Read Online Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail by Jack L. Chalker - Free Book Online Page A

man, woman, and child—were in the military, attached to a mission section. Within that section were most of the grades, with grade reflecting rank and, therefore, power. The state, or your section of it, provided common meal facilities, food, clothing, and shelter, and also made available the amenities that could be bought with the money you made. The pay seemed relatively low until you remembered that all the basics were taken care of and anything you earned could be spent on luxuries.
    There were three shifts a day, each running eight hours, with the hours adjusted for the differences from Confederacy norm. The work week was six days, with the seventh off, but different industries took different days off so there was no universal off day. To make sure all worked well and smoothly, there was the Monitor Service.
    I suspected it was this Monitor Service idea that got Talant Ypsir his one-way ticket from the Confederacy to the Diamond. Though I doubt if it would work on a thousand worlds spread over a quarter of a galaxy, the system worked fine, it seemed, on Medusa, though none of us liked it, least of all me.
    Every single room in every single city and town was monitored. Not just the rooms, but the streets, alleyways, buses, you name it. Just about every single thing anyone said or did was monitored and recorded by a master computer or, really, the huge computer bank that was actually in orbit around the planet. Whoever wrote the computer program should be tortured to death.
    Now, obviously, not even the galaxy’s greatest computer could really analyze all that data, and this was where Ypsir was diabolically clever. The Monitor Service, a sort of police force that ran this system and was generally just called TMS, programmed the computers to look for certain things—phrases, actions, who except for them knew what?—that would cause a computer to “flag” you. Then a human TMS agent would sit down and with the computer’s aid review anything about you he or she wanted, then haul you in to see why you were acting so funny or being so subversive. Nobody knew what the flag codes were, and a certain amount of totally random harassment was maintained by TMS just so the bright guys couldn’t figure them out.
    The system, as Kabaye pointed out proudly, did, in fact, work. Productivity was extremely high, absenteeism and shirking extremely low. Crime was almost nonexistent, except for the rare crime of passion which the computer couldn’t flag in time to stop. But even if you managed to commit it, as soon as the crime was discovered the TMS could call up the whole scene and see exactly what was what.
    Violators were tried in secret by TMS courts, extremely quickly it seemed, and given punishment ranging from demotion to being handed over to the psychs—many of whom were Confederacy crooks and sadists sentenced here themselves—for whatever they felt like doing to your mind. The ultimate punishment, for treason, was what was known as Ultimate Demotion—you were snipped off on a very unpleasant one-way trip to the mines of Momrath’s moons.
    It was an ugly system, and extremely difficult to fight or circumvent unless you knew exactly where the monitor devices were and what would and would not constitute a flag. That made it a near-impossible challenge, particularly for a kid whose background would suggest that he not be allowed too near any world leaders. In a sense, though, I liked it. Not only was this a real challenge, perhaps my supreme challenge; but Medusa was, after all, my type of world—technologically oriented and dependent on that technology. If I could find a way, too, the system would actually help. TMS, and, therefore, Talant Ypsir, must be pretty damn confident and secure.
    But the more complex the challenge, the more I would have to know, and learn. This would not be easy by any means, and no mistakes would be tolerated by the system. It would take some time, perhaps a very long time, before I could