One day, Olivier hoped to reveal just how wrong everyone’s perception of the laws and precedents that formed Baalphoria were. So many of the remembered case records favoured the government—the
good
Baalphorians. Cases where people with irregular deviations won were often rewritten, or skewed in a way that made it seem like the precedent they set was less important than it actually was. Some people would argue these cases and the wrongs that brought them about had occurred so long ago that they didn’t matter anymore—Olivier knew they did.
For instance, there were a handful of cases in his family’s bunker that showed that Dyads had long been fighting the Baalphorian laws that effectively stripped them of their rights at a single word from a
concerned caregiver.
If someone asked any other lawyer, they would say that no Dyad had ever tried to challenge their confinement under Dyad Containment Laws. In reality, there was actually a several-hundred-year-old, precedent setting case that required more oversight be applied to situations where Dyad Containment Laws were used, so Dyads whose families and caretakers were ashamed of them wouldn’t be able to simply hold them hostage for the rest of their life, the government content to ignore them even if the reasons behind those
concerns for the Dyad’s ability to live in regular society without significant and unreasonable aid from their caregivers or the government
were unfounded, and—
“What’s that face for?”
Olivier popped out of his devolving thoughts to find Emilia gazing up at him, smiling and slightly concerned—had she been watching his mind spiral through her stalking function? Or was he just that obvious in his distress? “Sorry. I was thinking about… unpleasant things,” he muttered, unsure of how much to tell her.
Probably, he shouldn’t tell her too much, if only because she had a friend currently facing those very laws that he knew weren’t accurate because before the government could change the Dyad Containment Law to require more oversight, war had broken out—the one before the last Colonial War. It had almost immediately been a brutal, continent-wide war, with far more death than the last war, which had largely been between Dion and Baalphoria. Somewhat understandably, the government had other priorities and the Dyad Containment Laws were never updated. Then, by the time the war was over, so much information lost to attacks and espionage, the case that should have forced a change was gone—and the people who actually wanted it changed? They were all Dyads, and most if not all of them had been detained under the Dyad Containment Law, which limited who they could communicate with, leaving them unable to voice their demands that the government change the law as they were required to.
Without census information, Olivier couldn’t prove it, but he suspected the government, not wanting to change the law, had worked to have all Dyads held under the flawed—not to mention illegal—version of the law. After all, in the last few hundred years, where such data
was
available, the percent of Dyads contained under the laws tended to be between 70-80%. At no time had it reached even 90%, let alone 100%. From what he had read in his family’s bunker—which often included news s and research papers about various laws as well—virtually no Dyads had opposed changing the laws that locked so many of them away, effectively removing all their rights. In other words, had even a single Dyad remained in a position to complain about the government not changing the law, there was no reason for them not to—aside, perhaps, from fear or a lack of news organizations willing to speak on their behalf.
Most likely, the government—who in no world should have
just forgotten
to change the laws once Dyads weren’t breathing down their necks, demanding they do what they were legally obligated to do—had worked to confine all Dyads, then hoped that everyone would forget about the lawsuit. From what Olivier could tell, after so many centuries, everyone had.
That was the sort of thing his family’s bunker, full of ancient, missing and destroyed records, could put right. For Dyad Containment Laws, in the centuries since that case that should have bettered the lives of Dyads, the laws had instead gotten worse—impossibly more constricting considering how excessive they had already been. Everyone accepted that during the information loses of war, at least some of what was lost was destroyed by people who weren’t actively hostile to Baalphoria; instead, it was just people trying to form the nation’s identity into what they wanted it to be.
It happened in other nations as well, and a sticking point in good international relations was often differing histories. One nation claimed another had committed war crimes; the other said they had never done such a thing. Some wounds faded over time. Accusations—sometimes even genetic proof—of large-scale sexual assaults on women of an enemy nation generally weren’t a wound that healed. Corpses that showed signs of mutilation from use in medical experiments haunted the descendants of those nations. If those things weren’t bad enough on their own, the denial of any wrongdoing by the nations who had allowed—sometimes even encouraged—their soldiers to commit such atrocities kept the wounds open, gushing hatred into the world even millennia later.
It was easy to use war as a means of erasing documents that would set a nation in one direction or another, removing sins from government records until no one actually knew the truth—until all that remained was two sides claiming different things, each believing it with their whole heart. Of course, such manipulations of fact weren’t so easily reversed. Some things would forever be lost to time and the aether, no concrete evidence remaining to confirm one side’s history over another’s.
In the case of Baalphoria’s Dyad Containment Laws, Olivier wouldn’t be surprised if some government official had been using the war as a cover for their erasure of a case that’s settlement they hadn’t agreed with. Unlike in cases where it was nation versus nation, however, very few people had cared to remember that Baalphoria should have been treating their Dyads better. Instead, all the facts had seemingly been lost to the winds of time.
“One day,” Olivier told Emilia, rather than spill the reality that her friend was about to be effectively kidnapped under a law that legally shouldn't exist as it was, but that there was nothing he could currently do to help the young Dyad, “I want to release at least some of the documents my family has. There are files in there that could help people—set laws right, by putting precedent setting cases back into public record.”
Emilia’s purple, silver-flecked eyes examined him for a long moment as they slowly caught up with the group—they had fallen behind as Olivier became consumed with his annoyance with the situation and how selfish his older relatives were, to keep all this information to themselves despite the good it could do.
“You can’t do it now?” Emilia asked, a wry smile pulling at her lips as she rolled her eyes and linked their arms together. “Let me guess? Your mommy—”
“Please stop calling my mother my
mommy,
” Olivier cut in, wrinkling his nose for just the fact that he’d had to say
mommy.
Part of it was his awareness it was also a kink thing, and while under the right circumstances—with the right person—he could definitely see himself enjoying being called
daddy,
he had such a hard limit against mommy kinks that he’d eventually—mortifyingly—asked Axelle to find him a function that would mute out the word for him in sexual environments. He didn’t frequent kink clubs
that
often, but when he did, he preferred not to be completely turned off when he inevitably walked by someone with a mommy kink.
“Fine~ Your
mother
is the sort of bitch to keep valuable, useful, and world changing documents a secret?”
“Yes. I know previous generations had their reasons to keep the documents secret, but my mother is most certainly keeping them secret in hopes of gaining more power.”
Emilia perked up at that, eyes glued to him, rather than the museum they were now wandering through. “How does it become power? And what sort of reasons did your ancestors have?”
They were definitely pushing the line of what they could—or perhaps more accurately
should
—be talking about in public, outside the protection of something like {A Private Moment}. Olivier trusted Emilia not to discuss what she learned with anyone—unless, as she’d said the night before, it seemed pertinent to something else going on, like her theoretical attack on a secret bunker filled with legal documents—but they were still in public, and as he explained his ancestors reasoning for keeping the files secret, he slipped into their Censors, sending audio messages so it would still feel as though they were properly talking.
“A big reason is that, were people to know, the bunker would become a target for future attacks. It might be relatively safe from hackers or physical attacks, but at least part of that protection is because few people know where it is. The price of keeping those documents safe, so new documents can constantly be added, is that no one can know about it.”
“I suppose that makes sense…”
Emilia agreed, although even through their virtual conversation, he knew she wasn’t completely convinced—neither was he.
“Did your ancestors ever intend to release them?”
“I believe so, but it is unclear. I think at times they hoped that someday there would be a way to release at least some of them. When it was safe, or perhaps anonymously. Even now, nothing is ever truly anonymous, and with slips of information or the right people looking, quite often the people behind things can be tracked down.”
At least, that was what Axelle had told him, when he had asked about the possibility of releasing the most important documents without any identifying information. He had never been sure exactly how much he believed her assertion that true anonymity was impossible, given there were plenty of hackers and criminals who seemed capable of retaining their anonymity despite having attracted the attention of the public and government. According to Emilia, who definitely couldn’t let such a claim lie without clarifying and expanding upon what he knew, it was indeed difficult to be sure your anonymity was secure, but not outright impossible.
“There are ways to lessen your chances of being caught, but it’s definitely difficult, and there really isn’t any way to be absolutely sure you’ll never be tracked down.”
She went on to explain that both she and Halen released their hacks through a combination of Black Knot and Free Colony technology.
”Xpherns can actually interface with the Baalphorian aethernet, with some… uh… pretty suspect modifications. It's also sooooo slow, and not ideal, and I have a completely different xphern to do that—the thing is huge and hooked into the Black Knot tech, to further obfuscate things. No one can track me through it, but, it's not like many Baalphorians own or can even use a xphern, you know? So, if someone figures out things are released through a xphern one day, especially with how famous Halen is becoming—cause eventually people are going to connect him back to his hacks—I don’t think it’ll be a giant leap to think of me—or, perhaps any child connected to my father? A lot of people might not realize my siblings and I exist, but enough do that if someone asks around—asks who my father trusts, if he’s ever brought anyone to the Free Colonies with him…”
“They might be led back to you, or perhaps one of your classmates,”
Olivier commented, considering that.
It was the sort of connection that, as Emilia said, someone
could
get to, although it might be rather difficult with how much Baalphoria’s laws protected those under 30, although, as Emilia had pointed out during a rant in their annotations, they were sometimes ridiculous. In the silverstrain’s case, she couldn’t talk about her own legal case in the news, as the crime occurred while she was under-30. It trapped her—left her unable to defend herself against public opinion on the case and what the government said of it, even if her name wasn’t directly attached to it.
The law protected her, but at the same time, it removed some of her autonomy. At the same time, those same laws had failed to protect him.
Arc 9 | Chapter 371: One Day
Comments