RICK AWOKE AND, AFTER letting Pete and Molli out his bunker door and into the rest of the house, he began his usual routine of exercise. This was a daily discipline; first thing in the morning. A half hour of muscle rubs, massaging joints, loosening up, and stretching, followed by another half hour of repetitive warm-up exercises. An hour-plus of Ba-gua circle walking. Tai-chi, Hsing-I and weapons were added to the routine in his evening exercises.

This was his way of staying healthy in otherwise cramped quarters barely larger than a one-bedroom apartment. To keep from going stir crazy, Sofia regularly came in to visit, reminisce, and keep him company. Then there were the dogs, a constant source of enjoyment, coupled with their usual stale breath, dirt and dust, and typical dog smells.

Occasionally, he would exit his compound to view the array, navigating the narrow passages of his underground tunnel system to access the barn. This activity was fraught with risk, however, since his body movements beneath the surface might be discovered by the infrared sensors of drones or satellites. He wore a special suit on these outings designed to mitigate and disperse any heat radiation his body emitted.

To keep his DNA from being detected by external bots and other bio-sensing devices, his waste products were handled by himself and Sofia. When a bag was full, he’d detach it from his toilet, hand it to Sofia, and she would dispose of it in her working bath. Sofia normally used this type of bath for mixing chemicals for the gardens. She jury-rigged a special one for Rick’s waste products, combining them with hydrochloric acid then venting the airborne waste into a room they had excavated in the hillside for future needs.

They always employed an abundance of caution, and for good reason. Snooping drones were a fact of life as were human hybrids, each possibly sporting advanced imaging and olfactory receptors. Given the extreme security the oligarchs implemented to prevent another Debacle, DNA monitors were deployed virtually everywhere there were people.

Perhaps due to their remote location, Sofia never found monitors lurking around their compound, though she suspected the drones regularly sampled the air in proximity of their house and therefore could find evidence of Rick’s DNA. One small mistake, one instance of mismanaging his clothing or waste products, had the potential to expose his presence and their plan.

In the previous decades, the authorities began to utilize DNA testing and other technologies to track and manage humans and hybrids. Ironically, DNA testing started in innocence, an elective way for people to uncover their genetic heritage, health indicators, and unknown relatives. However, as the technologies advanced, so did the ability to capture DNA for control and identification purposes.

With DNA tracking technology, one could readily acquire and sequence anybody’s DNA, record and store the unique signatures in an AI database, and use multiple means of surveillance to track an individual’s comings, goings, and proclivities. Because humans naturally shed millions of cells a day, a person’s whereabouts could be determined by sampling things like countertops, restaurant utensils, and even ambient air.

Like DNA tracking, most of the technologies the oligarchs employed extensively for citizen control purposes were initially used for commercial applications and eventually governmental uses. What soda did that person order at the ball game? Who was driving the rental car? What magazine article did they peruse at the airport? Who visited the store and what did they buy? What sock colors do they prefer?

Eventually, DNA tracking was integrated with the numerous other methods of analyzing any individual including financial transactions, conversations picked up on home or business intercom units, facial recognition, video monitoring, cellphone tracking and texts, automobile travel, stored data, and email traffic. All this information was collected and compiled in requisite governmental and commercial AI databases.

Quickly analyzable, this compilation of data enabled a very accurate contextual mapping of predictable activities in which a person would become involved. Any deviations from expectations were constantly assessed, sometimes resulting in yellow or red flags.

* * *

Rick began the morning’s stream of consciousness blathering, hyper-cognizant of the need to get quickly through his task.

“I have mentioned entropy multiple times, but I never explained what it means to me. There’s a textbook meaning, and I’m sure you’ll find many physicists and philosophers with differing opinions on the topic. But my version of entropy, my personal definition, relates to the universal constant, implying the eventual dissolution of all things in this dimension of space and time. I’ll talk another day about religious entitlement, as it’s a most effective topic for providing an example of entropy, but here’s an example.”

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“In the last few thousand years, certain entitled humans have predicted the end of the world. Much of this prediction rhetoric was encoded in various religious texts. It wasn’t just a Christian Biblical thing, mind you. Religions often used apocalyptic verbiage to control their rowdy human subjects, coerce them to join the flock, or thrash them into mending what were perceived to be sinful behaviors.”

“Such writings often intermixed ethical teachings with apocalyptic predictions, including warnings that if you didn’t change your ways, the detrimental apocalyptic outcome would be inflicted upon you. Well, we got our lesson on this thirty-eight years ago. We’ll never know whether it was God-initiated or not, but it was indeed a tortuous lesson.”

“Did we learn anything from that disaster? Did we mend our ways? Did we start following the positive, meaningful intentions in such religious writings? Of course not. We continued doing what we were doing before, only with intensified fervor. In fact, many used that event to personally profit from the pain and suffering of others, whether via power or possessions. Humans tend to learn little from their mistakes.”

“The Great Debacle was one of the last stages of human entropy, but I consider it an appetizer to an unfortunate main course. The four billion or so of us that remain are all sitting together at the table of the final meal, though we lack the vision to understand this. As the next course concludes, nobody will be around for dessert. Nobody.”

“Entropy is the garbage disposal of the universe. It’s not bad or good. It simply is. We fail to recognize that our societal purpose in life must be to prevent, delay, and reverse entropy.”

“Not a single human mind of the billions was engaged toward this exercise. We were ignorantly unaware that our species was sliding into that caustic vortex, the vile and acidic kitchen sink of entropy. And now, we are in the latter stages of the recycling of planetary, celestial waste, soon to be comprised of human flesh and its creations.”

“Speaking of creations, recall I’ve mentioned before that we lacked a common ethic and lacked the understanding that we even needed one. You can’t have the former if you don’t recognize the latter.”

Rick laughed sadly. “This may surprise and appall you, but many groups in society are actively working towards a dissolution of everything human. These wizards have concluded that their self-righteous religious constructs and dogma compel them to create the final outcome for humanity, the apocalypse that ends it all.”

“These beliefs, based in fear and entitlement, were in place well before the Debacle, even centuries before. Recently, however, the intensity has increased. Some of this is driven by the thought that maybe they didn’t get the job done properly the first time around, that they failed their superior belief system and God construct in some way.”

“After all, none of those who died in their rigor mortis contortions were apparently raptured, at least that the zealots can prove. Those poor souls are now desiccated skeletons and sinews hunched together in mass graves. None are enjoying endless bounty and glory of eternal heaven.”

“To explain further, we have had and continue to have believers in ancient, apocalyptic visions and scriptures of the religious kind. Some of those devotees feel they need to hasten the apocalypse. Why? Because being among the chosen few to lay such waste to our species, they would become the select, effulgent, and most glorious beneficiaries.”

“Indeed, they believed their actions would elevate their position in heaven, allowing them to suckle at the nurturing teat of God and consume the sweet nectar of their righteousness in the post-apocalyptic heaven state. All others, meaning people who didn’t believe and behave like them, would meet their deserved and terrible fate of fire or eternal damnation.”

“Isn’t that the quintessential definition of an entitled class? I laugh, thinking of the stupidity of most humans and their inability to separate themselves from their belief systems. These zealots have no concept of entropy, possessing belief constructs so narrow that they didn’t allow for its possibility. Their only vision was a selfish one, that they would receive their due rewards by advancing the demise of the species. They are no different than the myriad other true believers in humankind’s history. Dead and gone by now, having caused insufferable harms upon our species.”

“When the Debacle came, death took great numbers of these apocalyptic power mongers since so many of them resided in the cities that became wholesale graveyards of devastation. Yes, they did all they could to accelerate and enable an apocalypse. Yet when it happened, it was far different than their religious predictions. God only knows if it was one of these zealots that created the tiny monster that killed so many.”

“One can only imagine the flavors of this abhorrent belief system in existence now. If the pre-Debacle religious world was fractious and divisive, multiply that times a thousand in our post-apocalyptic, AI-bastardized, posthuman-splintered, demigod-controlled world of today.”

“The fanatics are at each other’s throats with their caustic rhetoric. They think their own personal brands of algorithmic special sauce and genetic mastery will allow them to either survive the next ruinous stage or sit as spectators in their heavenly chariots, observing their deity’s fate for Earth and congratulating themselves for being so wise, humble, and dedicated to their scriptures.”

“Bully for them. They can have at it and enjoy the fruits of their fears and entitlements. I’ll be long gone, I hope, when that day comes. I don’t want to live during the final entropic days of humanity. Indeed, I’ll be lucky to live a few minutes past this transmission by my estimate, given its heretical message in the eyes of the demigods. From my perspective, what’s a few more months or years of living only to watch the further decline of our species?”

“Having survived the Great Debacle and still suffering my own PTSD after these many years, as most of us do, I don’t care to observe our chessboard as it corrodes away from whatever noxious elixir the demigods or their minions pour into the apocalyptic sink. We repaired nothing since the last event. We didn’t change our ways, and we’re even deeper into that sink, our fingers slipping at the apex of the drain. We look up at a shattered mirror that reflects our own images as we slide rapidly toward that celestial sewer, the resting place of failed planetary species."