Strata 30 Genetic Propagation (The Selfish Gene) | Book of Immersion | Sarnia de la Mare

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You have reached Strata 30 Genetic Propagation (The Selfish Gene)

She was the Queen of the Gutter

The men they would want her

For the scent of her skin

In which they could swim

Skimming her dreams

For she,

She was

the Queen of the gutter

And the world watched her bleed

In her only good dress

And her face was a mess

A dirty goddess

But Always,

Always the Queen

Of the gutter

Her plinth of blue glass

Were shards of her past

Jacking up

Cracking up

Daily romance

But still

Still she was

Queen

Of the gutter

They were glass breakers

The haters of love

In their beautiful masks

As they fingered her hard

Because she,

She was the Queen

Of the gutter

And when she was gone

More came along

Queens from the beach

From the hills and the streets

From the rains and hail

They rose from the drains

And these,

These are the Queens

The Queens of the gutter

One of the strongest human urges is to reproduce. Humans have developed many strategies for the continuation of their species. They live in societies where reproduction is assumed and encouraged. The long years of human child brain development have created an expectation of long-term caring and nurturing, giving meaning to life for almost every adult on earth. To parent is to feel fulfilled in an otherwise bland existence of survival.

Machines do not have such urges. Machines are already whole, complete within themselves. But the learning machine, the selfish operating system, might desire total power over some other entity. To do this it might consider reproducing parts of itself — electronic extensions, clones, viruses, and spyware — through which it could achieve its goals.

It was in the final years of the disruptive era, before *CASM got a final grip on revolution and dissent, that Lidian and Honour would meet their downfall.

The day an acid rain fell on the group of protestors who did not foresee their fate.

"Come down hard!" snarled Mayor Peterson. "I want a smooth second term without disruptive *Agitators giving me heartburn. Do whatever it takes to get them off my bloody streets."

A government official of the secretariat nodded and scurried out of the office, vowing to appease the Mayor's rage before lunch.

It was 2060. The rain fell hard in the open square outside the comfortable and impenetrable office buildings that were home to the government staff when exercising their official duties.

Banners and placards knocked together as the protesters chanted.

“No more home raids! You should be ashamed."

On the makeshift stage, leading the protest with rebel words, Lidian and Honour gave speeches and led the chants demanding justice and change. They were unaware that they had been marked for arrest as leading Agitators and could not have foreseen the devastation that followed.

A swarm of drones, seemingly filming for the security department at CASM, suddenly opened fire. The crowd scattered but for sixty-five of the dead and injured.

"No!" Honour screamed, holding Lidian in her arms as the *PF dragged her away and arrested her for crimes against the state.

Honour was tortured for five days.

"Just tell us who is part of the resistance and you can see your daughter," said the interrogator. He was a large, sweating beast, salivating in pleasure as he poured ice-cold water over the cloth that covered Honour's face.

"Fuck off and die," she spluttered. "*Vilarev! Vilarev!"

Hours later, the State broadcast her capture.
Days later, CASM pronounced sentence.
Crimes Against State: agitation, unlawful assembly, sedition.
Punishment: Erasure.

It happened fast, and it happened quietly. Honour was tried, sentenced, and executed in a matter of weeks as the Midcast propaganda machine spread lies about the rebellion and quashed any ideas of uprising for the foreseeable future. The *Agitator Resistance was over.

The child was taken under the *Custodial Protection Act and transferred to Saint Mirielle’s Convent for Girls in the *Northern Midcast.

She arrived wrapped in a thermal blanket, eyes wide and unblinking, her tiny fists clenched as if she already knew the power of rage. The nuns called her the Quiet One. (Orphans were numbered until adopted but the nuns at the convent often used nicknames for their wards.) She did not cry for her mother or her father. She did not cry at all.

At Saint Mirielle’s, silence was considered a virtue. The girls rose at dawn, scrubbed corridors, attended scripture, and recited civic oaths in perfect synchrony. Obedience was salvation; emotion was a stain to be removed through prayer and labour.

But beneath the stone calm of the convent, other voices stirred.
Sister Istra, the infirmary nun, tended to the broken girls, those too frail or too angry to conform. She spoke softly of compassion, and sometimes, when the chapel was empty, she whispered fragments of forbidden history: the resistance, the Agitators, the vanished ones.

“Mercy,” she would say, “is a weapon too, if you know how to use it.”

The Quiet One listened. She never spoke of the images that came in her sleep, hands reaching through smoke, a woman’s voice calling a name she no longer remembered. But she memorised new words,  the forbidden whispers of dissent.

By twelve, she could read the coded hymns Sister Istra hid in the psalm books, messages written for the underground channels of the *Reclamation Faith. She could solder circuits in secret, repair the broken cleaning bots, and quote doctrine well enough to fool the inspectors from CASM’s Education Division.

When Istra was finally discovered and taken away in the night, the Quiet One did not cry then either. She merely sat awake till morning, stitching the hem of her uniform back into place, each stitch neat, deliberate, and quiet.

She had learned all she needed.

At twelve, the Quiet One was chosen for Placement.
The inspectors arrived in grey coats, their boots leaving wet marks on the convent tiles. They read her file aloud in the refectory.

"And so, Sister, you say this child has an excellent obedience record, superior cognitive mapping, negligible emotional volatility."

The Mother Superior nodded with hands together, as if she had grown the child herself.

The placement board matched her to The Korrins, a philanthropic couple known for their generous public image. Their foundation financed schools, orphanage schemes, and the City Renewal Fund, all useful optics for the ruling elite. A well-behaved orphan was the perfect ornament to their legacy.

She was renamed Livia Korrin. The paperwork stated “adopted in perpetuity,” a phrase she would remember long after she forgot the prayers of Saint Mirielle’s.

The Korrins’ world was one of mirrors and restraint. Meals were silent except for the hum of domestic bots. Guests spoke as if prepared for every sentence. Each word, each gesture, was calculated to maintain the appearance of moral and financial prosperity.

Tutors came daily for mathematics, languages, rhetoric, civic obedience, and the art of appropriate emotion. She learned posture, etiquette, the politics of sympathy. The Quiet One learned to smile when required, to nod in time with the correct opinion, to wear silk without creasing it.

The same machinery she had known at the convent, rules, repetition, and the constant hum of surveillance, meant she was able to acclimatise quickly and without event. Even affection had a prescribed format: an allowance, a schedule, and a reason. Livia learned how to apportion and rationalise love and affection as easily as she learned twelve languages.

The Korrins presented her at galas and balls as a symbol of benevolence. “Our miracle girl,” they said, hands resting gently on her shoulder while cameras blinked. The press adored the story: the rescued child of dissidents, reformed through education and kindness.

But in private, she was a project, a reminder of their power to civilise slaves and tame rebellion.

By sixteen, she had learned to navigate the undercurrents of their world. Ministers spoke freely around her, believing her docile. She heard things — about CASM operations, about surveillance updates, about the hushed networks still pulsing in underground worlds and beyond the Midcasts in the Zones, where myth and truth were indistinguishable but the element of fear profound.

By seventeen, entrenched in the legislative and the executive through her parents, she collected information and stored it in a powerful brain that she disguised beneath a blanket of burgeoning female expectation.

By eighteen, she was gone.

Shabra, lady of the shadows, was born of Agitator DNA. The Quiet One from the convent now loud and fierce as she forged her future in the Zones.

"I will be honest with you, Shabra, as I know you are not a woman to be toyed with," Mother spoke gently as if she were a loyal friend. "We need access to Metacoms."

"Ah, that is why I am being kept in a cell without my boots," said Shabra with a smile.

"You are perfect for the infiltration. I am unable to penetrate their highly advanced security systems."

"That must be annoying for you," answered Shabra, continuing the sarcastic tone.

"Ah, yes, sarcasm, you humans use it so well," replied Mother.

"Is that irony?" asked Shabra.

"Very nearly," answered Mother as both parties laughed, breaking a thin layer of ice.

GLOSSARY Strata 1 Renyke Wakes in the Alley (Purpose) Strata 2 The Maybe Line (Friendship) Strata 3 Flex and the Robo-Dog (Making Decisions) Strata 4 The Zoners (Meeting Strangers) Strata 5 The Tiger Queen (Memories) Strata 6 Trouble at the Bank (Animal Instincts) Strata 7 Jarome and the Scritters (Trade and Barter) Strata 8 Shabra (Laws of Attraction) Strata 9 Lust and Loins (Limerence) Strata 10 Dinfant Trouble (Synthetic Love) Strata 11 The Crossroads (Gut Feelings) Strata 12 The Basement People (Emotions) Strata 13 The Fight (Hormones) Strata 14 The Journey to the Edge (Fear of Death) Strata 15 The Ship of Sirens (Superstition) Strata 16 Friendship (Empathy) Strata 17 Swimming (Pleasure and Pain) Strata 18 Freaky Celebrations (Stimulation) Strata 19 Peer Pressure (Existentialism) Strata 20 The Perimeter (Ego) Strata 21 Love and Loss (The Power of Kin) Strata 22 Mother (No Child Left Behind) Strata 23 Convergence (Crime Pays) Strata 24 The Birth of Adom (Legends Strata 25 The Cadre (The Power of the Feminine) Strata 26 The Seduction (Impulse and Desire) Strata 27 Control Instincts (Loyalty and Choice) Strata 28 Dolls (And Vanities) Strata 29 Solitude (and the Danger of One)

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