was no place to hold public forums on how to handle the disease. Everyone seemed to want to do something different, and in the confusion of tactics, more and more people died. Eventually, the people shouting the loudest were the ones who called for sections of quarantine—the sick were no longer to be allowed outside. Every night, anyone left outside would be shot or otherwise killed. Every street corner was filled with corpses. You could smell them from beyond the Divide. When it was all said and done, corpse bonfires burned for weeks. We put the ashes in a monument, but the monument was melted by riots, later on.
    After the plague hit its highest point, Groove strolled in with its cures—which weren’t cures at all, because Tri-American knew what methods Groove was going to try to use (a type of retrovirus that was very effective for other blood plagues), and so Groove only served to hasten the death of plagued individuals. On-the-ground reports indicate that people actually began exploding, their diseased blood flying everywhere, further encouraging the spread of the disease.
    Citizens of St. Louis, many of them, were well-aware of what Groove and Tri-American were doing in their lab experiments with the poor. You can imagine our horror today at such a thing, when to be poor is divine. In our Republic, wealth is uniformly frowned upon; pumping homes and businesses full of unnecessary glut and currency are seen as the reasons for the considerable problems of the past, problems that we have tried to evolve from and escape.
    But, in this time, the poor were many, and so they were utterly expendable. Compare that to today, when all are the poor, and so all are essential. It was a different set of values altogether.
    By and large, we have seen the merit of placing caps on wealth and, of course, technological study (even with however difficult it makes studying the history of the past and all of its holograms). But, as I said before, it is difficult to judge the governments of the past through the lens of the present. The long Petrovian revolution allowed us to consider that nothing impedes liberty quicker than a plutocratic technocracy, which is why we frown so deeply at the corpocracy today. Perhaps another revolution will change our opinions again.
    Not that I am encouraging one, mind you.
    At any